For the first couple of years after I picked up a deck of cards in a hotel room, my entire creative process could be summarized in four words: make the thing happen. I wanted the card to change. I wanted the coin to vanish. I wanted the prediction to match. The effect — the visible impossible moment — was everything. I practiced for hours to make that moment as clean and as sudden as possible, and when I showed it to someone and their jaw dropped, I felt like I had done my job.
Then I read something in Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic that stopped me cold. He wrote: “The magic is the process, it is what causes the effect. The effect is just the part that we see.”
I read that sentence three times. Then I put the book down and stared at the wall of my hotel room for a very long time.
The Click Vs. The Buildup
Think about how most magic is presented. The magician holds a card. He snaps his fingers. The card changes. The audience sees something impossible and their brains scramble to catch up. That is the standard model. Snap, change, gasp.
But Brown’s argument is that the snap itself — the apparent cause — is where the real work of magic should happen. Not the technical work, the dramatic work. The snap is a non-event. It carries no weight, no meaning, no investment. It is a god clicking his fingers and reality obeying. And because it is dramatically empty, the audience is left with nothing to hold onto except the intellectual question of how it was done.
Compare that to a piece where the performer seems to be concentrating intensely, where you can see the effort and the uncertainty, where something seems to be transferring between performer and spectator through some invisible mechanism neither of them fully understands. The effect at the end might be identical — the card still changes — but the experience is completely different. Because now the audience has been part of a process. They have watched something build. They have been invested in whether it would work.
The difference is between witnessing a result and experiencing a journey.
The God Problem
Brown frames this as the difference between what he calls the God Model and the Hero Model of magic performance. In the God Model, the magician is an omniscient figure who can do anything he wants. He points, reality shifts, and the audience is supposed to be impressed. But the audience is not impressed, not really, because they know on every level that this person is not actually a god. The claim is too large. The gesture is too casual. The impossibility is too easy.
In the Hero Model, the magician is a more human figure who has a connection to something strange and powerful, but that connection is fragile, uncertain, and requires careful navigation. When the magic works, it feels earned. When it does not — or when the outcome is in doubt — the audience leans forward because they are watching a drama unfold, not just waiting for a reveal.
I recognized myself immediately in the God Model. Every time I snapped my fingers and made something happen, I was claiming to be a god. A casual, almost bored god who could reshape reality at will. And the audience responded accordingly — with puzzlement, with suspicion, with the instinctive resistance we all feel when someone makes a claim that seems too easy.
What Real Magic Would Actually Look Like
This is the thought experiment that rewired my approach. Brown asks: if magic were real — genuinely, actually real — what would it look like?
It would not look quick and easy. It would not happen with a finger snap. It would draw you in and make you nervous. It would require concentration, perhaps some kind of ritual or process. There would be uncertainty about whether it would work. The person performing it would seem genuinely invested in the outcome. And when the impossible moment finally arrived, it would feel like the culmination of a process that had been building, not like a light switch being flipped.
I started testing this idea in my performances. Instead of rushing to the climax, I slowed the process down. I built in moments of apparent concentration. I let there be pauses where the outcome seemed genuinely uncertain. I changed the way I framed what was happening — instead of “watch this” energy, I aimed for “let me try something” energy.
The difference in audience response was enormous.
The Corporate Keynote Revelation
The place where this clicked most powerfully was in my keynote work. As a strategy and innovation consultant, I use magic as part of my presentations. For a long time, I treated the magic segments as punctuation — sharp impossible moments that proved a point about perception or assumption. Snap, change, gasp, back to the presentation.
When I started building in the process, those same moments became something else entirely. They became demonstrations of something the audience could not fully explain. Not because the result was impossible, but because the path to the result was strange and compelling. The audience had traveled somewhere with me, and the destination felt like it had been earned rather than declared.
At a corporate event in Graz, I was doing a piece about how assumptions shape decision-making. The old version would have been: think of something, I reveal it, you are amazed, now let me tell you about cognitive bias. The new version built the revelation slowly. I asked questions. I paused. I appeared to be working through something. The audience could see me thinking, concentrating, sometimes appearing uncertain. When the revelation came, it landed differently — not as a trick that proved a point, but as an experience that embodied the point. The process was the message.
Why We Skip the Process
There are practical reasons why magicians default to the God Model and skip the process. The biggest one is fear. Slowing down, building uncertainty, appearing to work at something — all of this creates a window where the audience might think you have failed. The snap-and-change model is safe because it is fast. You are exposed for the minimum amount of time. The audience barely has a chance to form suspicions before the impossible moment arrives.
But that safety comes at a cost. When you rush to the effect, you are communicating that the effect is all you have. And when the effect is all you have, the audience’s only option is to try to figure out how you did it. You have given them nothing else to hold onto. No drama, no uncertainty, no investment, no story. Just a puzzle.
The irony is that slowing down and building in the process actually makes the method harder to detect, not easier. When the audience is emotionally engaged in a process — when they are wondering whether it will work, not how it works — their analytical faculties are occupied with the drama rather than the method. The process is not just better theater. It is better deception.
Cause by Metaphor
One of the most elegant ideas Brown introduces is the concept of cause by metaphor. Rather than explaining why the magic works in literal terms — “I am reading your micro-expressions” or “energy is flowing from my hand to yours” — the most powerful approach is to let the spectator feel the cause through metaphor and implication.
This means you do not explain. You do not narrate. You create conditions where the spectator’s imagination does the work. Maybe you hold something near a candle flame and the object transforms — the fire is not literally causing the change, but the association is powerful enough that the spectator’s mind connects the two. Maybe you ask someone to think about a memory and the magic seems tied to the emotional weight of that memory. The cause is metaphorical, but the feeling of causation is real.
This is where my background in strategy consulting turned out to be unexpectedly useful. In consulting, you learn that the most powerful insights are the ones the client arrives at themselves. You create the conditions, you ask the right questions, you build the framework — and when the insight clicks, it feels like their discovery, not yours. The same principle applies to magic. When the audience feels the cause without being told it, the experience belongs to them.
Building the Muscle
Shifting from effects-first to process-first took deliberate practice. I started by taking effects I already performed well and asking myself a single question: what is the cause?
Not the method. The cause. Why, in the world of the performance, does this impossible thing happen? What is the invisible force or connection or circumstance that makes it possible? And how can I make the audience feel that cause without stating it?
Some effects responded beautifully to this treatment. Others resisted — they were pure visual spectacles that did not benefit from a process-based approach. That was useful information too. It helped me understand which effects belonged in my repertoire and which ones, however impressive, did not fit the kind of performer I was becoming.
The Space Between
The space between the declaration of will and the result — that is where Brown says the real magic lives. Most performers skip right over it. They declare their intention (“I will find your card”) and immediately produce the result. The space between is collapsed to zero.
But that space is everything. It is where tension lives. Where uncertainty lives. Where the audience’s investment builds. Where the performer can be human, vulnerable, engaged. It is the difference between a joke that is just a punchline and a joke that builds through a carefully constructed setup. The punchline needs the setup. The effect needs the process.
I think about this now with every piece I perform. Not “what is the effect?” but “what is the journey to the effect?” Not “what will the audience see?” but “what will the audience feel along the way?”
The card still changes. The prediction still matches. The revelation still lands. But now the audience has been somewhere before they arrive. And that somewhere — that process, that buildup, that uncertain path through a dramatic landscape — is where the magic actually happened.
The effect is just the part we see.