There is a cardboard box sitting on a shelf in my home office in Austria. It has a hole cut in the top, just big enough to fit a hand through. Inside the box, at any given time, there are a dozen or so random objects. A kitchen timer. A novelty keychain from a hotel in Linz. A small rubber duck that Adam Wilber sent me as a joke. A wine cork. A battery. Whatever odds and ends I have collected since the last time I emptied it and refilled it with new things.
This box has done more for my performance skills than hundreds of hours of practicing sleight of hand in hotel rooms. And I discovered it not from a magic book, but from a storytelling guide written by a former radio producer.
The Exercise
Cara Hamilton describes this drill in her book on storytelling for magicians, and she credits it to her years training radio presenters. The premise is deceptively simple. You fill a box with random objects. You start a stopwatch. Without feeling around inside or peeking, you reach in, pull out one object, and immediately begin speaking about it. For sixty seconds. Without pausing. Without “um” or “er” or clearing your throat. You speak about that object as if it is the most important, most fascinating thing anyone has ever encountered.
You can be factual. You can be creative. You can tell outright lies. It does not matter. What matters is that you fill sixty seconds with continuous, confident, engaging speech about an object you did not choose and could not prepare for.
When I first read about this exercise, I almost skipped past it. It sounded like a warm-up drill for broadcast students, not something relevant to a strategy consultant who performs mentalism at corporate events. But Hamilton made a claim that stopped me: she said that no matter how good someone’s university degree was, no matter how polished their credentials, if they did this exercise consistently, they became better presenters. Something about that directness caught me. It sounded like something Ken Weber would say.
So I tried it.
The First Attempt
The first object I pulled out of the box was a stapler. A plain, black, desktop stapler. And I froze. Not physically — I was standing in my office, alone, with a phone timer counting down from sixty. But my brain froze. What do you say about a stapler? It staples things. It is made of metal and plastic. It sits on desks. I had exhausted everything I knew about staplers in about eight seconds.
The remaining fifty-two seconds were excruciating. I stumbled. I repeated myself. I said “um” at least a dozen times. I described the stapler’s color twice because I could not think of anything else. I made a weak joke about office supplies that would not have landed with any audience, let alone a cardboard box in an empty room.
When the timer went off, I felt genuinely embarrassed — and there was nobody there to be embarrassed in front of. That was the moment I understood what the exercise was actually training.
What It Actually Trains
The box exercise is not about the objects. It is about the gap between stimulus and response — the moment when something unexpected appears in your hands and your brain has to generate something interesting to say about it. That gap is exactly where most performers fall apart.
Think about what happens during a live performance when something unplanned occurs. A spectator says something unexpected. A prop behaves differently than anticipated. The room’s energy shifts. The emcee says something that changes the frame before you walk on. In each of these moments, you face the same challenge as pulling a stapler out of a box: you have to say something engaging, right now, without preparation.
Most of us default to filler in those moments. We say “okay” or “interesting” or “so anyway” or we narrate what we are doing. We describe our own actions because describing what is visible is easy and requires no creativity. The box exercise trains you out of that reflex. It forces your brain to generate narrative, context, and interest under pressure, about anything, at any time.
After a few weeks of doing this exercise — five minutes a day, three or four objects per session — I noticed something shifting. Not in the exercise itself, though I was getting better at it. The shift happened during live performances.
The Transfer Effect
I was performing at a corporate event in Vienna, about three weeks after I started the box exercise. A spectator made a comment during a routine that I had not anticipated. Normally, I would have smiled, nodded, and steered back to my script. Instead, something different happened. A response formed in my mind almost immediately — not a rehearsed line, but a genuine, relevant, interesting reply that connected the spectator’s comment to the theme of the routine. I said it without thinking, the audience laughed, and the moment felt completely natural.
This kept happening. The box exercise was training a muscle I did not know I had — the ability to generate interesting speech on demand, about anything, in any direction. It was not making me funnier or more knowledgeable. It was making me faster. The gap between hearing something unexpected and responding to it with something engaging was shrinking.
I started to understand why Hamilton recommended this exercise so emphatically. Radio presenters face this challenge constantly. They have to fill airtime, respond to callers, react to breaking news, transition between segments — all while sounding confident, smooth, and interesting. The box exercise is their equivalent of scales for a musician. It builds the fundamental capacity that everything else rests on.
