For the first year or so of my journey into magic, I had one metric for whether a performance worked: Did I fool them?
If the spectator looked confused, if they turned to their friend and said “How did he do that?” — I counted it as a win. If they grabbed the cards and started examining them, even better. That meant I had gotten them. That meant the method was clean. That meant I was improving.
I was wrong about all of it.
Not wrong that clean method matters — it does. Not wrong that the audience should not be able to reconstruct what happened — they should not. But wrong about what the finish line actually looks like. Wrong about what a successful performance feels like from the audience’s side of the table.
I was optimizing for puzzlement. What I should have been chasing was wonder.
The Night It Clicked
I was at a corporate dinner in Vienna, performing close-up at a table of six. I did a piece with a borrowed ring — it vanished from one person’s hand and appeared somewhere unexpected. The method was solid. The handling was clean. The table went silent for a moment, and then one of the guests said, “Okay, but how?” He said it with a tone that was half impressed, half challenged. His wife immediately jumped in: “It has to be in the other hand.” Someone else said, “No, he must have switched it.”
Within fifteen seconds, the table had turned into a forensic investigation. They were engaged, sure. They were talking about what I had just done. But the conversation was entirely about method. Not about the moment. Not about what it felt like. Just about the mechanics of how the ring got from A to B.
I walked away from that table feeling like I had succeeded. The trick worked. They were fooled.
But later that evening, at a different table, something different happened. I did a mentalism piece — something simpler, honestly, from a technical standpoint. But the presentation was more personal. I told a story about a moment from my early days studying psychology, about how we reveal more than we think through the smallest choices we make. And when the effect landed, the woman across the table did not say “How?” She said, “That’s terrifying.” And then she laughed. And then she was quiet for a moment. And then she told me a story about her grandmother, who she swore could read minds.
That table did not investigate the method. They did not try to reverse-engineer what had happened. They sat with the feeling of it. They talked about it on their own terms, connecting it to their own lives. The effect had become a doorway into something larger than a puzzle.
That was the first time I felt the difference between fooling someone and moving them. I did not have words for it yet. The words came later.
Joshua Jay’s Distinction
The words came from Joshua Jay’s book How Magicians Think, where he draws a line between two emotional states that most people — and most magicians — treat as the same thing.
Astonishment is the instant of pure shock. The fraction of a second when the impossible registers and the brain has not yet caught up. It is the gasp, the widened eyes, the involuntary “No!” It is real, it is powerful, and it is fleeting. Almost immediately, the rational mind steps in. System 2 thinking — Daniel Kahneman’s term for the slow, analytical, problem-solving mode of cognition — takes over. The brain starts looking for explanations. Where was the card? What did he do with his left hand? When did the switch happen?
This is the transition from astonishment to curiosity. And once curiosity takes over, the magic is effectively over. The audience is no longer experiencing the impossible. They are solving a puzzle.
Wonder is something different. Wonder is deeper, longer-lasting, and far harder to create. It requires not just surprise but meaning. Not just “I don’t know how that happened” but “I don’t know how that happened, and it matters.” Wonder has an element of foreshadowing, of internal logic, of emotional resonance. It lives in the space where the spectator stops trying to figure it out — not because they give up, but because figuring it out would diminish the experience.
Charles Reynolds put it perfectly: “The true magical experience should be more about wonder and less about wondering.”
That single sentence reorganized everything I thought I knew about performing.
Why We Default to Puzzlement
Here is what I think happens, and I am guilty of this myself. When you start learning magic, the first feedback you get is technical. Did the move look clean? Did the force work? Did the spectator pick the right card? The metrics are binary: fooled or not fooled, caught or not caught.
And because those metrics are clear and measurable, we build our entire sense of progress around them. A good night is a night where nobody caught the move. A bad night is a night where someone said “I saw you do something with your thumb.” We become engineers of deception, and deception becomes the product we are selling.
The problem is that deception is a necessary condition for magic but not a sufficient one. You cannot have magic without deception — if the audience knows how it happened, the effect collapses. But deception alone does not create magic. It creates puzzlement. And puzzlement is just a cognitive itch. It is the brain’s way of saying, “I have incomplete data and I would like to resolve that.” It is the same feeling you get from a riddle you cannot solve or a crossword clue that is just out of reach.
