I spent three weeks writing what I thought was the perfect introduction to a card routine. It was a story about the history of playing cards — how they evolved from hand-painted court entertainment in the Mamluk Sultanate to mass-produced consumer goods, how the four suits have been interpreted as representing the four classes of medieval society, how the joker was a late American addition that originally served as a trump card in euchre. I loved every word of it. I practiced the delivery. I refined the transitions. I was proud of it.
Then I performed it at a trial run in a small venue in Graz, in front of about thirty people I had recruited specifically for honest feedback. The performance went well enough. The card routine itself landed. People reacted at the right moments. But when I collected the feedback forms afterward — simple questions: What did you like? Was there something you did not like? How entertaining was it? — a pattern emerged that I could not ignore.
Three different people had circled the same section of my performance. One wrote: “The history bit at the start was interesting but I wasn’t sure why you were telling us.” Another wrote: “Lost me a bit during the long introduction — I wanted to get to the trick.” The third, with devastating economy: “Too much talking before anything happened.”
They were right. All three of them. And the reason they were right is captured in a principle I had read in Cara Hamilton’s guide to storytelling for magicians and then promptly ignored: if your routine or any detail within it is likely to get a “so what” response from the audience, remove it.
The “So What” Rule. Three words that have since saved me more time, more embarrassment, and more dead air than any other single principle I have learned.
What the Rule Actually Means
The rule is deceptively simple. After every section, every line, every detail in your performance, imagine the least engaged person in your audience thinking: “So what?” If you cannot immediately answer why that person should care — not why you care, but why they should — the material does not belong.
This is not the same as saying everything must be dramatic. It is not saying everything must be a punchline or a reveal. It is saying everything must have a job. Everything must earn its place. You must be able to explain what each element is doing for the audience’s experience — building tension, establishing context, creating empathy, providing a laugh, delivering a surprise. If you cannot name its job, it is unemployed, and unemployed material is worse than silence.
My playing card history monologue was fascinating to me. I genuinely find the evolution of the deck interesting. I could talk about it for an hour. But what job was it doing for the audience? It was not building tension — there was nothing at stake. It was not creating empathy — it was a lecture, not a story. It was not providing humor. It was not establishing context that the audience needed to understand the effect that followed. The card routine would have landed exactly the same way if I had said nothing about the Mamluk Sultanate.
The monologue existed because I wanted to say it, not because the audience needed to hear it. That is the heart of the “So What” problem.
The Consultant’s Trap
I think this particular mistake comes naturally to people with my background. As a strategy consultant, I was trained to build comprehensive arguments. You do not walk into a boardroom and present a recommendation without first establishing the research base, the market context, the competitive landscape, the historical precedents, and the analytical framework. The more thorough the setup, the more credible the conclusion. Executives expect it. They want to see the work.
Audiences at a performance do not want to see the work. They want to experience the result. The setup exists to serve the payoff, not to demonstrate your knowledge. When the setup becomes its own centerpiece — when it grows beyond what the payoff requires — the audience begins to drift. Not because they are unintelligent or uninterested in history, but because they came to experience something, and you are making them wait.
This was a hard adjustment for me. My instinct is to build the case. To provide context. To make sure the audience understands why what they are about to see matters. And some of that impulse is correct — context does matter, and a properly framed effect is more powerful than an unframed one. But the “So What” Rule draws a sharp line between useful framing and self-indulgent preamble.
Useful framing: “I want to show you something that changed how I think about decisions.” This takes five seconds, establishes emotional stakes, and makes the audience curious.
Self-indulgent preamble: Four minutes about the history of playing cards that the audience did not ask for and does not need.
The difference is not length, exactly. It is function. The useful frame has a clear job: create anticipation and emotional investment. The preamble has no job except to display my knowledge.
Applying the Rule Line by Line
Once you internalize the “So What” Rule, you start seeing unemployed material everywhere. Not just in your own performances, but in everything — other performers’ shows, keynote speeches, movies, podcasts. You develop an ear for the moment when a presenter has drifted from serving the audience to serving themselves.
But the most useful application is the surgical one: going through your own scripts line by line and asking the question at every sentence.
