Here is how most of my early performances worked. I would hold up a card. I would snap my fingers. The card had changed. I would hold up a coin. I would wave my hand. The coin was gone. I would ask someone to think of a word. I would pause for effect, click my fingers, and reveal the word.
Snap. Wave. Click. Every single time, the same structure. The performer wills something, makes a gesture, and reality complies. No process. No struggle. No uncertainty. Just a flick of the wrist and the universe obediently rearranges itself.
I was proud of that finger-snap, too. I had a particular way of doing it — crisp, decisive, with a slight head tilt — and I considered it part of my persona. My signature move. The snap of the fingers that meant: now the magic happens.
Except the magic was not happening. Not really. The trick was working. The method was clean. The audience was fooled. But something was missing, and I could not figure out what it was until I read Darwin Ortiz’s Designing Miracles and finally understood the causality problem that was gutting every effect I performed.
Why Humans Hunt for Causes
Ortiz grounds his entire design framework in a principle from cognitive psychology that, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Human beings are hardwired to search for causal connections. When something appears to happen, our brains immediately and automatically look for what caused it. This is not optional. It is not a conscious decision. It is deep survival wiring, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Things do not just happen. Every event has a cause. And when we cannot find the cause, we experience discomfort.
This wiring is the engine that drives the entire audience experience during a magic performance. Something impossible has just occurred. Instantly, below conscious awareness, the audience begins scanning backward through everything they observed. What did he do? What did he touch? When did his hands move? What happened right before the moment of change? They are looking for the cause. They cannot help it.
And here is the devastating insight: when you snap your fingers and the card changes, you have provided a “cause” that the audience immediately rejects. They know finger-snapping does not change cards. It is not a real cause. It is a theatrical placeholder — a decorative gesture where genuine drama should be. So the audience dismisses the snap entirely and continues hunting for the actual mechanism. The snap has done nothing except mark the moment of the effect and send the audience deeper into detective mode.
The snap is not a magical moment. It is an invitation to solve a puzzle.
The God Model
Derren Brown frames the same problem differently in Absolute Magic, and his framing is what made it visceral for me. He describes what he calls the God Model of magic. In this model, the magician is an all-powerful figure who controls reality at whim. He clicks his fingers and impossible things happen. He waves his hand and the world obeys. He is effortless, unchallenged, operating from a position of absolute authority over the physical world.
The trouble is that everyone in the room knows this is nonsense. Nobody believes the performer actually commands reality through finger-snapping. And because they know the premise is false, the audience’s response is intellectual rather than emotional. They are curious about the method. They admire the skill. But they do not feel wonder. They feel the challenge of a puzzle. How did he do that? What is the trick?
Brown offers an alternative he calls the Hero Model. Instead of a god who commands, the hero is a more human, more vulnerable figure. He does not control the world effortlessly. He serves as a connection to something deeper, something mysterious, and that connection is fragile. It requires effort, concentration, the right conditions. Things could go wrong. The balance might not hold. And when it does hold, when the impossible thing manifests, it feels earned rather than decreed.
The God snaps his fingers and reality changes. Nobody cares because nobody believes it. The hero focuses, strains, concentrates, and then — barely, precariously — something shifts. And the room holds its breath because the process felt real.
Where the Magic Actually Lives
Both Ortiz and Brown converge on the same crucial point from different directions: the space between the performer’s intention and the result is where the magic actually lives. Most performers skip right over that space. The snap eliminates it entirely. Intention and result happen simultaneously. There is no journey between them.
But think about what genuine magic would look like if it existed in the real world. Would someone who could actually move objects with their mind simply snap their fingers and watch the object leap across the table? Would it be instant and effortless?
Almost certainly not. Real telekinesis, if it existed, would probably look like the most difficult thing a human being has ever done. The practitioner would focus with agonizing intensity. There would be visible strain. Uncertainty. The object might tremble before it moved. The performer might fail once before succeeding. The whole process would communicate: this is hard, this is real, and the outcome is not guaranteed.
That process — the visible struggle between will and result — is what gives the audience’s causal reasoning something meaningful to attach to. Not a logical explanation. Not a scientific mechanism. But an emotional cause. Something that registers as: I just watched someone do something extraordinary through sheer force of concentrated intention. I do not know how. But I watched it happen. I saw the effort. I felt the tension. And I believe — at some emotional level I cannot quite articulate — that the effort and the result were connected.
The Four Causal Cues and Why the Snap Fails All of Them
Ortiz identifies four specific cues that trigger the audience’s cause-hunting instinct: antecedence (a cause must precede its effect), correlation (elements consistently present when the effect occurs become suspects), temporal proximity (events close in time are assumed to be linked), and contiguity (things close in space are assumed to be related).