Magic — real magic, the kind that stays with someone — is not an itch. It is a shift. A moment where the world feels briefly larger, stranger, more mysterious than the spectator had assumed. A moment where the impossible becomes not a problem to solve but an experience to inhabit.
The Rational Mind Always Wins
One of the most sobering things Jay writes about is the fleeting nature of astonishment. It does not last. It cannot last. The rational mind is too powerful, too persistent, too well-trained. Within seconds of experiencing the impossible, the brain is already constructing explanations. Maybe it was in the other hand. Maybe there were two cards. Maybe it is a special deck.
This is not a failure of magic. It is human neuroscience doing exactly what it is designed to do. The brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex — the regions responsible for problem identification and resolution — fire immediately when confronted with something inexplicable. The brain treats the impossible the same way it treats any anomaly: as a problem to be solved.
The magician’s challenge, then, is not to prevent the rational mind from engaging. That is impossible. The challenge is to make the journey from astonishment to analysis as slow as possible, and to leave the spectator with something that survives the analysis. Not a puzzle that gets solved, but a memory that remains luminous even after the rational mind has had its say.
This is what wonder does that puzzlement does not. Puzzlement fades the moment an explanation — even a partial, unsatisfying one — is found. Wonder persists because it is not primarily an intellectual state. It is emotional. And emotions do not dissolve when the brain offers a theory. The woman at that Vienna table who said “That’s terrifying” — even if she later figured out a plausible explanation, the feeling of that moment would remain. The feeling is immune to analysis in a way that puzzlement is not.
How I Changed My Approach
Understanding this distinction changed three things about how I perform.
First, I stopped measuring success by confusion. If the spectator’s primary response is “How?” then I have created a puzzle, not a moment. The response I am looking for now is something less articulable — a pause, a look, a comment that connects the effect to something in the spectator’s life. When someone tells me a story about their grandmother or asks me if I really believe in intuition, I know the effect landed at the level of wonder rather than puzzlement.
Second, I started investing far more in the moments before and after the effect itself. The effect — the instant of impossibility — is just the peak. But a peak without a mountain beneath it is just a spike. The story I tell before the effect, the context I create, the emotional frame I establish — these are what determine whether the impossibility registers as a puzzle or as something meaningful. The same vanish can be either, depending on what surrounds it.
Third, I got more comfortable with silence. After an effect lands, there is a natural pause — a moment where the spectator is processing what just happened. I used to rush past that pause, moving immediately to the next thing, because the silence made me nervous. I thought the audience was getting bored or starting to analyze. Now I understand that the pause is the wonder. The silence is the spectator sitting inside the impossible moment. If I fill it with patter or move to the next trick, I am the one who breaks the spell. If I let it breathe, the wonder has time to settle into memory.
The Paradox of Surprise
There is a paradox at the heart of all this that I keep turning over. Audiences come to magic expecting to be surprised. They know impossible things will happen. They are, in some sense, prepared for astonishment. But surprise, by definition, must be unexpected. So the magician is in the strange position of needing to surprise people who are expecting to be surprised.
The answer, I think, is that the surprise cannot live at the level of “something impossible happened.” The audience already expects that. The surprise has to live at the level of “I did not expect it to feel like this.” The impossibility is the medium. The surprise is the meaning, the emotion, the personal resonance that the audience did not see coming.
When I tell a story about how we reveal ourselves through our smallest choices, and then demonstrate that idea through an effect that makes the spectator feel genuinely seen — the surprise is not the effect. The surprise is the vulnerability of the moment. The surprise is that a magic trick made them feel something real.
That is wonder. And it is worth infinitely more than a clean fool.
The Ongoing Struggle
I do not want to pretend I have solved this. The pull toward puzzlement is strong, especially in close-up work where the audience is literally watching your hands. There are nights when I fall back into the old mode — when I am more focused on whether the method is clean than on whether the moment is meaningful. There are effects in my repertoire that are technically excellent puzzles but have not yet found their way to wonder.
But the distinction itself — knowing that there are two targets, and knowing which one matters more — has been the most important conceptual shift in my development as a performer. It reframes every decision. Not “Will this fool them?” but “Will this move them?” Not “Can they figure it out?” but “Will they want to?”
Magic is not a puzzle delivered to an audience. It is an experience shared with them. The moment I started treating it that way, everything changed.