There is a moment I remember from early in my journey when I thought I had solved the performance puzzle. I had assembled what I considered a bulletproof set — five effects, each one strong on its own, each one building in intensity, each one getting reliable reactions. I performed it at a corporate event in Linz, and it went well. The applause was genuine. People approached me afterward to say they had enjoyed it.
But a few weeks later, when I asked the event organizer for feedback — what her colleagues had said, what they remembered — the answer was deflating. They remembered that there had been a magician. They remembered that some things had been impressive. They could not recall a single specific effect. And they could not describe the experience beyond “it was good.”
Good. The most damning compliment in entertainment.
What they could not describe was me. Not because I had done anything wrong, but because I had not given them a reason to remember me specifically. I had presented five strong effects. I had not presented a performer with a vision. The effects were excellent. The performer behind them was interchangeable.
The Greater Effect
Derren Brown introduced a concept in Absolute Magic that reframed everything I thought I knew about show construction. He calls it the “Greater Effect.” The argument is this: in any individual trick, we subordinate the method to the effect. Nobody cares how the card was controlled to the top of the deck. They care that the card appeared where it should not have been. The method serves the effect. The effect is what matters.
Brown then extends this logic one level up. If method serves effect within a single trick, then individual tricks serve the Greater Effect within a full performance. The Greater Effect is not any single impossible thing that happens. The Greater Effect is the performer — the total impression, the vision, the experience of encountering this particular person and their particular relationship to the impossible.
In the same way that we hide the method so the audience experiences only the effect, we should subordinate individual effects so the audience experiences only the Greater Effect: the magician as a complete, fascinating, memorable presence.
When I first read this, I resisted it. I had invested enormous time learning individual effects. The idea that they were “just methods” for a larger purpose felt like a demotion of everything I had worked on. But the more I thought about the performers who had actually stayed with me — whose names I remembered, whose shows I could describe years later — the more I realized Brown was right. I did not remember their tricks. I remembered them.
The Performers I Remember
Think about the performers who have stayed with you. Not the ones whose tricks you remember — the ones whose presence you remember. The ones you could describe to a friend not in terms of “he did this thing with a card” but in terms of “there was something about him.”
When I think about the magic I have seen that left the deepest impression, the tricks are oddly secondary. I remember the quality of the encounter. I remember how the performer related to the audience. I remember the feeling in the room. I remember what it was like to be in their presence.
The effects were the vehicle, but they were not the destination. The destination was an experience of this person — their confidence, their mystery, their warmth, their intensity, their humor, whatever quality they possessed that made the impossible things they did feel like natural extensions of who they are.
This is the Greater Effect. And it is what was missing from my set in Linz. I had five vehicles and no destination. Five impressive methods of showing that I could do impossible things, but no coherent answer to the question: who is this person, and why does the impossible seem to happen around him?
A Handful of Effects Can Last a Lifetime
There is a line from Eugene Burger that Brown references, and it stopped me in my tracks: a small handful of effects can suffice for the rest of your life. How you connect them to your audience is what matters.
This goes against every instinct that the magic hobbyist — and I include my earlier self — possesses. The hobbyist collects effects. The hobbyist measures repertoire by volume. The hobbyist believes that more material equals a better performer, because surely the audience will get bored if they see the same things again.
But the professional — the artist — knows that depth beats breadth. A performer who does five effects that are deeply connected to their character, vision, and audience will always be more memorable than a performer who does twenty effects that are technically impressive but characterologically disconnected.
I think about musicians I admire. The greatest ones do not play the most songs. They play the right songs, in the right order, with the right energy, and the totality of the experience is unmistakably theirs. You could not swap one musician for another and get the same concert, even if they played the same setlist. The music is method. The musician is the artwork.
The Vision Problem
If the performer is the artwork, then the performer must have a vision — a clear, personal answer to the question: what do I want my audience to feel has occurred, and what do I want them to think of me?
Most performers, including me for far too long, never explicitly answer this question. We default to implicit answers that we have absorbed from watching other performers, from magic conventions, from tutorial videos. The implicit answer is usually some version of: “I want them to think I am skilled and impressive.”
