There is a sentence in Darwin Ortiz’s Strong Magic that I have thought about more than almost any other sentence in any book on performance. It is deceptively simple, and the first time I read it, I nodded and moved on. It took me weeks to realize I had not actually understood it. Here it is:
You cannot direct attention away from something. You can only direct attention toward something else.
That sounds like the same thing, right? Move attention from A to B — whether you frame it as pushing it away from A or pulling it toward B, the result is identical. The audience stops looking at A and starts looking at B.
But the framing is not the same thing. The framing changes everything about how you design, rehearse, and execute every moment of a performance. And it changed how I think about attention in contexts far beyond magic.
The Mistake I Kept Making
In my first year of performing, my internal monologue during any moment that required misdirection sounded like this: “Don’t let them look at my right hand. Don’t let them look at my right hand. Make sure they don’t see what my right hand is doing.”
This is the “away from” mindset. It is focused on the thing you are hiding. It is defensive. It is reactive. And it produces a specific physical effect that audiences can sense even if they cannot articulate it: tension.
When your mind is focused on what you are hiding, your body broadcasts anxiety. Your shoulders tighten. Your movements become slightly hurried. Your eyes dart. You lean away from the danger zone. Everything in your demeanor whispers, “Something is happening over here that I don’t want you to see.” And human beings are exquisitely calibrated to pick up exactly this signal. We evolved to detect concealment. It is written into our neurology.
The “toward” mindset produces the opposite effect. Instead of thinking about what you need to hide, you think about what you need to show. Your internal monologue becomes: “Look at this. This is interesting. This is where the story is happening right now.” You are not running away from danger. You are leading toward interest.
And the physical difference is profound. Your body relaxes. Your movements become purposeful rather than evasive. Your eyes settle confidently on the point of interest. You lean into the moment instead of shrinking from it. The audience reads confidence, engagement, and direction — all of which make them more likely to follow your lead.
The Eight Tools, Reframed
Ortiz identifies eight tools that control where an audience looks: eye contact, body language, patter, movement, sound, contrast, newness, and inherent interest. When I first studied these, I understood them as mechanisms for pulling attention away from something I needed to hide. I was wrong. They are mechanisms for pulling attention toward something I want to show.
The difference is not semantic. It changes which questions you ask during rehearsal.
Wrong question: “How do I stop them from looking at my right hand during the transfer?”
Right question: “What am I giving them to look at during the transfer?”
The wrong question has no actionable answer. “Stop them from looking” is a negative — it tells you what you do not want but gives you nothing to do. The right question demands a positive answer. You must build something interesting, something compelling, something worthy of attention at the exact moment when the secret work happens.
This means that every moment of misdirection requires a moment of direction. You cannot simply subtract the audience’s attention from one place. You must add it to another. And that addition must be genuine — it must be truly interesting, truly engaging, truly worth looking at. If the “toward” element is weak, flimsy, or transparent, the misdirection fails. The audience’s attention drifts back toward whatever feels most alive in the room, and if the most alive thing is the suspicious action you are trying to cover, you are exposed.
A Hotel Room Revelation
I had a specific moment of understanding that I still think about. I was in a hotel room in Vienna — one of those long evenings where I had nothing but a deck of cards, a table lamp, and my phone propped up to record myself — and I was working on a sequence that required me to do something with my left hand while my right hand was supposedly the focus.
On playback, I could see the problem clearly. Every time the secret action happened, there was a dead zone. My right hand was just sitting there, holding a card, doing nothing particularly interesting. It was like a movie where the main character stands still while the plot continues off screen. The audience’s eye had nothing to anchor to. And in the absence of something interesting to look at, the eye wanders. It explores. It finds things you do not want it to find.
The fix was not to add a bigger distraction. It was to make the “toward” element genuinely compelling at that exact moment. I restructured the sequence so that the right hand was in the middle of a visually interesting action — spreading cards slowly, one at a time, faces toward the audience, as if searching for something — at the precise moment the left hand needed to work. Now the right hand was not a decoy. It was the story. The audience’s eyes followed it because it was the most interesting thing happening, not because I was desperately hoping they would not look elsewhere.
That distinction — being the most interesting thing versus being a distraction from the real thing — is the entire principle in action.
