For the longest time, I believed magic was inherently special. That the act of making something impossible happen in front of another person carried its own gravity. That the effect — a card changing, a coin vanishing, a thought being divined — was, by its very nature, meaningful. Powerful. Worth paying attention to.
I was wrong. And realizing I was wrong was one of the most productive things that ever happened to my performing.
The idea that knocked me sideways came from Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic. It is not buried in a footnote or hedged with qualifications. It sits right there on the page, direct and uncompromising: “Magic is not inherently anything. It is what you set it up to be.”
Six words that demolished an entire framework I had been operating under. Magic is not inherently anything.
Not inherently powerful. Not inherently mysterious. Not inherently entertaining. Not inherently meaningful. Not inherently cathartic or primal or important. It just is not. None of those qualities are baked in. None of them come for free.
The Comfortable Lie
The lie I had been telling myself — and the lie I think a lot of performers tell themselves — is that the magic does the work. That if you execute the method cleanly and the effect is strong, the audience will be moved. That impossibility itself generates wonder.
This is an incredibly seductive belief because it absolves you of an enormous amount of responsibility. If magic is inherently powerful, then your job is primarily technical. Get the moves right. Choose strong effects. Execute cleanly. The power is in the material, and your job is not to screw it up.
But here is what actually happens when you operate under this assumption. You perform a beautiful piece of sleight of hand — something that took months to learn, something that is genuinely impossible from the audience’s perspective — and the response is polite applause. Or worse, a shrug. Or worse still, “You’re very clever.”
I have gotten the “You’re very clever” response more times than I care to admit. And every time, something died a little inside me. Because clever is not what I was going for. Clever is the response you get when the audience appreciates your skill but feels nothing. Clever means they saw a puzzle, not a miracle. Clever means the magic did not land as magic.
And every time it happened, I blamed the effect. Or the audience. Or the venue. I did not blame myself, because I believed the material should have done the heavy lifting.
Brown’s idea blew that excuse apart.
The Weight of the Realization
If magic is not inherently anything, then everything the audience experiences is a result of what you — the performer — communicate. Not just what you say, but what you presuppose, what your body language conveys, what your timing suggests, what your approach signals, what your material selection implies about who you are and what you think of the people watching.
The experience of magic, in other words, is not generated by the effect. It is generated by the performer. The effect is just the vehicle. The performer is the driver, and the destination is whatever the performer decides to aim for.
This is a terrifying idea if you think about it honestly. It means there is no safety net. You cannot hide behind strong material. You cannot rely on the inherent power of impossibility. You are fully, completely responsible for what the audience feels. If they feel wonder, you created that. If they feel nothing, you created that too.
I remember sitting in a hotel room in Graz after reading that passage, staring at the deck of cards on the nightstand, and thinking: everything I have been doing is backwards. I have been starting with the trick and hoping the experience follows. I should have been starting with the experience I want to create and building everything else around it.
An Irritating Magician Creates an Irritating Experience
Brown makes a point that sounds almost brutally obvious once you hear it, but which most performers never confront directly. If an irritating person performs magic, the spectator’s experience of magic is irritation. Not wonder. Not astonishment. Irritation. Because the audience does not separate the effect from the person delivering it. The performer and the performance are, in the audience’s mind, a single entity.
This means that every aspect of how you present yourself — your approach, your tone, your appearance, your respect for the audience’s time and space, your willingness to read the room — is not peripheral to the magic. It is the magic. Or at least, it determines what the magic becomes in the spectator’s mind.
I thought about all the times I had approached a table at an event slightly too eagerly, or pushed past someone’s obvious discomfort, or launched into an effect before the group was ready. In those moments, I was not creating magic. I was creating annoyance with a card trick attached to it. The impossibility of the effect was irrelevant because the experience surrounding it was negative.
This is what Brown means by “magic is not inherently anything.” The impossibility does not override bad communication. It does not compensate for a poor approach. It does not automatically generate positive feelings. The impossibility is neutral. It becomes whatever context you wrap around it.
The Liberation
Here is where the idea shifts from terrifying to liberating: if magic is not inherently anything, then magic can be anything you choose to make it.
Think about what that means. You are not constrained by tradition. You are not locked into the “mysterious wizard” archetype or the “cheeky trickster” mold. You do not have to be funny if funny is not who you are. You do not have to be dark and brooding if that is not authentic to your personality. You do not have to frame every effect as a demonstration of impossible power if that framing does not resonate with you.
