The first time I performed at a technology conference in Graz, everything went beautifully. The audience was unsuspecting. They had come for a keynote on innovation, and the magic elements were a surprise — woven into the talk in a way that caught people off guard. The reactions were fantastic. Genuine astonishment. People came up afterward and could not stop talking about one particular moment in the presentation.
The organizer immediately booked me for the following year’s conference.
I was thrilled. Same venue, similar audience, a chance to refine and improve. I spent months preparing new material, upgrading my routines, polishing every element. By any objective measure, my second performance was technically superior to the first.
And the reactions were noticeably weaker.
Not bad. Not embarrassing. But the electric quality of the first performance was missing. The audience watched with a different energy — an energy I could not quite name at first. They were attentive, engaged, clearly enjoying themselves. But they were also watching in a way that felt different. More focused. More scrutinizing. Less willing to simply experience the moment.
It took me weeks to figure out what had happened. Then I found the law in Darwin Ortiz’s Strong Magic that explained it perfectly: the better you are, the closer they watch.
The Paradox
This is one of the cruelest paradoxes in performance. As your reputation grows and your skill improves, audiences watch you more carefully. The more impressive you become, the more scrutiny you invite. The more astonishment you create, the more determined people are to catch you the next time.
Think about what this means practically. The methods that worked when you were an unknown — when the audience had no reason to watch carefully, when they did not know what to look for, when they were not primed to be vigilant — those same methods may fail once you have built a reputation. The standard for deception rises with every successful performance.
At that Graz conference, word had spread. People in the audience had heard about last year’s performance. Some had seen videos. A few had been there in person. They arrived already knowing that something remarkable was going to happen, and they were determined to figure out how. They were no longer an unsuspecting audience absorbing a keynote presentation. They were an informed audience actively looking for the secrets.
My methods had not gotten worse. The audience’s attention had gotten sharper.
Why This Happens
There are several psychological mechanisms driving this paradox, and understanding them helps you solve it.
The first is expectation. When an audience expects to be amazed, they shift into a different cognitive mode. Instead of passively receiving an experience, they actively scrutinize it. They are watching for the method rather than experiencing the effect. This is the opposite of what you want, and it happens precisely because you were good enough to create that expectation.
The second is the challenge instinct. Ortiz writes extensively about the challenge attitude — the tendency of some audience members to view magic as a contest between performer and spectator. When your reputation precedes you, the challenge instinct intensifies. People do not just want to enjoy the show. They want to prove, to themselves and to the people sitting next to them, that they can figure it out. “I bet I can catch him this time” is the internal monologue you are now competing against.
The third is simply familiarity. A repeat audience has already seen you in action. They have a baseline. They know your style, your rhythms, your patterns. The first time, everything is new and therefore harder to analyze. The second time, they have a map. They know where to look. They have already processed the surprise factor and can now devote their full cognitive resources to analysis.
The First Solution: Evolve Your Methods
The most obvious response to this paradox is to upgrade your methods. If the audience is watching more closely, your methods need to be more bulletproof. This is true but insufficient.
I did this after Graz. I went through every routine I had performed and asked: if someone were watching this with full attention and active suspicion, what would they catch? Where are the vulnerable moments? What would a highly motivated observer notice?
This audit was humbling. Several routines that felt rock-solid when performed for unsuspecting audiences had clear vulnerabilities when I imagined a primed, suspicious audience. Moments that relied on casual attention would fail under intense scrutiny. Procedures that worked because the audience had no reason to question them would crumble if the audience arrived already questioning.
I rebuilt those routines with stronger methods — approaches that could withstand scrutiny rather than merely avoid it. This was months of work, but it was necessary work. If you are going to build a reputation, your methods must be reputation-grade.
The Second Solution: Manage the Frame
But stronger methods are only half the answer. The other half is managing the audience’s frame of mind.
Remember what Ortiz teaches: the effect happens in the spectators’ minds. If the spectator’s mind is in analysis mode, hunting for the method, then even a perfect method produces a diminished experience. The audience may not catch you, but they are spending so much cognitive energy trying to catch you that they have none left for wonder.
This is where presentation becomes critical. You need to shift the audience from analysis mode to experience mode. You need to give them something so engaging, so emotionally compelling, so humanly interesting that they forget to hunt for the method.
