There was a period, maybe eighteen months into my serious study of magic, when I was obsessed with efficiency. I had a consulting background. I thought about optimization the way a strategist thinks about resource allocation. Every routine I built was designed to minimize risk, reduce the number of things that could go wrong, and make the execution as smooth and comfortable as possible for me.
I thought this was professionalism. I thought streamlining the performer’s experience was the same as streamlining the audience’s experience. I was wrong about that, and the error cost me months of mediocre reactions before I understood what was happening.
The turning point came from Darwin Ortiz’s ninth law in Strong Magic, stated with the kind of blunt clarity that makes you stop reading and stare at the ceiling: “Your job is to make things as easy as possible for the audience, not as easy as possible for yourself.”
Nine words that reframed everything I was doing wrong.
The Calculation I Had Backwards
Let me describe what “optimizing for myself” actually looked like in practice. I was working on an effect where the spectator would select a card and I would eventually reveal it. There were two possible approaches to the selection process. The first was clean and open — the spectator could pick any card, look at it, show it around, and return it to the deck in full view of everyone. The second was more controlled — the spectator’s choice was constrained in ways that were invisible to them but made my job significantly easier.
I chose the second approach every time. Of course I did. It reduced the difficulty by a factor of ten. It virtually eliminated the chance of failure. It was the smart play, from an engineering perspective.
But here is what I did not account for: the audience’s experience of the selection process was fundamentally different between the two approaches. In the first version, everyone in the room could see the spectator freely choose a card, look at it, and lose it in the deck. The conditions were crystal clear. The audience understood exactly what had happened, and they understood that it would be impossible for me to know which card was chosen.
In the second version, the selection involved a series of steps that, while they did not look suspicious, created a slight fog. The audience could not articulate what was wrong, but the process was slightly convoluted. There were a few extra steps, a few moments where the logic was not immediately transparent. The audience followed along, but they were working to follow along. And that work — that tiny cognitive load — subtracted from the impact of the reveal.
When I finally revealed the card in the second version, the reactions were fine. Polite. Impressed. But when I forced myself to learn the first version — the one that was significantly harder for me but effortlessly clear for the audience — the reactions jumped. Not a little. Dramatically. The reveal produced genuine astonishment because the audience had never lost the thread. They knew, with absolute clarity, that what just happened should have been impossible. No fog. No half-remembered steps. Just a clear “before” condition and an impossible “after” condition, with nothing confusing in between.
The difference was not in the effect. It was in the audience’s confidence about the conditions.
Why Clarity Is the Performer’s Responsibility
Ortiz’s related principle cuts even deeper: “The audience should never be made to work.” This is not about dumbing things down. It is about recognizing that the audience’s cognitive resources are finite and that every unit of attention they spend trying to follow what is happening is a unit they cannot spend experiencing the impossibility.
Think about it from the perspective of someone watching magic for the first time — which, at corporate events in Vienna or Graz, is often the case. They have no framework for what is happening. They do not know what to watch, what matters, what the “trick” is. Every cue they receive about what is important comes from the performer. If the performer’s procedure is confusing, the spectator does not have the option of pausing and rewinding. They just lose the thread. And once the thread is lost, no amount of spectacular methodology can reconnect it.
I see this constantly when I watch other performers at conventions and magic events. Brilliant methods, clean executions, tremendous skill — and muted reactions. The audience applauds politely because they can tell that something impressive happened, but they are not sure what. The procedure was designed around the method’s requirements, not around the audience’s capacity to follow.
The culprit is almost always the same: the performer chose the handling that was easiest to execute and then expected the audience to keep up. The calculation was performer-centered, not audience-centered.
The Expository Phase
Ortiz has a companion principle that took me even longer to internalize: “Make the expository phase as convincing as possible.” The expository phase is everything before the magic happens — the setup, the demonstration of conditions, the proof that everything is fair. Most magicians treat this phase as a necessary evil, something to rush through on the way to the good part.
I was guilty of this. I would establish that a deck was normal by giving it a quick spread, barely pausing, and moving on. I would show an envelope was empty by flashing it open for half a second. I would prove a prediction was sealed by waving it in the general direction of the audience. The proofs were technically there, but they were performed for my convenience — quickly, perfunctorily, so I could get to the reveal.
The problem is that the expository phase is not separate from the effect. It is part of the effect. Ortiz’s thirteenth law warns that “audiences have contrary intelligence — they’re dumb when you want them to be smart and smart when you want them to be dumb.” The conditions you need the audience to notice, they will miss. The discrepancy you need them to overlook, they will catch.
