There was a stretch of about six months where I stopped improving. I did not know it at the time. At the time, I thought I was at the top of my game.
The keynotes were landing well. The magic segments were getting strong reactions. The corporate clients were rebooking. The feedback forms — those polite, structured evaluation sheets that companies hand out after events — consistently showed high marks. People were telling me I was good. And I believed them.
The problem with believing you are good is that it is the first step toward stopping being good.
Ken Weber, whose book on entertainment changed how I think about performance, puts it about as bluntly as anyone: the worst thing that can happen to a performer is comfort. Not failure. Not a bad show. Comfort. Because failure drives you to improve. A bad show sends you back to the drawing board. But comfort — the quiet satisfaction that everything is working fine — gently, imperceptibly leads you to stop doing the things that made you good in the first place.
The Plateau You Cannot Feel
The insidious thing about complacency is that it feels exactly like success. The external signals are positive. People are clapping. Clients are paying. The shows are going well. By every measurable standard, you are succeeding.
But inside the success, something is dying. The edge that made you sharp is dulling. The hunger that drove you to practice until midnight in a hotel room is fading. The relentless self-critique that forced you to watch your own performance videos and find the weaknesses — that mechanism is slowing down because the weaknesses feel fewer and the strengths feel sufficient.
I did not notice the plateau because the audience did not notice it either. Not at first. The decline from sharp to adequate is gradual enough that any individual performance looks fine. It is only visible in aggregate, over months, and only if you have the honesty to compare where you are with where you should be.
My wake-up call came from Adam Wilber. We were reviewing footage from a corporate event I had done in Vienna, and he said something that stopped me cold. “You look comfortable up there.”
He did not mean it as a compliment. He meant that the performance had lost its hunger. That I was cruising on material I knew worked, delivering it at a level I knew was sufficient, and not pushing for the level I was capable of. The audience had no complaints because they did not know what they were missing. But Adam, who had seen me at my best, could see the difference.
That conversation made me realize: the audience is not the standard. The audience will accept good enough because they have no baseline for comparison. The standard is your own potential. And the gap between good enough and your potential is where complacency lives.
The Good Enough Trap
Good enough is the most seductive trap in performance. It is not mediocrity. Mediocrity is obvious and uncomfortable. Good enough is pleasant. Functional. Professional. It pays the bills. It earns compliments. It checks every box that anyone would reasonably expect.
And that is precisely why it is dangerous. There is no crisis to respond to. No emergency to address. No failure to learn from. The feedback loop that drives improvement — perform, evaluate, identify weakness, fix, repeat — breaks down because the evaluation step returns positive results. Why fix what is not broken?
The answer, of course, is that it is not broken. It is just not as good as it could be. And “not broken” is a very different standard from “excellent.”
I think about this in terms of a scale I use from my consulting work. Imagine performance quality on a scale from zero to one hundred. Zero is incompetent. Fifty is adequate. Seventy is good. Eighty-five is very good. And one hundred is your absolute best — the ceiling of what you are currently capable of on your best day with your best material for your best audience.
Most performers plateau somewhere in the seventy to eighty range. The audience cannot tell the difference between seventy-five and ninety. The feedback at seventy-five is almost identical to the feedback at ninety. The only person who can tell the difference is you — if you are honest enough to look.
Complacency lives in the gap between seventy-five and ninety. It is the silent acceptance that seventy-five is good enough because nobody is complaining. It is the quiet decision, usually not made consciously, to stop pushing for the last fifteen points because the effort required to get there seems disproportionate to the visible return.
What the Last Fifteen Points Cost
Here is what makes the fight against complacency so difficult: the last fifteen points on that scale require disproportionate effort. The improvement from fifty to seventy-five is relatively fast. You are learning fundamentals, building skills, adding material. Progress is visible and satisfying. The improvement from seventy-five to ninety is slow, grinding, and largely invisible to anyone but you.
It is the difference between training for a marathon and training to shave three minutes off your marathon time. The first goal is achievable with consistent effort. The second requires a level of specificity, discipline, and willingness to suffer through marginal gains that most people — understandably — are not willing to invest.