You can make magic intimate. You can make it philosophical. You can make it funny, or unsettling, or warm, or strange. You can use it to tell a story, to make a business point, to create a shared moment between strangers at a dinner table. You can use it as a vehicle for any experience you are capable of creating as a communicator.
For me, this was enormous. I came to magic as a strategy consultant and entrepreneur. I did not come from a performing family. I did not grow up on stage. The traditional frames of magic performance — the tuxedo, the top hat, the “watch closely” patter — felt foreign to me. Not bad, necessarily, but not mine. And I had been trying to fit myself into those frames because I assumed they were required. I assumed magic came with a built-in template, and my job was to execute that template as well as I could.
When I realized magic is not inherently anything, I understood that I was free to bring my own frame. My background in strategy, my fascination with psychology, my experience standing in front of corporate audiences talking about innovation — all of that could be the context for magic. Not a separate thing. Not a hobby that existed in a different compartment from my professional life. A natural extension of who I already am.
The Practical Shift
The practical change was immediate and specific. I started designing performances from the experience backwards rather than from the effect forward.
Before, my process was: find an effect I like, learn the method, add some patter, perform it. The experience was whatever happened to emerge from that process.
After, my process became: what do I want the audience to feel? What moment am I trying to create? What frame do I need to establish for that moment to land? And then: what effect serves that frame?
This sounds simple, but the difference in output is enormous. When you start with the experience, you make different choices about everything. The effect you select might be technically simpler but presentationally richer. The patter is no longer decorative — it is structural, doing the work of establishing the frame that makes the impossibility meaningful. The approach to the audience is no longer a formality but the first act of the performance, setting the tone for everything that follows.
I scrapped three effects from my working repertoire in the weeks after this realization. Not because they were bad — they were technically strong. But they were effects I had been performing without a clear vision of what they were for. They existed because I could do them, not because they created a specific experience I was aiming for. And performing something just because you can is exactly the kind of default thinking that leads to polite applause and “You’re very clever.”
The Vision Must Come First
Brown takes this idea further: every performer must develop a clear, personal vision of what their magic should look and feel like. This vision is the north star. It drives material selection, character development, presentation design, and every performance choice, large and small.
He suggests the vision usually begins negatively — you start by identifying what you do not want to be. I found this was true for me. I knew I did not want to be the cheesy entertainer. I knew I did not want the audience to feel patronized. I knew I did not want the experience to feel disconnected from reality, like a bubble of silliness that pops the moment I leave the table.
From those negatives, I built toward positives. I want the audience to feel that something real just happened. I want them to feel respected — like I am sharing something with them rather than doing something to them. I want the magic to connect to ideas they already think about: decision-making, perception, the limits of attention, the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. I want the experience to feel like a conversation that happened to include an impossible moment, not like a trick that happened to include some talking.
That vision is not complete. I am still refining it. But having it — having any vision at all, even an imperfect one — changed my performing more than any new technique or effect ever has.
What You Do Not Communicate Does Not Exist
There is a corollary to “magic is not inherently anything” that is equally important and equally uncomfortable: if you do not communicate your vision, it does not exist. You are not doing what you think you are doing.
This is hard to accept. I have had moments where I felt deeply connected to what I was performing — moments where the internal experience was rich with meaning and intention — only to learn afterward that the audience saw something entirely different. They saw a guy doing card tricks. They did not see the meaning I was feeling because I had not found a way to make that meaning visible.
The gap between internal experience and external communication is one of the most dangerous gaps in performance. You can have the most beautiful vision in the world, the most carefully considered artistic intention, and if none of it reads to the audience, it does not exist. Not for them. And since magic happens in the spectator’s mind, their experience is the only one that counts.
This is not an argument for being heavy-handed or over-explaining. The communication can be subtle — a look, a pause, a shift in tone, the careful choice of one word over another. But it must be there. The audience cannot read your mind. They can only read your performance. And your performance must contain everything you want them to experience, because they will not supply it on their own.
Living With the Responsibility
Magic is not inherently anything. This sentence has become something I return to regularly, almost like a reset button. When a performance does not land, I do not blame the material or the audience. I ask: what did I communicate? What frame did I set? What experience did the audience actually have, regardless of what I intended?
The answers are not always comfortable. But they are always useful. Because if the magic is not inherently anything, then every performance is an opportunity to make it something. Something specific. Something intentional. Something that could not have happened without you, the performer, choosing it.
That is the liberation. And it is worth the weight of the responsibility that comes with it.