About two years into my journey with magic, I purchased a routine from a creator whose work I deeply admired. It came with everything: the props, the method, a detailed performance video, and a complete script. The script was good — genuinely good. It had humor, a clear narrative arc, a satisfying climax. Watching the creator perform it, the script sounded effortless. The words fit the effect like a glove. I was excited.
I learned the method. I memorized the script. I rehearsed it dozens of times in my home office, then in hotel rooms across Austria and Germany. I performed it at a corporate event in Graz, exactly as taught, with the creator’s script delivered as faithfully as I could manage.
It fell flat. Not disastrously — the audience was polite, they clapped at the end. But the energy was wrong. The humor that had been sparkling in the creator’s performance landed with a dull thud in mine. The conversational moments that had seemed so natural on the instruction video felt stilted coming out of my mouth. The entire routine felt like I was wearing someone else’s suit — technically it fit, but it did not look right on me.
I called Adam Wilber afterward and described the experience. His response was immediate and blunt: “Of course it didn’t work. You were performing someone else’s personality.”
He was right. And figuring out what to do about it became one of the most important lessons of my performing life.
The Adaptation Problem
Every serious book on magic performance addresses this issue. Pete McCabe dedicates entire sections of Scripting Magic to it. Cara Hamilton builds adaptation steps into her storytelling framework. The message is consistent across every source I have studied: never perform someone else’s script unchanged. Adaptation is not optional. It is the process of making a trick yours.
But “make it yours” is easy advice to give and difficult advice to follow. What does it actually mean? How do you take a routine that someone else designed — someone whose performing style, humor, energy, and audience relationship are different from yours — and transform it into something that feels authentically like you, without losing what made it good in the first place?
The first time I tried to adapt a routine, I made the beginner’s mistake of changing everything. I rewrote the script from scratch, substituted my own jokes, altered the pacing, and modified the structure. The result was worse than the original. I had thrown out the baby with the bathwater. The routine’s strength had been in its carefully designed structure — the way each moment built on the last — and by rewriting everything, I had destroyed that architecture.
The second time, I made the opposite mistake: I changed almost nothing. I swapped a few words, updated a cultural reference, and called it adapted. It was not. I was still performing someone else’s material in someone else’s voice, with a thin coat of my own paint on top.
The third attempt was different, because by then I had developed a process.
The Six-Step Process
The process I eventually settled on has six steps. I did not invent these steps from nothing — they emerged from combining Hamilton’s adaptation framework with McCabe’s scripting principles and my own painful trial and error.
Step one: I perform the routine as taught, several times, in private. Not to memorize the script, but to understand the mechanics. What is the structure? Where are the key beats? What emotional journey does the audience go through? I am not learning the words. I am learning the architecture.
Step two: I identify the load-bearing walls. Every routine has structural elements that cannot be removed without the whole thing collapsing. These might be specific setup lines that create the expectation the climax subverts. They might be transitions that cover necessary technical moments. They might be the premise itself — the core idea that gives the routine its identity. I mark these. They are not to be touched, at least not yet.
Step three: I strip out everything else. Every joke, every aside, every conversational filler, every personal anecdote, every cultural reference — everything that is not load-bearing gets removed. What remains is a skeleton: the bare structure of the routine with only the essential moments intact.
Step four: I rebuild using my own material. This is where the real work happens. I take that skeleton and start adding flesh — but it is my flesh, not the creator’s. I write new connecting tissue in my own voice. I add humor that reflects my sense of what is funny, not the creator’s. I insert personal references from my own life — my consulting work, my hotel room practice sessions, my Austrian context, the experiences I have actually had.
Step five: I test the adaptation against two questions. First: does it still work structurally? Does the climax still land, do the transitions still flow, does the emotional arc still build properly? If I have broken the structure, I go back and figure out which of my changes caused the damage. Second: does it sound like me? If I read the script aloud without performing the routine, does it sound like something I would actually say to another person? If any line sounds like it belongs in someone else’s mouth, I rewrite it.
Step six: I perform it for real and see what happens. And then I repeat steps four and five based on what I learn.
A Concrete Example
Let me describe this process with a specific routine, without revealing any methods. I acquired a mentalism piece that came with a presentation framed around a psychological experiment. The creator presented it as a professor-type character, citing studies and using clinical language. It was brilliant — for him. He has an academic bearing and a dry wit that makes the professor character natural.
