The first time someone told me I had performed badly, I spent three days replaying the conversation in my head. Not thinking about how to improve. Replaying the conversation. Running it on a loop, defending myself to an imaginary tribunal, composing arguments for why the critic was wrong, rehearsing what I should have said in response. Three days of mental energy spent not on getting better but on protecting my ego from a truth it did not want to hear.
The performance had been at a private event in Vienna. A friend of the host — someone who had seen a lot of live entertainment — pulled me aside afterward and said, quite kindly, that the second half of my set had lost the room. People had started talking to each other. The energy had dropped. “The first part was great,” she said. “But something happened after the break. It was like you were performing for yourself instead of for us.”
She was right. And three days later, when I finally stopped defending myself inside my own head, I recognized that she had identified not just a performance problem but a philosophical one. I was performing for myself instead of for them. And the reason I could not hear her feedback was that my relationship to performing was built on the wrong foundation.
The Stanislavski Distinction
Derren Brown cites a distinction from Stanislavski in Absolute Magic that has become one of the most important ideas in my practice: love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.
The difference sounds semantic. It is not. It is the difference between two completely different orientations to performance, and it determines everything — how you practice, how you receive criticism, how you handle failure, how you grow, and whether you are capable of growing at all.
Loving the art in yourself means your primary relationship is with the craft. You are devoted to improving. You are fascinated by the process. You derive satisfaction from doing the work well, from discovering something new about presentation or technique or audience psychology, from the slow accumulation of skill over years. Your ego is involved — you care about quality, you want to be good — but your ego is in service to the craft rather than the other way around. When someone tells you that the second half of your set lost the room, you hear it as information about the craft. Useful information. Gold, even.
Loving yourself in the art means your primary relationship is with the validation. You perform because performing makes you feel important, talented, admired. The craft is a vehicle for the feeling you get when an audience applauds, when someone tells you that was amazing, when you see the astonishment on a spectator’s face and know that you caused it. Your ego is not in service to the craft. The craft is in service to your ego. When someone tells you that the second half of your set lost the room, you hear it as an attack on your identity. You defend. You deflect. You spend three days in your head rehearsing counterarguments.
I wish I could say I recognized this distinction immediately and corrected course. I did not. It took me years to understand which side of the line I was standing on, and even longer to begin the slow process of moving to the other side.
The Seductions of Validation
For someone who came to magic as an adult professional — someone who spent most of his career in strategy and innovation consulting — the validation of performing is intoxicating. In consulting, the feedback loop is long and ambiguous. You present a strategy. The client implements it over months. Results emerge over quarters. You never quite know if the outcome was due to your work, market conditions, or the client’s own efforts.
In magic, the feedback loop is instant. You perform an effect. The person gasps. You know, right now, that you caused that reaction. The dopamine hit is immediate and unambiguous. After years of delayed, uncertain feedback in my professional life, the immediacy of audience reaction was addictive.
And that is exactly the problem. Because when the reaction becomes the reason for performing, the reaction becomes the thing you optimize for. You stop asking “Is this piece as good as it can be?” and start asking “Does this piece get the reaction I need?” These sound like the same question, but they are not. The first question leads to growth. The second question leads to stagnation — because once you find something that reliably produces the reaction, you stop pushing.
I noticed this pattern in myself when I realized I had been performing the same set, essentially unchanged, for over a year. Not because it was perfect — it was not — but because it was reliable. Every piece got a reaction. Every transition worked. Every laugh was in the right place. The set was a machine optimized for validation, and I was reluctant to break anything because breaking something might reduce the validation.
This is what loving yourself in the art looks like. The set is frozen because change is risky, and risk threatens the validation. The performer stops growing because growth requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is the enemy of the ego-driven performer.
The Criticism Paradox
Brown makes an observation about criticism that initially sounds obvious but becomes more devastating the longer you sit with it: the only answer to improving as a performer is to seek criticism humbly and greedily.
Performers who love the art in themselves do this naturally. They actively seek out people who will tell them what is not working. They welcome notes. They film themselves and watch the footage with analytical detachment, cataloging flaws and areas for improvement. They ask audiences for honest feedback and are genuinely grateful when they receive it, even when it hurts. Decent, intelligent criticism is pure gold — value it highly and seek it out where you can.
Performers who love themselves in the art cannot do this. Or rather, they can do it intellectually — they can solicit feedback, nod along, say “Thank you, that is helpful” — but emotionally, every piece of criticism lands as a wound. Because their identity is entangled with their performance, criticism of the performance is felt as criticism of the self. And the self does not want to be criticized. The self wants to be validated.