The finger-snap technically satisfies all four cues. It happens before the effect, it is consistently present, it occurs immediately before the magical moment, and it happens right where the magic occurs. Formally, it looks like a cause.
But the audience rejects it because it violates something deeper than formal causality. It violates belief. They know snapping fingers does not change physical reality. So despite satisfying the four formal cues, the snap is dismissed, and the audience continues searching. The four cues work against you now, because they point the audience toward a moment in time and space where something suspicious must have happened — and from there, the investigation into the real method begins.
Now consider what happens when you replace the snap with a visible process of concentration. That process also satisfies all four causal cues. It precedes the effect, it is consistently present, it is temporally and spatially proximate. But unlike the snap, the audience cannot dismiss it quite so easily. They do not literally believe in psychic powers. But the display of focused intention is ambiguous enough, compelling enough, human enough that their causal reasoning does not immediately reject it. Instead of launching an investigation, the rational mind pauses. Hm. That was strange. He seemed to really concentrate. Something happened. I am not sure what.
That pause — that brief suspension of the analytical machinery — is all you need. In that pause, wonder has room to exist.
Redesigning My Effects Around Cause
Once I understood this, I began systematically stripping the empty gestures from my repertoire and replacing them with moments of process.
The first and simplest change: I stopped snapping my fingers. For every effect where I used to snap, I now pause. I hold the moment. I let the audience see me concentrate, or think, or engage visibly with whatever the effect requires. The pause takes five seconds where the snap took half a second. But in those five seconds, something changes in the room. The audience stops watching a trick and starts witnessing an event.
The second change was in how I frame effects verbally. Instead of presenting magic as something I do to the audience (“watch this”), I began presenting it as something we explore together. “There is a theory about how unconscious decisions work. Let me show you what I mean.” Now the cause is not my fingers. It is a psychological principle. The audience does not need to believe I have supernatural powers. They just need to find the premise interesting enough to stay engaged while the impossible thing happens.
The third and largest change was restructuring entire routines so that the process of arriving at the magic is visible, uncertain, and dramatic. One of my mentalism pieces used to be structured as a clean, fast reveal. The spectator thinks of something, I reveal it. Snap. Done. Impressive but hollow.
I rebuilt it so the audience watches me work toward the answer. There are apparent missteps. There is visible recalibration. The arrival at the correct answer looks like the culmination of a genuine process rather than the unveiling of a predetermined trick. The journey is what makes the destination meaningful.
Why This Changes Everything for Adult Learners
When I was starting out, learning magic from online video tutorials in hotel rooms after long consulting days, I gravitated toward effects that were clean and quick. The snap-and-change approach. Part of that was aesthetic preference. Part of it was practical — shorter effects meant fewer places for things to go wrong.
But part of it, I now realize, was avoidance. Building real cause into a performance is hard. It requires acting ability, timing, emotional investment, and the willingness to be vulnerable on stage. Snapping your fingers is easy. Standing in front of someone, concentrating visibly, investing yourself in a moment whose outcome appears uncertain — that requires a different kind of courage entirely.
For adult learners especially, I think this matters. We come to magic with a lifetime of professional experience in presenting ourselves as competent, controlled, and knowledgeable. The snap-and-change model fits that self-image perfectly. I am in control. I snap my fingers. Things happen. It is efficient and authoritative.
The hero model asks you to be something different. Uncertain. Struggling. Not fully in control. Performing with visible effort rather than effortless mastery. This feels risky, especially for someone who has built a career on appearing to have everything figured out.
But it is that very risk that makes the performance come alive. When the audience sees you invest genuine effort, when they sense that the outcome is not guaranteed, when they watch you work toward something rather than simply decree it — they lean in. They care. They are rooting for you. And when the impossible thing happens, they do not think “clever.” They think “extraordinary.”
The Snap Is Dead. Long Live the Struggle.
I still occasionally catch myself reaching for the snap. Old habits are persistent. Just last month, performing at a conference in Graz, I felt my fingers moving toward each other in that familiar way during a card revelation and had to consciously stop myself. Replace the snap with a breath. A look. A beat of silence where the audience can feel the weight of what is about to happen.
That weight is the cause. Not a logical cause. Not a scientific cause. An emotional cause. A dramatic cause. The kind of cause that makes an audience feel they have witnessed something rather than merely been fooled by something.
The finger-snap made things happen instantly. The pause, the effort, the visible process of arriving at the impossible — these make things matter. And mattering is what separates a trick from a moment of real magic.
Build the cause. Show the journey. Let them see you work for it. The magic that emerges from visible effort will always land harder than the magic that appears from a snap of the fingers, because one gives the audience a reason to wonder and the other gives them only a reason to investigate.
And wonder, always, is what we are after.