I want to tell you about the loneliest moment in a magician’s life.
It is two in the morning. You are in a hotel room. You have been practicing a routine for forty-five minutes. Everything is working. The sequence is smooth. The timing is right. You run through it one more time, and it is perfect. Clean. Invisible. Beautiful, even.
And then you look up, and the room is empty.
The bedside lamp is on. The television is muted. Your laptop is open on the desk with a tutorial paused on it. And the thing you just executed flawlessly means absolutely nothing, because nobody saw it.
This is a moment I know well. Two hundred nights a year in hotel rooms, alone with a deck of cards and a growing sense that I was getting good at something nobody would ever witness in that context. I would finish a practice session feeling accomplished, close the laptop, and go to sleep. And the next morning, the only evidence that anything had happened was a slightly worn deck of cards on the nightstand.
I thought about this for years without fully understanding what it meant. Then I read something in Joshua Jay’s How Magicians Think that turned the vague feeling into a sharp, clear principle.
The Principle
Jay puts it plainly: magic does not exist unless someone is there to experience it. A trick performed alone is not magic. It is practice. The distinction is not semantic — it is fundamental to understanding what magic actually is.
This seems obvious when you say it out loud. Of course magic needs an audience. Of course a card trick performed in an empty room is just finger exercises. But the implications go much deeper than that, and they took me a long time to absorb.
If magic exists only in the spectator’s mind, then the spectator is not a passive observer of your performance. The spectator is the place where the magic happens. You provide the stimulus — the impossible event, the context, the emotional framing — but the magic itself is an experience that occurs inside another person’s consciousness. It is their perception that creates the impossibility. It is their memory that shapes the story they will tell later. It is their emotional response that determines whether what happened was a trick or a moment of genuine wonder.
This reframes everything. The performer is not the source of the magic. The performer is the catalyst. The spectator is the laboratory.
What I Was Getting Wrong
For the first couple of years of my performing life, I treated my audiences as witnesses. They were there to see what I could do. My job was to execute the effects as cleanly and impressively as possible, and their job was to watch and be appropriately amazed.
This is wrong, and I know it is wrong because I have been on the other side of it. I have sat in audiences watching magicians who were performing for themselves — executing technically demanding material with obvious pride, looking at their own hands more than at the people in front of them, creating an experience that was fundamentally about their skill rather than about the audience’s experience.
When you watch a performer like that, you can appreciate the technique. You can acknowledge the difficulty. But you are not inside the magic. You are outside it, observing. The magic is happening on stage, and you are sitting in a chair watching it happen to someone else — the performer himself, who seems to be having a wonderful time.
The opposite experience — the one that actually constitutes magic — is when the impossible event seems to happen to you. Not to the performer. To you. In your hands. In your mind. In the gap between what you knew to be true a moment ago and what you are experiencing right now. The best magic creates the feeling that your personal reality has been momentarily revised.
That cannot happen if the performer is treating you as a witness. It can only happen if the performer understands that you — the spectator — are the venue where the magic takes place.
The Hotel Room Paradox
This created a paradox in my practice life that took me a while to resolve.
If magic only exists in the spectator’s mind, and I spend most of my practice time alone in hotel rooms, then I am spending most of my time doing something that is, by definition, not magic. I am rehearsing the mechanisms that might create magic when a spectator is present. But the thing itself — the actual magic — is absent from my practice entirely.
This is true, and it is important to sit with it rather than argue it away.
The consequence is that practicing alone, no matter how many hours you put in, will never fully prepare you for the experience of performing. Because the experience of performing is not just the execution of a sequence of actions. It is the creation of an experience in someone else’s consciousness. And you cannot practice that without a consciousness to create it in.
I learned this the hard way during my early performances. I would practice a routine until it was bulletproof, walk into a performance feeling prepared, and then discover that the routine — which worked perfectly in the hotel room — fell flat in front of actual human beings. Not because the technique failed. The technique was fine. The routine fell flat because I had practiced the mechanical sequence without practicing the human connection that gives the mechanical sequence meaning.
A mentalism piece, for example, might involve a series of steps that build to a reveal. In the hotel room, you practice the steps. You get the timing right. You make sure the method is invisible. And that is necessary and good. But what you cannot practice alone is the moment where you look into someone’s eyes and they realize you have just told them what they are thinking. That moment is not yours. It belongs to them. You can set it up, you can create the conditions for it, but you cannot experience it without them. And if you do not understand that distinction — if you think the moment belongs to you — you will subtly, inevitably communicate that self-centeredness, and the magic will diminish.