Why Distraction Is the Wrong Word
I have come to dislike the word “distraction” in the context of magic performance. It implies something cheap, something forced, something transparent. A distraction is what you create when you drop a tray of glasses to cover a robbery. It is loud, obvious, and temporary. The moment the tray stops clattering, everyone looks back at the thing they were watching before.
Attention control is not distraction. It is direction. A good director does not distract the audience from the boom microphone at the edge of the frame — they compose the shot so the audience’s eye goes exactly where the story is happening, and the boom microphone never enters their awareness. The audience is not being tricked into looking away from the microphone. They are being guided toward the actor’s face because the actor’s face is where the emotion lives.
This is why Ortiz’s eight tools work: they are all “toward” tools, not “away” tools. Eye contact works because human beings are hardwired to follow another person’s gaze — where you look, they look. Body language works because your body orientation signals where the important thing is. Movement works because our visual system is built to track motion — a survival mechanism so ancient it predates conscious thought. Sound works because unexpected noise captures attention involuntarily.
None of these tools push attention away from something. They all pull it toward something. And when you internalize this, you stop thinking defensively and start thinking creatively. Instead of “How do I hide this?” you ask “What do I reveal?”
The Implications Beyond the Moment
This principle extends far beyond the specific moments of method execution. It applies to the entire structure of a performance.
When I am building a routine, I now think about every moment as a destination for attention. Where should the audience be looking right now? What should they be thinking about? What is the most interesting, most emotionally engaging, most narratively compelling element of this particular moment?
If I cannot answer those questions for any given beat of the routine, that beat is a vulnerability. Not because of a method exposure risk, but because any moment without a clear “toward” is a moment where the audience’s attention is unmanaged. And unmanaged attention is not idle attention — it is searching attention. Bored eyes look for something interesting. And what is interesting to an audience watching a magic performance? Figuring out how it works. Catching the move. Finding the secret.
The strongest performers I have studied never have dead zones. There is always something to look at, something to think about, something to feel. The narrative is continuous. The direction is constant. And the secret work happens not during manufactured distractions but during genuinely engaging moments — moments so compelling that the audience would not dream of looking anywhere else.
Applying It to Keynote Speaking
This principle has crossed over into my professional work as a keynote speaker in ways I did not anticipate. The same dynamic operates in any presentation context. When a speaker loses the audience’s attention, the instinct is to think about what is going wrong. “They’re checking their phones. They’re whispering to each other. They’re losing focus.”
The “away from” response is to try to suppress the unwanted behavior. Speak louder. Ask a pointed question. Make a joke to snap them back. These are all versions of the dropped tray of glasses — temporary, forced redirections that work for a moment and then fade.
The “toward” response is to ask: what am I giving them that is worth their attention right now? Is this story compelling? Is this data point surprising? Is this image on the screen genuinely interesting? If the answer is no, the problem is not the audience’s wandering attention. The problem is the absence of a strong enough “toward.”
I have found that when I build a keynote with the same rigor I apply to building a magic routine — ensuring that every moment has a clear attentional destination, every beat serves a narrative purpose, every visual is worth looking at — the audience management takes care of itself. They do not check their phones because the presentation is more interesting than their phones. That is not distraction. That is direction.
The Paradox of Effort
There is a paradox embedded in this principle that took me a long time to appreciate. When you think “away from,” you work harder. Your effort goes into concealment, suppression, and defense. You are fighting the audience’s natural curiosity, trying to prevent them from doing what they are biologically programmed to do: look at interesting things.
When you think “toward,” you work smarter. Your effort goes into creation, engagement, and direction. You are leveraging the audience’s natural curiosity, channeling it exactly where you want it to go. You are not fighting their instincts. You are riding them.
The paradox is that the “toward” approach, which sounds like more work — you have to build genuinely compelling content for every moment — is actually less effortful in performance. Because once you have built those compelling moments, the audience follows willingly. You do not have to manage them. They manage themselves. Their own curiosity, their own engagement, their own interest does the work that no amount of defensive misdirection could accomplish.
You cannot direct attention away. You can only direct it toward. Build something worth looking at, and the audience will look. Build something worth thinking about, and the audience will think about it. The secret work happens not in the shadow of distraction but in the light of genuine interest.
That is the principle. It is one sentence. It takes a career to fully implement.