Last Tuesday, after a keynote in Salzburg, I was driving back to my hotel and a line came to me. Not a new line. A better version of a line I have been using for over a year. The original line worked fine. Got the reaction I wanted. No audience member had ever given me a reason to change it.
But this new version was tighter. One fewer word. A slightly different rhythm. And the emphasis fell on the word that carried the most weight instead of the word that happened to come last in the sentence.
I pulled over, typed the new version into my phone, and spent the next twenty minutes in a parking lot saying both versions aloud, testing the feel of each one in my mouth, imagining how the audience would receive the difference.
One line. Three words changed. No audience would ever notice the difference consciously. And I was sitting in a parking lot at ten o’clock at night, obsessing over it.
This is what the journey looks like from the inside. Not the grand discoveries. Not the breakthroughs. The endless, granular, sometimes absurd pursuit of the slightly better version of something that already works.
The Nip and Tuck Philosophy
Pete McCabe, in his book on scripting for magic, introduced a concept that I have internalized so deeply it now operates as an instinct rather than a strategy. He calls it the continual nip and tuck — the idea that your material is never finished. It is always in a state of ongoing refinement. A word here, a pause there, a slightly different way of framing a moment.
When I first encountered this idea, I found it exhausting. Never finished? The whole point of preparation is to reach a state of readiness. The whole point of practice is to arrive at a level of proficiency where the material is done and you can just perform it. The idea that it is never done — that the process of refinement continues indefinitely — sounded less like craftsmanship and more like compulsion.
Years later, I understand it differently. The nip and tuck is not a burden. It is the practice. It is the relationship between a performer and their material, kept alive through constant, loving, detailed attention. The moment you decide the material is finished — the moment you stop looking for the better line, the tighter transition, the more precise pause — is the moment the material begins to die.
Not literally. The routine still works. The audience still reacts. But something goes out of it. An aliveness that comes from the performer’s engagement with the material. When you are still searching, still refining, still discovering new possibilities within a piece you have performed hundreds of times, the material has a quality of freshness that the audience feels even if they could not name what they are feeling.
When you stop searching, the material becomes rote. You are executing rather than performing. Going through the motions rather than discovering the moments. And that shift, invisible at first, gradually makes itself known in the quality of the experience you create.
What I Am Actually Searching For
The search has different levels, and I want to be specific about each one.
At the surface level, I am searching for better words. Language is the primary medium through which I connect with an audience, and language is infinitely refinable. There is always a more precise word, a more evocative phrase, a more natural cadence. The difference between “I am going to show you something” and “I want you to see something” is three words. The difference in what the audience feels is significant. The first is about me. The second is about them.
Below the surface, I am searching for better timing. Timing is the architecture of experience, and it adjusts based on context. The same routine, performed for a corporate audience at nine in the morning and for a dinner audience at nine in the evening, needs different timing. Not radically different. Subtly different. The pauses are slightly longer in the evening, when people are relaxed and ready to linger in the moment. The pace is slightly faster in the morning, when energy is higher but patience is shorter. These adjustments are not scripted. They are sensed — felt in real time based on the audience’s energy. But you can only sense them if you are actively paying attention, which you can only do if you are still searching rather than running on autopilot.
At the deepest level, I am searching for better emotional truth. This is the hardest thing to articulate and the most important. Every routine has an emotional core — the feeling it is designed to create in the audience. Astonishment, delight, wonder, warmth, laughter. That emotional core can always be more clearly expressed. The framing can always be more honest. The delivery can always be more connected. The moment of magic can always be more fully inhabited.
This is what I mean when I say I am still looking. Not looking for something that is missing. Looking for the more fully realized version of something that is already there.
The Three-Hundred-Performance Version
There is a version of every routine that only exists after three hundred performances. It is the version where every element has been tested, adjusted, retested, and polished through the feedback of hundreds of different audiences. It is the version where the performer is no longer performing the routine — they are living inside it, moving through it with the kind of ease that only comes from deep, exhaustive familiarity.
I have a few pieces in my set that are approaching this level. They have been performed enough times that I know them the way I know the layout of my apartment — I could navigate them in the dark. And yet, even at three hundred performances, I am still finding things.
A few weeks ago, I discovered that if I shift my weight from one foot to the other at a specific moment in my mentalism piece, the audience’s attention follows the movement in a way that makes the next beat land more cleanly. This is not something I could have planned in advance. It is something that emerged from the accumulated experience of performing the piece hundreds of times while maintaining active awareness.