The Verbal Crutch Purge
The exercise has a secondary benefit that I did not appreciate until it kicked in. It eliminates verbal crutches. When you know that every “um” and “er” is a failure point in the exercise, you become hyperaware of them. And that awareness transfers directly to performance.
I did not realize how many verbal crutches I was using until the box exercise forced me to confront them. I had a habit of saying “so” before transitioning between phases of a routine. I would say “okay” after a spectator responded to an instruction. I would inhale audibly before my closing line, a tiny gasp that was imperceptible to me but probably noticeable to anyone sitting in the front row.
The box exercise trained these out — not through self-discipline or conscious effort, but through sheer repetition. When you spend five minutes a day speaking without crutches, those crutches start to feel wrong in every other context. You become allergic to them.
Variations I Have Developed
Over the months I have been doing this exercise, I have added variations that make it more relevant to performance.
The first variation is the ninety-second version. Once sixty seconds became comfortable, I extended it. Ninety seconds about a single random object is significantly harder than sixty. It forces you deeper. You cannot stay on the surface — you have to find angles, stories, connections, and tangents that keep the speech interesting for a full ninety seconds. This is closer to the reality of performance, where a single interaction with a spectator or a single phase of a routine can easily last two minutes.
The second variation is the character version. I pull an object out of the box and speak about it as a specific character. Not a fictional character — a version of myself at different energy levels. The consultant explaining the object to a boardroom. The performer building mystery around it. The friend telling a funny story about it. This trains tonal flexibility, which is something I used to struggle with. I had one performance register — slightly too formal, slightly too careful — and this variation helped me break out of it.
The third variation is the connection version. I pull two objects out of the box and have to connect them in a single narrative. A battery and a wine cork become a story about energy and celebration. A rubber duck and a hotel key card become a story about travel and the strange things you find in hotel rooms. This variation trains the associative thinking that makes for great improvisational moments in performance.
Why It Works for Magic Specifically
Magic performance has a unique challenge that pure public speaking does not: you are managing two parallel tracks simultaneously. There is the technical track — what your hands are doing, where props need to be, what secret actions need to happen when — and there is the presentational track — what you are saying, how you are engaging the audience, what story you are telling.
Most beginning performers, myself included, lose the presentational track when the technical track gets demanding. The moment something requires real concentration with your hands, your mouth goes on autopilot. You start narrating your own actions. “Now I’ll take this card and place it here.” You describe what is visible because your brain is too busy with what is invisible to generate anything interesting.
The box exercise builds the presentational muscle to the point where it can operate semi-independently. When your ability to generate interesting speech becomes automatic — when it does not require the same cognitive resources it used to — you free up attention for the technical demands of performance. The two tracks can run in parallel because one of them has been trained to near-automaticity.
This is the same principle behind practicing sleight of hand until it becomes muscle memory. You practice the technical skills until they do not require conscious thought, freeing your mind for presentation. The box exercise does the inverse: it practices the presentational skill until it does not require conscious thought, freeing your mind for technique. Training both tracks independently, then combining them, is far more effective than trying to develop both simultaneously.
The Compound Effect
I have been doing this exercise for the better part of a year now. The compound effect is striking. My ability to respond to unexpected moments in performance has improved dramatically. My verbal crutches have largely disappeared. My transitions between phases of a routine — which used to be the weakest parts of my shows, the moments where I would default to dead procedural narration — have become some of the strongest moments. Because those transitions are exactly the kind of unscripted, responsive speech that the box exercise trains.
But the deepest impact is something harder to quantify. The exercise has made me more comfortable with uncertainty. When I pull an object out of that box, I have no idea what I am going to say. And over hundreds of repetitions, I have learned that something interesting will come. Not every time. Not always immediately. But if I start speaking with confidence and keep my brain engaged, something worth hearing will emerge.
That trust in my own ability to respond has changed how I walk onto a stage. I am less rigid. Less dependent on everything going exactly according to plan. More willing to follow an interesting moment wherever it leads, because I have trained myself to believe that I can find something worthwhile in any direction.
A cardboard box with a hole in the top. A dozen random objects. A sixty-second timer. It sounds like nothing. It has changed everything.