I did this exercise with my thirty-minute show after the Graz feedback. I printed out the full script — every word I said, including transitions and off-the-cuff remarks that had become habitual. Then I went through it with a red pen, writing “SW?” in the margin next to anything that could provoke a “so what” from the audience.
The red marks were humbling. Not just the Mamluk monologue. I found a two-minute stretch in the middle of my show where I was essentially narrating my own actions. “Now I am going to mix these thoroughly. I want you to see that there is nothing hidden. Notice that I am using both hands.” The audience could see all of this. They did not need me to provide audio commentary on visible actions. I was filling silence with description, and description without purpose is just noise.
I found a callback to a joke from earlier in the show that no longer made sense because I had restructured the running order. It was an orphaned reference — something that used to have a job but had been made redundant by a structural change, and I had kept saying it out of habit.
I found a moment where I asked the audience a rhetorical question and then answered it myself before they had time to react. The question had no job because I never gave it the space to do its work.
By the end of the exercise, my thirty-minute show had been marked up so heavily that it looked like a crime scene. I sat with the edited version and realized that roughly four minutes of material — four entire minutes — was failing the “So What” test. Four minutes of dead weight that the audience had been politely tolerating while waiting for the parts that mattered.
The Courage to Cut
The hardest part of the “So What” Rule is not identifying the problem material. Once you know what to look for, it is obvious. The hard part is cutting it. Because the material you need to cut is often the material you are most attached to. You wrote it. You practiced it. You thought it was clever. It represents research, effort, and personal taste.
This is where the rule becomes ruthless, and where it needs to be. A detail may be greatly interesting to you, but if the audience thinks “so what,” then it has no business being in your act. Full stop. Your attachment to the material is irrelevant to its function. The audience did not come to see your attachment. They came to be entertained, moved, astonished. Everything that does not serve those goals is a tax on their attention, and attention is a finite resource that you are spending whether you realize it or not.
I kept a file on my laptop — a “graveyard” of cut material. Lines I loved that did not earn their place. Stories that were interesting but did not serve the effect. Jokes that made me laugh but left the audience neutral. The graveyard serves two purposes. First, it makes cutting less painful because the material is not destroyed, just relocated. Second, some of it finds a home later in a different context where it does have a job. The Mamluk history, for example, eventually found its way into a corporate keynote about the evolution of games and decision-making, where it served the narrative perfectly. The material was not bad. It was just in the wrong show.
The Positive Test
The “So What” Rule is fundamentally a negative test — it identifies what to remove. But it implies a positive test as well, and this positive version is just as useful: can you explain what each element of your performance is doing?
I started keeping a simple chart. Left column: each section or moment of my show. Right column: its job. Building tension. Getting a laugh. Establishing the premise. Creating empathy. Delivering the impossible moment. Providing a breather between intense sequences.
Any row where the right column was blank — where I could not name the job — was a candidate for cutting. Any row where the right column said something vague like “sets the mood” got pushed harder: how does it set the mood, and is there a faster or more effective way to do it?
This chart became one of my most useful rehearsal tools. It forced me to justify every moment of stage time, which in turn made every moment that survived the test stronger and more intentional.
The Rule Beyond Magic
What makes the “So What” Rule powerful is that it applies everywhere. In keynote speaking, I use it to trim slides and talking points. In business presentations, I use it to strip out background slides that provide context nobody requested. In conversation, I notice when I am providing detail that the listener did not ask for and does not need.
The rule is really a principle of respect. Respect for the audience’s time. Respect for their attention. Respect for the fact that they showed up and they deserve to spend every minute of that time on something that earns its place. When you cut the “so what” material, what remains is tighter, faster, more impactful. The audience feels the difference even if they cannot name it. They know when a show is lean and intentional, just as they know when it is padded with material that exists only because the performer could not bring themselves to cut it.
I could not bring myself to cut it for a long time. The Graz feedback forms taught me that the audience would do the cutting for me — by disengaging, by drifting, by politely enduring — if I did not do it first.
Better to do it first. Better to hold each line, each story, each detail up to the light and ask: what is your job? If it cannot answer, thank it for its service and send it to the graveyard.
The show that remains will be worth every second.