That discovery came at performance number two hundred and eighty-something. If I had stopped searching at two hundred — decided the piece was finished, stopped paying attention to the micro-dynamics, shifted to autopilot — I never would have found it.
The three-hundred-performance version is not the final version. It is just the version that reveals itself at that stage of the journey. The five-hundred-performance version will be different again. The thousand-performance version — if I am still performing the piece at that point — will be something else entirely.
This is why the journey never ends. Because the material keeps revealing itself to performers who are still looking.
The Danger of Done
Let me describe what happens when a performer decides their material is done.
The first thing that stops is the post-show reflection. When the material is finished, there is nothing to reflect on. You performed it, it worked, on to the next thing. The practice of sitting with the performance afterward — reviewing what happened, what the audience responded to, what could be different — goes away because there is nothing to change.
The second thing that stops is the experimentation. When the material is finished, there is no room for variation. You deliver it the same way every time because the same way is the “right” way. The small experiments — trying a different emphasis, testing a new pause, adding a line and seeing if it lands — stop because the material does not need them.
The third thing that stops, and this is the most destructive, is the performer’s emotional engagement with the material. When the material is finished, performing it becomes a mechanical act. You are executing a script rather than inhabiting a performance. The technical execution remains strong. The emotional connection drains away, so gradually that you might not notice until the audience’s reactions tell you something has changed.
I have watched this happen to performers I admire. Material that once sparkled becomes flat. Routines that once created genuine wonder become technically impressive but emotionally hollow. The performer is still hitting every mark, every beat, every cue. But the life has gone out of it because the performer stopped searching for what else the material could be.
Austin Kleon’s Lesson
Austin Kleon’s philosophy on creative work gave me a useful frame for understanding this perpetual search. He writes about the creative process as an ongoing relationship with your influences, your material, and your own evolving identity. The work is never finished because you are never finished. You change. Your understanding deepens. Your relationship with the material evolves. And the material, if you let it, evolves with you.
This reframes the nip and tuck from a chore to a privilege. You get to keep refining. You get to keep discovering. You get to maintain an active, living relationship with your material instead of treating it as a product that was completed on a specific date and sealed.
The blog you are reading is evidence of this philosophy in action. Every post I write about magic, performance, and the psychology of craft teaches me something new about my own practice. The act of articulating what I have learned forces me to examine it more closely. And that examination, without fail, reveals something I had not seen before — a connection I had missed, a principle I had not fully understood, a possibility I had not considered.
The Coffee Shop Test
Here is a test I use to determine whether I am still searching or just executing. I call it the coffee shop test.
Imagine you are sitting at a coffee shop with someone who has never seen your show. They ask you about a specific routine. Not what happens in the routine — they do not care about the effect. They ask you what you are currently working on within the routine. What you are trying to improve. What you have discovered recently. What you want to figure out next.
If you can answer that question with genuine enthusiasm — if you can describe the specific thing you are exploring, the line you are refining, the timing you are adjusting, the moment you are trying to deepen — the material is alive. You are still searching.
If you cannot answer — if the routine is just something you do, with nothing currently being explored or refined — the material is in danger of becoming rote. Not bad. Not broken. Just no longer growing. And material that is no longer growing is material that will eventually start declining, one imperceptible degree at a time.
Why This Matters
The journey that never ends sounds romantic when you read about it. In practice, it is often tedious, frustrating, and lonely. Sitting in a parking lot at ten o’clock at night, testing two versions of the same line, knowing that the difference is so small that probably no one in the audience will consciously register it. Spending thirty minutes after a show reviewing a single transition, looking for the half-second pause that would make it breathe better. Rewriting a script for the twelfth time, changing three words that were already fine.
But here is what I have learned: the search is the craft. The craft is not the routine. It is not the performance. It is not the reaction. It is the search. The ongoing, never-ending, sometimes absurd pursuit of the better version.
And the performers I admire most — the ones whose work genuinely moves people, whose material feels alive no matter how many times they perform it, whose shows create the kind of wonder that sticks with an audience long after the curtain closes — are the ones who never stop looking.
They are still searching for the new line. The new bit. The new subtle twist. Not because what they have is not good enough. Because the search itself is what makes it good. And the day the search ends is the day the magic — the real magic, the magic that has nothing to do with tricks — begins to fade.
I am still searching. I expect I always will be. And I would not trade that restless, sometimes exhausting, endlessly rewarding process for all the finished material in the world.