When you rush the expository phase, you are relying on the audience to notice the fairness of the conditions. But they will not notice unless you make it impossible to miss. A quick spread of the deck does not register as proof. A deliberate, slow, face-up display of every card with a simple comment — that registers. It takes more time. It requires you to hold a display steady while people look. It is less comfortable for the performer. And it is infinitely more effective.
I rebuilt my prediction routine around this understanding. Instead of quickly showing the prediction envelope and moving on, I started handing it to a spectator at the very beginning, asking them to hold it, asking them to confirm they could feel something inside, asking them to set it on the table in full view. Instead of flashing the deck to prove it was normal, I began spreading the cards face-up on the table and letting people see them. Instead of verbally explaining conditions, I started demonstrating them physically and letting the audience draw their own conclusions.
Every one of these changes made my job harder. The handling was less controlled. There was more time for the audience to notice things I would rather they did not notice. There were more moments where something could go wrong. But the clarity of the conditions was immaculate, and the audience’s conviction about the fairness of the setup was rock solid. When the reveal came, it hit with full force, because the audience had no ambiguity about what should have been impossible.
The Hotel Room Test
I developed a test for this, born out of the practice sessions that happen late at night in hotel rooms while traveling for consulting work. After running through a routine, I would imagine explaining the conditions to someone who was not present. Not the method. Just the conditions. “I showed the spectator a deck of cards. They chose one. Nobody else saw it. The card went back into the deck. I never touched it again. Then I named their card.”
If the description of the conditions was simple and clear — if someone hearing this secondhand would immediately understand why the result was impossible — then the expository phase was working. If the description required qualifications, footnotes, or “well, actually what happened was…” then the conditions were too complex for the audience to hold in their heads, and I needed to simplify.
This test is merciless. It eliminates the routines where the procedure is doing more work for the method than for the effect. It eliminates the handlings where the audience’s confusion is being mistaken for their amazement. And it forces me to ask, at every decision point, the question Ortiz insists I ask: am I making this easy for them, or easy for me?
The Consulting Parallel
This principle translates directly to the strategy work I do in my professional life. When I build a presentation for a client, I am constantly tempted to structure it around what is logical to me — the way the analysis unfolded, the sequence in which I discovered the insights, the natural order of my own thinking process. But the client does not share my analytical journey. They need the conclusion first, then the supporting evidence, arranged not in the order I found it but in the order that is easiest for them to absorb.
The same calculation applies on stage. The performer’s natural sequence — the order in which the method works, the logical flow of the technique — is almost never the audience’s optimal sequence. The audience needs information delivered in the order that builds the clearest possible picture of the conditions, not in the order that makes the method smoothest to execute.
Every time I rearrange a routine so that the method’s requirements dictate the audience’s experience, I am optimizing for myself. Every time I rearrange it so that the audience’s clarity dictates my challenges, I am optimizing for them.
Where This Gets Uncomfortable
The honest truth is that making things easy for the audience almost always means making things harder for the performer. The cleaner selection process requires more skill. The deliberate expository phase requires more nerve, because you are spending more time with the conditions on display. The routine that is simplest for the audience to follow often involves the most complex work behind the scenes.
This is uncomfortable. I spent my first year in magic seeking comfort — methods that were safe, handlings that were forgiving, procedures that minimized the chance of exposure. Ortiz’s law asks me to invert that instinct. Not to seek difficulty for its own sake, but to accept difficulty as the price of clarity.
I think this is what separates the performances that get polite applause from the performances that get the stunned silence followed by the eruption. The polite applause comes from audiences who sensed that something impressive happened but could not fully track it. The stunned silence comes from audiences who tracked every step, understood exactly what should have been impossible, and then watched the impossible happen anyway.
The difference is not in the method. It is not in the skill. It is in who the routine was designed to serve.
The Discipline of Audience-First Design
I now evaluate every routine through a single filter: at each moment, is this moment serving the audience’s experience or the performer’s convenience? When I catch myself choosing a handling because it is easier, I pause. Easier for whom? If the answer is “easier for me,” that is not a reason. It might still be the right choice — but only if the audience’s experience is equal or better. If the easier handling produces even slightly less clarity for the spectator, the harder handling wins.
This is a discipline, not a talent. It is a deliberate, conscious inversion of the performer’s natural instinct to optimize for personal comfort. And like every discipline, it gets easier with practice but never becomes automatic. The pull toward personal convenience is always there. The temptation to rush the expository phase, to choose the controlled handling, to structure the routine around the method rather than the effect — it never fully goes away.
But every time I resist it, the reactions tell me I made the right choice. The audience does not know what I made harder for myself. They only know that what they just witnessed was clear, fair, and impossible.
Make it easy for them. Accept the harder road for yourself. The gap between amateur and professional lives in that calculation, and so does the gap between polite applause and genuine astonishment.