Two Performances of the Same Routine
Let me give you a specific example that made this real for me.
Early in my keynote work, I had a prediction routine that I was particularly proud of. The technique was clean, the structure was elegant, and in rehearsal it felt like the best thing in my show. I performed it at a conference in Salzburg for about two hundred people, and the reaction was polite but unremarkable. Applause. Some nodding. A few people mentioned it afterward. But nobody was shaken by it.
Two weeks later, I performed the same routine at a smaller event in Graz. Maybe sixty people. Same script. Same technique. Same structure. But this time, something was different. I was different.
At the Salzburg show, I had been focused on execution. Was the prediction in place? Was the volunteer going to cooperate? Was the reveal going to land cleanly? My attention was on the mechanism. I was making sure the trick worked.
At the Graz show, for reasons I cannot fully explain — maybe the smaller room, maybe the fact that I had just had a good conversation with someone in the audience before the show, maybe just a better headspace that day — my attention shifted. I stopped thinking about whether the trick was going to work and started thinking about what this woman on stage was experiencing. She had just made a free choice. She was holding a sealed envelope. She had no idea what was about to happen. And the thing that was about to happen was going to momentarily demolish her understanding of what is possible.
I was not watching my own hands. I was watching her face.
The reveal hit differently. The audience responded not to the prediction — a piece of paper with writing on it — but to her reaction. Her gasp. Her laugh. Her disbelief. The magic happened in her mind, and because I was paying attention to her mind rather than my hands, the audience was paying attention to it too. The room erupted in a way the Salzburg room never did.
Same routine. Same technique. Same words. The only difference was where the performer’s attention was directed. In Salzburg, my attention was on the mechanism. In Graz, my attention was on the spectator. And the spectator is where the magic lives.
What This Means for Practice
This does not mean that practicing alone is useless. Far from it. The hotel room practice is essential. You need the technique to be so deeply embedded in muscle memory that you can stop thinking about it entirely during performance. You need the script to be so internalized that it emerges naturally, as conversation, not recitation. You need the structure to be so solid that you can deviate from it without losing your way.
All of that happens alone. All of that is necessary.
But it is preparation for magic, not magic itself. And the moment you confuse one for the other — the moment you think that a flawless rehearsal in an empty room means you have mastered the piece — you have made the category error that separates technicians from performers.
A concert pianist who plays flawlessly in an empty recital hall has demonstrated technical skill. A concert pianist who plays the same piece in front of an audience and moves them to tears has made music. The notes are the same. The experience is not. The difference is the listener. Without the listener, there is no music — only sound waves.
Without the spectator, there is no magic — only movements.
The Implication for How We Think About What We Do
This principle has changed how I prepare for performances. I still practice technique alone. I still run through routines in hotel rooms. But I no longer consider that practice complete. I consider it half the work. The other half — the half that actually produces magic — can only happen in front of people.
This means I seek out opportunities to perform in low-stakes settings. Friends, family, colleagues who are willing to sit through an experiment. Small corporate gatherings where I can test new material without the pressure of a major keynote. Any situation where another human consciousness is present to serve as the laboratory where the magic might occur.
It also means that when I do perform in front of audiences, I am paying attention to different things than I used to. I used to evaluate my performances based on how cleanly I executed the technique. Did the method work? Was the handling smooth? Were there any flashes?
Now I evaluate based on what happened in the audience’s minds. Did they experience impossibility? Did they feel something shift? Will they remember this tomorrow, and if so, what will they remember — the procedure, or the feeling?
Because the procedure is mine. The feeling is theirs. And the feeling is the only place where magic actually exists.
The Loneliest Moment, Revisited
I still practice alone in hotel rooms. I still finish sessions at two in the morning with nobody watching. I still look up from my hands and see an empty room.
But I no longer mistake that moment for magic. I know what it is: preparation. The installation of muscle memory. The embedding of scripts. The refinement of timing. All necessary. All important. All incomplete.
The magic will happen tomorrow night, in a conference room in Vienna or a banquet hall in Innsbruck, when I look into someone’s eyes and watch the moment land. When their reality shifts, just for a second. When the impossible becomes, briefly, real — not because I did something clever with my hands, but because their mind experienced something it could not explain.
That is where the magic lives. Not in my hands. Not in my hotel room. In them.
And the performer who understands that — who truly, deeply, operationally understands that the magic belongs to the spectator and not to the performer — has understood the most important thing there is to understand about this strange, beautiful, endlessly frustrating art form.