There is a martial arts principle that I think about every time I step in front of an audience. In judo, you do not overpower your opponent. You use your opponent’s own momentum against them. When someone charges at you, you do not meet force with force — you step aside and redirect that force so it carries them past you, off balance, exactly where you want them to go. The harder they push, the more effectively you can redirect.
Darwin Ortiz draws this exact parallel in his discussion of misdirection, and the moment I read it, something fundamental shifted in how I understand the relationship between a performer and an audience. The best misdirection does not fight the audience’s attention. It borrows the audience’s curiosity — the very force that should be working against the performer — and redirects it so that it becomes the cover.
The Audience’s Curiosity Is Not Your Enemy
When you stand in front of an audience and perform something impossible, every person in that room wants to figure out how you did it. This is not hostility. This is human nature. We are pattern-recognition machines. We see something that does not fit our model of reality, and our brains immediately mobilize to resolve the contradiction. Where did the card go? How did the coin get there? What just happened?
For most of my early performing life, I treated this curiosity as a threat. The audience wants to catch me. The audience wants to figure it out. The audience is the adversary. My job is to outwit them, to stay one step ahead, to conceal and deceive despite their best efforts.
This adversarial framing is wrong, and it produces bad performances. It makes you tense. It makes you defensive. It makes you treat every moment of audience attention as a potential failure point rather than an opportunity.
The judo reframe changes everything. The audience’s curiosity is not a threat to be resisted. It is a force to be redirected.
How Curiosity Becomes Cover
Here is the mechanism, stripped to its core. The audience has a finite amount of attention. That attention is driven by curiosity — they want to know what is going to happen, how this will resolve, what the outcome will be. This curiosity is powerful, focused, and directional. It points toward whatever the audience perceives as the most important, most interesting, most unresolved element of the current moment.
The judo move is this: you structure the performance so that the audience’s curiosity points toward something genuinely engaging and unresolved at the exact moment when you need their attention elsewhere. You do not fight their curiosity. You create something for their curiosity to attach to. And because curiosity is a powerful force, it holds their attention firmly on the target you chose — far more firmly than any manufactured distraction could.
The crucial difference: in a distraction model, you are working against the audience’s natural focus. In a curiosity-redirect model, you are working with it. The audience is doing exactly what they want to do — following their interest, pursuing the mystery, engaging with the narrative. They just happen to be pursuing the mystery you designed, not the mystery you need to protect.
A Lesson from a Corporate Event in Linz
I learned this principle viscerally at a corporate event in Linz, about two years into my performing. I was doing a mentalism piece where I needed to obtain a piece of information without the audience realizing I had obtained it. The “distraction” approach would have been to create some loud, attention-grabbing moment — a joke, a dropped prop, a sudden change of subject — to cover the acquisition.
Instead, I built genuine suspense around a different element of the routine. I asked the spectator a series of questions that seemed to be building toward a prediction. Each question raised the stakes. The audience leaned forward. They were intensely curious about where this line of questioning was leading. Would I guess their birthday? Their childhood pet’s name? The name of their first crush?
While the audience was fully absorbed in following this thread of escalating curiosity, I obtained the information I actually needed through means that were perfectly visible but utterly unremarkable in the context of the moment. The acquisition was not hidden. It was simply irrelevant to the story the audience was following. Their curiosity was so fully engaged with the prediction thread that everything else became background noise.
When the routine climaxed, the reaction was enormous. Not just because the effect was strong, but because the audience’s own curiosity had been building the entire time. They were invested. They had been leaning forward, wondering, anticipating. The payoff hit a primed audience, and the impact was multiplied.
That was when I understood: the misdirection and the entertainment were the same thing. The curiosity that made the routine engaging was the same curiosity that made the method invisible.
The Self-Defeating Nature of Fighting Attention
Consider what happens when you try to force attention somewhere it does not naturally want to go. You point dramatically at something. You say “Look at this!” You wave your hand. The audience looks — for a moment. But their internal drive is still oriented toward the mystery, toward the trick, toward figuring things out. The moment your forced direction loses its novelty (and it will, within seconds), their attention snaps back to wherever their curiosity was pointing before you interrupted it.