I am not that person. I am a strategy consultant who came to magic through curiosity and obsession, not through academia. The professor frame did not work for me. The clinical language sounded pretentious in my mouth.
So I kept the structure — the sequence of events, the audience interaction points, the reveal mechanism — and completely replaced the frame. Instead of a psychological experiment, I presented it as something I stumbled into while studying decision-making for a business keynote. Instead of clinical language, I used the language of someone genuinely fascinated by how people make choices. Instead of the professor character, I was simply myself — a consultant who discovered something strange about human perception and wanted to share it.
The structural beats were identical. The effect was identical. But the experience of watching it was completely different, because the words, the tone, and the frame were mine.
What You Keep, What You Change
Through several adaptations, I have developed a sense for what is usually safe to change and what is usually dangerous to touch.
Safe to change: cultural references, personal anecdotes, jokes, metaphors, analogies, the specific vocabulary and speech patterns, the character or persona from which the routine is performed, the setting or context of the presentation.
Dangerous to change: the sequence of events (which is often designed to support the method), the specific wording of instructions to spectators (which may be more precisely calibrated than you realize), the timing of key reveals, the emotional arc from setup through climax.
The distinction maps onto Hamilton’s concept that you have a pattern of speech natural to you — words you are comfortable with, pauses that come naturally to you. Everything that is surface language can and should be adapted to your natural patterns. Everything that is structural engineering should be changed only with great care and full understanding of why it was designed the way it was.
The Backstory Swap
One of the most powerful adaptation tools I have found is what I think of as the backstory swap. Many routines come with a backstory — a narrative explanation for why this particular effect exists, why these particular props are involved, why the performer is doing this particular thing. The backstory is almost always the creator’s backstory, and it is almost never transferable.
Michael Close, as quoted in Scripting Magic, puts it perfectly: every trick you want to perform, the first question you have to ask is what does this trick mean to me? Not what it meant to the person who created it. What it means to you.
When I adapt a routine, one of the first things I do is write my own backstory for it. Why would I, Felix — a strategy consultant based in Austria who co-founded a magic company with Adam Wilber — be performing this particular effect? What in my life connects to it? What genuine interest or experience of mine makes this routine meaningful to me?
Sometimes the connection is obvious. A routine about perception and attention connects naturally to my keynote work on innovation and cognitive bias. A routine involving decision-making connects to my consulting background. Sometimes the connection requires more creative thinking. But there is always a connection to be found, because the themes of magic — impossibility, perception, trust, surprise, wonder — are universal. They touch every life, including mine.
The backstory does not have to be true. Close himself says he loves it when there is a little bit of truth to the lie — that is all you need. Just enough truth that you believe it yourself. When you believe the backstory, the audience will believe it too, because your delivery will have the weight of genuine conviction rather than the lightness of recitation.
The Respect Principle
There is an ethical dimension to adaptation that I want to address directly. Taking someone else’s routine and performing it with your own presentation is normal and expected in magic. What is not acceptable is taking someone else’s presentation — their specific jokes, their personal stories, their unique framing — and passing it off as your own. That is theft, plain and simple.
Adaptation means replacing the presentation, not copying it. It means doing the creative work of finding your own voice for the material. When I perform a routine that I purchased from another creator, the structure is theirs (and I credit them if asked), but the presentation is mine. Every word of it. Every joke. Every reference. Every story.
This is more work than simply memorizing someone else’s script. It is significantly more work. But it is the only way to perform with authenticity, and authenticity is the foundation of everything. An audience may not be able to articulate why a performance feels genuine or why it feels hollow, but they can always feel the difference.
The Test That Tells You It Worked
How do you know when an adaptation is complete? When the routine feels like it was always yours. When you cannot imagine performing it with the original creator’s words. When someone asks you about the routine and you describe it in terms of your own experience and your own perspective, not in terms of where you learned it.
The routine I described earlier — the one I bombed in Graz with the creator’s original script — is now one of the strongest pieces in my repertoire. The structure is the same. The method is the same. But the presentation is mine in every particular. When I perform it now, there is no gap between who I am and what I am saying. The words fit because they are my words. The humor lands because it is my humor. The energy is right because it is my energy.
That transformation — from wearing someone else’s suit to wearing your own — is the entire point of adaptation. It is not a shortcut. It is not a compromise. It is the creative work that turns a purchased trick into a personal performance.