In performance terms, the last fifteen points are about the details. The pause that is one beat too short. The line that is good but not perfect. The handling that is smooth but could be smoother. The moment of eye contact that connects but does not quite burn. The transition between effects that works but does not flow.
None of these things are broken. None of them would cause an audience member to complain. All of them, collectively, are the difference between a show that people enjoy and a show that people remember.
The Daily Practice of Dissatisfaction
After my conversation with Adam, I made a deliberate change to my mindset. I adopted a mantra that I repeat to myself regularly, though I almost never say it out loud: I am not as good as I can be.
Not as a criticism. Not as self-flagellation. As a fact. A simple, honest acknowledgment that there is always a gap between where I am and where I could be. That the gap is not a failure. It is an opportunity. And the moment I stop seeing the gap is the moment I stop growing.
This is a form of productive dissatisfaction. Not the toxic kind — the kind that tells you you are not good enough and never will be. The productive kind. The kind that says: this is good, and it can be better. That show was strong, and the next one can be stronger. That line worked, and there might be a line that works twice as well.
Productive dissatisfaction is uncomfortable. It means never fully resting in your success. It means watching a performance that the audience loved and still finding three things you want to improve. It means sitting with the tension between “that went well” and “that could have gone better” without resolving it in either direction.
But that tension is the engine of growth. And the moment it stops — the moment you resolve it by deciding “that was good enough” — the engine goes quiet.
The Comparison Trap (and How to Avoid It)
There is a danger in this mindset, and I want to address it directly. The mantra “I am not as good as I can be” can easily slide into “I am not as good as them.” Comparing yourself to other performers — especially to the legends you study and admire — is a fast track to paralysis rather than improvement.
The standard is not someone else. The standard is yourself. Specifically, the best version of yourself that is currently achievable with your skills, experience, and material. You are not competing with David Copperfield or Derren Brown or whoever you admire most. You are competing with the version of you that exists if you push a little harder, prepare a little more thoroughly, and refuse to settle for what is already working.
This distinction is crucial because it keeps the dissatisfaction productive. If the standard is Copperfield, you will always fall short, and the dissatisfaction becomes toxic and demotivating. If the standard is your own potential, the gap is always closable, and the dissatisfaction becomes fuel.
How I Stay Hungry
The practical systems I use to fight complacency are simple but they require discipline.
I watch video of every performance. Not just the ones that felt bad. Especially the ones that felt good. Because the performances that felt good are the ones most likely to contain hidden complacency — moments where I coasted on material I knew would work instead of pushing for the version of that material that could be extraordinary.
I keep a running list of improvements. After every show, I write down at least three things I want to do better next time. Not problems. Not failures. Improvements. Things that worked but could work more. This list never gets shorter. It is not supposed to. The length of the list is a measure of how honestly I am evaluating myself.
I periodically work on new material. Not because the current set is bad. Because working on new material forces me back into the uncomfortable space of not knowing whether something will work. It re-engages the muscles of experimentation, risk, and vulnerability that complacency allows to atrophy.
I seek out performances by people who are better than me. Not to compare. To remind myself of what is possible. When I watch a performer who operates at ninety or ninety-five on the scale, it recalibrates my sense of what good enough actually means. It reveals the gap I have been unconsciously accepting.
And I talk to Adam, who has the rare combination of understanding my work deeply and caring about me enough to be honest. Partners like that are invaluable. Not because they make you feel good. Because they make you better.
The Paradox of Contentment
There is a paradox in all of this. The mantra “I am not as good as I can be” sounds like a recipe for unhappiness. Perpetual dissatisfaction does not exactly scream contentment.
But here is what I have found: the dissatisfaction is not with myself. It is with stasis. It is with the idea that where I am today is where I should stay. The discomfort is not personal. It is positional. I am not unhappy with who I am. I am unwilling to stop becoming who I could be.
And there is a strange contentment in that unwillingness. A sense of aliveness. Of engagement. Of being in active relationship with your craft rather than passively coasting on what you have already built.
The performers who stop growing are not happier than the ones who keep pushing. They are just quieter. The edge is gone, the hunger is gone, and what remains is a hollow comfort that looks like success from the outside and feels like stagnation from the inside.
I will take the productive discomfort. Every time. I am not as good as I can be. And that sentence, spoken honestly, is the most motivating thing I know.