I learned to do this through narrative. When I weave magic into a keynote, the magic is embedded in a story about innovation, about human perception, about the assumptions we make in business and in life. The audience’s cognitive resources are engaged with the ideas, the narrative, the emotional content. The magic becomes a punctuation mark within a larger argument, not a standalone challenge to be decoded.
This is not misdirection in the traditional sense. It is something deeper. It is giving the audience something worth paying attention to beyond the puzzle of how the trick works. When the content is compelling enough, even the most analytically minded audience member gets absorbed in the experience rather than the method.
The Third Solution: Disarm the Challenge
There is a specific technique I developed for repeat audiences, and it relates directly to Ortiz’s warning about the challenge attitude. When I know that part of the audience has seen me before or has heard about my work, I address it directly — not the methods, but the dynamic.
I might say something like: “Some of you saw me last year, and you’ve probably been looking forward to catching me this time. I should warn you — I have been looking forward to fooling you again even more.” Delivered with a genuine smile, this does two things simultaneously. It acknowledges the elephant in the room — yes, they are here partly to figure it out — and it reframes the dynamic as collaborative play rather than adversarial competition. We are in this together. I am not trying to humiliate their intelligence. I am inviting them into a game we both want to play.
This disarming approach works because the challenge attitude feeds on tension, and tension feeds on the unspoken. When the performer pretends not to notice that the audience is hunting, an unproductive tension builds. The audience feels adversarial but cannot express it. By naming the dynamic, you release the tension and redirect the energy.
The Fourth Solution: Change the Angle
The most sophisticated response to increased scrutiny is to change what the audience thinks they are watching. This connects to what Ortiz calls the false frame of reference in Designing Miracles — a concept so powerful it deserves its own post, but the core idea is relevant here.
If the audience is watching closely and knows what to look for, change what they are looking for. Present effects that operate on entirely different principles from what they expect. If they are watching your hands because they assume sleight of hand, perform effects that do not involve sleight of hand. If they are watching for switches because that is what they think they detected last time, use routines where nothing is switched.
The audience’s scrutiny is shaped by their theory of how you work. If you can operate outside their theory entirely, their increased attention is pointed in the wrong direction. They are watching more closely, but they are watching for the wrong thing. This is actually more effective than their casual attention the first time, because their commitment to the wrong theory actively prevents them from finding the right one.
After that second Graz performance, I restructured my keynote material around this principle. I specifically chose effects for repeat audiences that operated on different principles from what I had used previously. If last year’s presentation relied on one approach, this year’s relied on a completely different one. The audience’s increased scrutiny was rendered useless because their entire analytical framework was pointed at the wrong target.
The Fifth Solution: Accept the Diminishing Returns
There is an honest truth embedded in this paradox that I think performers need to accept: a repeat audience will never have exactly the same experience as a first-time audience. The element of surprise — true surprise, the kind that comes from not knowing what is coming — cannot be fully recreated.
This does not mean repeat performances cannot be powerful. They can. Some of my best reactions have come from repeat audiences who thought they knew what to expect and were blown away by something they did not see coming. But the first-time magic, the pure surprise of encountering something unexpected, has a quality that repetition cannot replicate.
Accepting this is not defeatism. It is strategic clarity. When you stop trying to recreate the first-time experience and instead design for the repeat experience — designing for audiences who arrive informed, alert, and analytically primed — you start making different choices. Better choices. You raise your game precisely because the standard has risen.
The Escalation Imperative
The better you get, the closer they watch. The closer they watch, the better you need to get. This is an escalation that never ends, and I have come to see it not as a curse but as the engine of improvement.
Every time an audience forces me to raise my standard, my work gets stronger. Every time a repeat audience’s scrutiny exposes a weakness in my approach, I find a better approach. The paradox is painful in the moment, but it is the mechanism by which good performers become great performers.
In consulting, we call this the Red Queen effect — you have to keep running just to stay in place. In magic, you have to keep improving just to maintain the same level of impact. The alternative is to perform only for new audiences and never face the scrutiny that comes with reputation. Some performers choose this path. It is easier. But it guarantees that you will never grow beyond the level where casual attention is sufficient.
I would rather face the paradox. I would rather perform for people who are watching closely, who arrive with expectations, who have theories about how I work. Because solving the paradox — finding ways to create wonder despite maximum scrutiny — produces the kind of work that can astonish anyone, first-time audience or seasoned skeptic.
The better you get, the closer they watch. Good. Let them watch. And then show them something they were not watching for.