It happened after a set at a corporate event in Vienna. I had performed three effects for a table of six. Clean execution. Good reactions during the performance. Laughter in the right places, gasps at the reveals. By any standard I knew how to measure, the set had gone well.
As I was thanking the group and preparing to move to the next table, a woman in a grey blazer reached over and touched my arm. She smiled and said, with unmistakable sincerity: “You’re very clever.”
I thanked her warmly. I felt a glow of satisfaction. She recognized the skill. She admired what I could do. I carried that compliment with me to the next table and the next, replaying it in my head as evidence that the evening was going well.
It took me months to understand that those three words were not a compliment. They were a failure report. And the warm glow I felt was the feeling of mistaking a diagnosis for praise.
The Diagnosis
When I read Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic for the first time, there was a sentence that stopped me dead. Brown writes that something dies inside him when he hears the response “You’re very clever.” I read it, set the book down, and stared at the wall of my hotel room for what felt like a full minute. Because I remembered that woman in Vienna. I remembered the glow. And I realized that Brown was telling me the glow was the precise sensation of failing at the thing magic is supposed to do.
Here is what “You’re very clever” actually means, decoded from the spectator’s internal experience. It means: I watched you do something I cannot explain. I know it was a trick. I could not figure out the trick. You must be very skilled at this sort of thing. I am impressed by the ingenuity required to fool me.
Notice what is entirely absent from that experience. Wonder. The sense that something genuinely impossible just happened. The feeling that reality cracked open, even for a moment. The emotional disruption that separates magic from every other performing art.
“You’re very clever” is the response to a puzzle successfully constructed. It puts the performer in the category of skilled technician — someone who has mastered a difficult craft and demonstrated that mastery effectively. It is the response you give to an engineer who built something elegant, or a chess player who executed a brilliant strategy. Respect for intellect. Admiration for skill. And not a trace of wonder.
Cleverness, as Brown puts it, does not speak of a magical realm.
Why I Was Generating Cleverness
Once I understood the problem, I had to confront an uncomfortable question: what, specifically, about my performances was producing this response? Because the effects themselves were good. The methods were solid. The audience was fooled. If fooling the audience were the goal, I was succeeding. But fooling was not the goal. The goal was wonder, and I was landing nowhere near it.
The answer, when I finally identified it, came from my professional background. I am a strategy consultant. My entire career has been built on intellectual performance — walking into rooms full of smart people and demonstrating that I belong there through the quality of my analysis, the precision of my reasoning, the elegance of my solutions. Cleverness is not just a trait for me. It is an identity. It is how I earn my living and how I earn my place.
When I started performing magic, I brought that same orientation with me. I chose effects that were intellectually sophisticated. I built routines with multiple phases and layered impossibilities. I performed with the energy of someone presenting a strategy deck — crisp, confident, controlled, designed to showcase the quality of my thinking.
And the audience responded to exactly what I was communicating. They watched a clever person demonstrate cleverness, and they told me I was clever. They were reading me accurately. The problem was not their perception. It was what I was giving them to perceive.
The Spectrum
I started paying attention to the specific quality of audience responses, not just whether people reacted but how they reacted. Over dozens of performances, a spectrum emerged.
At the puzzle end: “How did you do that?” The audience is intrigued but operating in analytical mode. They experienced something they cannot explain and their primary drive is to figure it out. The magic registered as a challenge to their intelligence.
One step further: “You’re very clever” or “That was really impressive.” The puzzle has been acknowledged as unsolvable, and the admiration has shifted from the puzzle to the puzzle-maker. Still intellectual. Still fundamentally about the performer.
Further along: “That’s impossible.” Now something is shifting. The audience’s attention has moved from the performer to the experience itself. They are confronting the impossibility rather than evaluating the person who created it. The performer is fading from the frame.
At the wonder end: silence. A slow exhale. A hand pressed to the chest. Wide eyes that do not blink. A whispered “no” or “what” or nothing at all. This is the response that tells you the magic worked. Not the trick. The magic. The audience has been pushed beyond their analytical machinery into a space where they have no tools for processing what they just experienced.
The woman in Vienna had given me a response from the puzzle end. I had been celebrating it as if it came from the wonder end. That gap between what I thought was happening and what was actually happening was the distance I needed to travel.
What Produces Cleverness Instead of Wonder
I began cataloguing the variables. What was different about the performances that produced “clever” versus the ones that produced silence?
Speed was a major factor. When I performed quickly — clean, efficient, snap and change — the audience processed the experience as a demonstration of skill. Fast equals practiced. Practiced equals technique. Technique equals clever. Every rapid-fire effect confirmed the audience’s framing: this is a skilled person showing me what he can do.