This is why cheap misdirection fails. It creates a momentary redirect but does not address the underlying force. It is like trying to hold a spring compressed — the moment you release pressure, it snaps back.
The judo approach does not compress the spring. It redirects the spring. The audience’s curiosity is not momentarily interrupted — it is redirected toward a new target that is as interesting, as engaging, and as compelling as the thing you need to protect. There is no snap-back because the audience does not feel like their attention has been diverted. They feel like they are following the story.
Inherent Interest: The Strongest Tool in the Kit
Ortiz identifies inherent interest as one of the eight tools of attention control, and I have come to believe it is the most powerful of the eight because it is the only one that creates self-sustaining attention. Eye contact, movement, sound — these are all transient. They capture attention for a moment. But inherent interest — the pull of genuine curiosity, real suspense, unresolved narrative tension — holds attention indefinitely.
Think about it this way. A loud noise makes everyone look at the source. For a second. Maybe two. Then they look away. But a question that creates genuine suspense — “I wrote a prediction before the show, and it’s in this envelope, and we’ll see if I was right in just a moment” — that question holds attention for as long as the suspense is unresolved. Minutes, potentially. The audience does not look away because they cannot look away. Their curiosity is engaged. The unresolved question occupies their mind. And while their mind is occupied with the question, everything else in the room — including the secret work happening in plain sight — is beneath the threshold of their awareness.
This is the judo principle in its purest form. The audience’s own curiosity, the very force that should make them suspicious and vigilant, is channeled into a specific question. And the harder they concentrate on that question, the less capacity they have for noticing anything else. Their focus is your cover. Their engagement is your concealment.
Building Curiosity as a Structural Practice
Once I understood this, I started designing routines differently. Instead of thinking about misdirection as a problem to solve at specific moments, I started thinking about curiosity as a resource to build throughout the routine. Every phase of a routine should generate a question the audience wants answered. Every beat should make them wonder, anticipate, or speculate.
Not all at once. That would be overwhelming. The idea is to always have at least one unresolved thread that the audience is following. When one question is resolved, the next one opens. When suspense builds, the audience leans in. When it resolves, they relax — and if you time it right, the relaxation itself becomes a window (but that is a topic for another post).
The point is that the audience’s attention should never be unmanaged, and the management should never feel forced. When the management is driven by genuine curiosity — when the audience is following a story they care about, pursuing a question they want answered, anticipating an outcome that matters to them — the misdirection takes care of itself.
The Consulting Parallel
I recognized this principle in my consulting work before I understood it in magic. In strategy facilitation, when you want a room full of executives to focus on a specific problem, you do not tell them to stop thinking about other problems. That never works. People cannot stop thinking about something on command. Instead, you pose a question so compelling, so directly relevant to their concerns, that the other problems recede naturally. You do not subtract their attention from the distractions. You give their attention something better to focus on.
The conference room and the performance stage operate on the same psychological principle. Human attention is not a switch you can flip. It is a river you can channel. And the way to channel a river is not to build a dam — it is to dig a more attractive path.
The Ethical Dimension
There is something I want to name explicitly, because it matters. The judo principle is not manipulation in a sinister sense. It is the foundation of all good entertainment. A filmmaker uses this principle when they structure a scene to guide your eye to the actor’s face rather than the CGI seam at the edge of the frame. A novelist uses it when they build suspense around one plot thread while quietly planting the seeds of a twist in another. A comedian uses it when they set up an expectation so firmly that the punchline — the redirect — hits with maximum surprise.
In all these cases, the audience’s own engagement is the mechanism. They are curious. They are invested. They are following a thread. And that following, that investment, is both the experience and the cover. The entertainment and the technique are the same thing.
This is what I mean when I say the best misdirection is indistinguishable from good performance. When your misdirection is built on genuine curiosity, you are not deceiving the audience’s attention — you are earning it. You are giving them something real to care about. The fact that their caring also happens to cover the method is a feature of good design, not a trick of manipulation.
The audience pushes forward with curiosity. You step aside and redirect. They carry themselves past the secret, propelled by their own momentum. They never felt pushed, pulled, or deceived. They felt entertained.
That is misdirection as judo. And like judo, it only works when you stop fighting and start flowing.