Skilled and impressive is fine. But it is not a vision. It does not distinguish you from any other competent performer. It does not give the audience a reason to remember you rather than the effects you performed. And it does not provide a framework for making the hundreds of creative decisions — material selection, scripting, staging, pacing, music, interaction style — that shape a performance.
A vision is specific. It is personal. It answers not just “What do I want them to feel?” but “What do I want to communicate about how the world works, about what is possible, about the nature of perception, about the relationship between performer and audience?”
My vision, when I finally sat down and articulated it, turned out to be this: I want my audience to feel that their assumptions about reality are less reliable than they thought, and that this uncertainty is exciting rather than threatening. I want them to think of me as someone who is genuinely fascinated by the gaps between what we believe and what is actually true.
Once I had this, decisions that used to feel arbitrary became clear. Effects that fit the vision stayed. Effects that did not, no matter how strong technically, went. Scripting choices that supported the vision felt natural. Choices that did not felt forced. The vision became a filter, and the filter produced coherence, and coherence is what makes a performer memorable.
Subordinating the Parts to the Whole
The practical application of the Greater Effect principle is a willingness to let individual moments be less spectacular if it serves the whole.
This was hard for me to accept. When you have a killer closer — an effect that reliably produces gasps and applause — the temptation is to make the entire show build toward that moment, to subordinate everything else to the climax. But if the climax is a standalone spectacle that is disconnected from the performer’s vision, the audience leaves remembering the trick, not the performer.
Better to have a show where every moment — strong or quiet, impressive or subtle — is connected to the same vision. Where the quieter moments build context and character that make the impossible moments resonate at a deeper level. Where the performer’s character and perspective are present in every transition, every interaction, every word, so that the individual effects feel like different expressions of the same person rather than a variety show of unrelated impossibilities.
I restructured my set after sitting with this idea. I removed my strongest standalone effect — a visual piece that always got the biggest reaction but had nothing to do with my vision of challenging assumptions about reality. In its place, I built a sequence that was individually less spectacular but thematically integrated. The audience reaction to the new sequence was different. Less explosive at any single moment, but more sustained across the whole set. And when I asked for feedback afterward, people described the experience rather than the tricks. They described me.
The Message Is the Performance
There is a temptation, especially for analytical people like me, to try to articulate the message of your performance explicitly. To find words that capture what you are trying to communicate and then script those words into your act. To say something meaningful about perception or reality or the human mind and have the magic illustrate the point.
I have tried this. It does not work as well as you would think. When the message is stated, it becomes a lecture. When the message is demonstrated, it becomes art.
The message of your performance is the performance itself. It is not in the words. It is not in the tricks. It is in the total experience of watching you do what you do. It is in how you stand, how you look at people, how you respond when something goes wrong, how you transition between moments, how you receive applause, how you leave the stage. It is in everything, and it is in nothing specific.
This is what Brown means when he says that the fascinating magical qualities you possess should be communicated as subtly as any genuine character trait, without overstatement. You do not walk into a room and announce that you are intelligent. You demonstrate intelligence through your behavior, and people draw their own conclusions. Similarly, you do not walk onto a stage and announce that you are going to challenge their perception of reality. You perform in a way that challenges their perception, and they draw their own conclusions.
The conclusions they draw will always be more powerful than any claim you could make. Because they arrived at those conclusions themselves, and people trust their own conclusions more than anyone else’s assertions.
The Magician I Am Building
I am not there yet. I am still building toward the Greater Effect, still learning to subordinate individual moments to the whole, still catching myself performing tricks instead of performing myself.
But the direction is clear. The goal is not a collection of effects. The goal is a performer whose presence communicates something specific and memorable, and whose effects are simply the methods by which that communication occurs.
The tricks are methods. The performer is the effect. The experience of encountering this person — their particular vision, their particular way of relating to the impossible, their particular way of being in a room — is the Greater Effect. Everything else is in service to that.
When someone leaves one of my shows and cannot remember any specific trick but can vividly remember what it felt like to watch me, I will know I am getting close.