When I slowed down — when I built the moment, paused before the reveal, allowed silence to accumulate — the audience’s processing changed. Slowness gave them time to sit with the impossibility rather than evaluate the execution. The analytical machinery had time to run out of explanations before the reveal even happened, and by the time the impossible thing manifested, the audience was already in a state of cognitive suspension rather than cognitive evaluation.
Complexity was another factor. Counterintuitively, the more complex the effect, the more likely it was to produce “clever.” Complexity signals effort. Effort signals a person working hard to accomplish something. And a person working hard to accomplish something is evaluated on their skill and intelligence. The audience could feel the intricacy. They could sense the layers. And they responded to the architecture rather than to the experience.
Simpler effects, when performed with emotional investment, hit harder. An effect with one clear impossibility, presented slowly and seriously, produced more wonder than a three-phase routine with escalating conditions. The single impossibility was undeniable. The layered routine was impressive but cerebral.
The most important variable, though, was me. When I performed with visible satisfaction in my own skill — when my body language said “watch how good I am at this” — the audience obligingly watched how good I was, assessed my skill, and concluded I was clever. I had invited evaluation, and I received it.
When I performed with less of myself in the equation — when I withdrew my ego from the performance and let the effect carry its own weight — the audience stopped evaluating me and started experiencing the impossibility. The magic was no longer about what I could do. It was about what just happened.
The Internal Reorientation
The shift I needed to make was not primarily technical. It was internal. I had to stop performing to impress and start performing to create an experience.
The practical difference is subtle but specific. When I perform to impress, my internal monologue runs: Are they watching? Did that land? Was the execution clean enough? Am I getting the reaction I want? My attention is split between the mechanics of the effect and the reception from the audience. I am monitoring the experience rather than inhabiting it.
When I perform to create an experience, my internal monologue quiets. I am looking at the card as it changes as if I am seeing it for the first time. I am reacting to the impossibility rather than performing a reaction to it. I am in the moment, not hovering above the moment assessing its success.
This is what Stanislavski called the “Magic If” — a concept Brown adapts for magic performance. Instead of acting the cliche of an emotion (wide eyes for surprise, a dramatic gasp for astonishment), you ask: what would I actually do if this were really happening? If a card genuinely just changed in my hand against all physical possibility, what would my honest reaction be?
The answer is not a big gesture. The answer is stillness. A long look at the card. A moment of genuine confusion. And then a look at the spectator that says, wordlessly: did you see that too?
That look — quiet, unperformed, real — communicates something no amount of theatrical astonishment can achieve. It says: I am not demonstrating cleverness. I am experiencing this with you. And in that shared experience, the audience stops evaluating the performer and starts sitting with the impossibility.
The Consultant’s Paradox
There is a deep irony here. My entire professional life rewards cleverness. In consulting, the person who constructs the most elegant analysis, who sees the pattern no one else sees, who solves the problem with intellectual precision — that person wins. Cleverness is the currency. The whole game is built on demonstrating how smart you are.
Magic asks for the opposite. Magic asks you to set down the cleverness, to stop performing your intelligence, to stop making the experience about what you can do. It asks you to serve the moment rather than to own it. To create a space where the audience can feel something rather than think something. To disappear from the center of the experience and let the impossibility stand on its own.
For an adult who came to magic from a world that rewards being the smartest person in the room, this is a genuinely difficult reorientation. Every instinct says: add another layer of complexity. Add another phase. Make the conditions stricter. Demonstrate more thoroughly how impossible this is. And every one of those additions pushes the audience further toward cleverness and further from wonder.
The discipline is subtraction. Remove the elements that showcase your intelligence. Keep only the elements that serve the experience. Trust that the magic, stripped of your need for admiration, is powerful enough on its own.
What I Listen For Now
I no longer hear “You’re very clever” as a compliment. I hear it as data. It tells me that this particular performance landed at the puzzle level. That the audience’s analytical machinery was engaged throughout. That something in my pacing, my self-presentation, my framing kept their attention on me rather than releasing it to the experience.
What I listen for now is different. The intake of breath. The beat of silence before applause begins. The quiet “what” whispered to the person sitting beside them. The spectator who says nothing at all, who just looks at me with an expression that says their model of the world has developed a hairline fracture.
These responses do not mention me. They do not evaluate my skill. They do not analyse my intelligence. They are responses to the experience itself — to the crack that opened in ordinary reality and has not yet closed.
If they walk away thinking about me, I gave them a show. If they walk away thinking about what happened, I gave them magic. And if the best they can say is “You’re very clever,” then I know that what I gave them was a puzzle dressed up as a performance.
The next time someone pays you that particular compliment, accept it graciously. Then go home and ask yourself what needs to change so that next time, they cannot find any words at all.
Silence is the sound of magic working.
“You’re very clever” is the sound of it failing.