I recognize both of these modes in myself, sometimes within the same day. There are performances after which I watch the footage with genuine curiosity, eager to find the weak spots, excited about the potential for improvement. And there are performances after which I cannot watch the footage at all, because the ego is too raw, because the need for validation is too strong, because I would rather believe it went perfectly than confront evidence that it did not.
The ratio of the first mode to the second has shifted over time. I spend more time in the curious mode now than I used to. But the ego mode never disappears entirely. It is always there, waiting to reassert itself, especially after a show that did not go well.
The Dissociation Exercise
Brown describes a practical technique for handling criticism that I have used dozens of times since I learned it. When a critical comment stings — when you feel the defensive reaction rising, when the inner tribunal starts assembling arguments — do this:
Instead of replaying the criticism from inside your own perspective — hearing it said at you, feeling the emotion of the moment — visualize the scene from outside. See it as a film. You and the critic are both on screen, small, in black and white, at arm’s length. Watch the version of you in the picture receive the feedback. Let that distant version of yourself evaluate whether the criticism has merit. Let them decide what changes might be worthwhile.
The technique works because it separates the emotional response from the analytical one. When you are inside the moment, criticism feels personal. When you are watching the moment from outside, criticism becomes information. And information is what you need to grow.
I used this technique with the feedback from the woman in Vienna. Instead of replaying her words as an accusation — “you lost the room” — I replayed the scene from the outside. I saw myself receiving the feedback. I saw her delivering it kindly and specifically. And from that distance, stripped of the emotional charge, I could evaluate her observation on its merits.
She was right. The second half of my set was weaker. I was performing for myself — doing effects I enjoyed doing rather than effects the audience needed to experience. And once I saw that clearly, I could do something about it.
The Daily Calibration
I have come to think of the art-in-yourself versus yourself-in-the-art distinction not as a binary choice but as a daily calibration. Every morning, every practice session, every performance, I am somewhere on the spectrum between the two. Some days I am deeply in the craft, fascinated by a technical problem, excited about a new scripting idea, eager to experiment even if it means failing. Other days I am in the ego, anxious about upcoming performances, checking for validation, measuring myself against other performers.
The goal is not to eliminate the ego. The ego is useful. A healthy ego is necessary for stepping on stage at all. You cannot perform if you do not believe, on some level, that you are worth watching. Joshua Jay makes this point — you cannot convincingly ask someone else to suspend their disbelief if you are not willing to do it first yourself. The ego is the engine that gets you onto the stage.
But the engine must serve the journey. When the engine becomes the destination — when the point of performing is how performing makes you feel about yourself — the art stagnates and the performer stops growing.
What Changed
After the Vienna feedback incident, I made several changes. I restructured my set, replacing two effects that I loved performing but that the audience did not need. I started filming every performance and watching the footage within twenty-four hours, before the ego had time to build a defensive narrative. I asked Adam and a few trusted friends to give me honest notes, and I trained myself to say “Thank you” and nothing else when they did, suppressing the instinct to explain or defend.
I also started a simple practice that sounds almost trivial but has been surprisingly powerful. Before every performance, I ask myself: am I doing this for them or for me? The honest answer is always both. But the ratio matters. If I catch myself leaning toward “for me” — performing effects I enjoy rather than effects that serve the audience, including moments that feel good to execute but do not contribute to the experience — I adjust.
This is not selflessness. This is craft. Loving the art in yourself is not about subordinating your needs to the audience’s demands. It is about recognizing that your needs are best served by doing excellent work, and excellent work requires honest self-assessment, relentless improvement, and a willingness to put the craft ahead of the ego when they conflict.
The Long Game
I am still learning to love the art in myself more than I love myself in the art. It is not a switch you flip. It is a practice — as much a practice as any card technique or scripting exercise. Some days I do it well. Other days the ego wins and I perform for the validation rather than for the craft.
But the direction is clear, and the evidence is convincing. The performances that feel most meaningful — to me and to the audience — are the ones where the craft was in charge. Where I was curious rather than anxious. Where I was experimenting rather than defending. Where I was focused on what the audience needed rather than what my ego needed.
When I love the art in myself, the art improves. When I love myself in the art, the art stagnates and the self is never quite satisfied, because validation is a hunger that can never be fully fed.
The woman in Vienna did me the greatest favor any audience member has ever done. She told me the truth. It took me three days to hear it. But I heard it. And everything that has improved since then started with that conversation — and with my willingness, finally, to stop defending and start listening.