There is a mentalism piece I have been performing for about two years. The structure is simple: a spectator thinks of something personal, writes it down, seals it in an envelope. Over the course of the next few minutes, through a series of increasingly specific revelations, I tell them what they wrote.
The first version of this routine lasted about four minutes. The reveals came quickly — bang, bang, bang — one after another like fireworks. I was proud of the pacing. It felt efficient, energetic, modern. Nobody would get bored. Nobody would check their phones.
And nobody was blown away, either.
The reactions were polite. Impressed nods. Scattered applause. People said “that was good” in the way people say “that was good” when they mean “that happened and it is now over.” The technical execution was clean. The reveals were accurate. Everything worked. But the emotional impact was that of someone reading a grocery list at slightly above-average speed.
I could not figure out what was wrong until I read six words from Darwin Ortiz in Strong Magic that reframed the entire problem: “Make them care, then make them wait.”
The Two Steps You Cannot Skip
Ortiz’s suspense formula is deceptively simple. It has exactly two components, and they must happen in exactly this order.
First: make them care. Establish emotional stakes. Give the audience a reason to be invested in what happens next. This is not about explaining the trick — it is about making the outcome matter to them emotionally. Will the prediction match? Will the spectator’s thought be revealed? Will the impossible thing actually happen? The audience needs to want to know the answer before you give it to them.
Second: make them wait. Delay the resolution. Once the audience cares about the outcome, you do not deliver it immediately. You stretch the moment. You let the tension build. You allow the space between wanting to know and actually knowing to expand until the audience is leaning forward, holding their breath, desperate for the resolution.
Skip the first step and the waiting produces boredom, not suspense. The audience does not care what happens, so making them wait is just making them impatient.
Skip the second step and the payoff has no tension behind it. The audience cared, but you gave them the answer before the wanting had time to accumulate. The fireworks went off in an empty room.
My four-minute version was skipping the second step entirely. The audience cared — the premise was engaging, the spectator was invested, the room was watching. But I was so anxious about losing their attention that I rushed through the reveals without letting any of them breathe. I was afraid of silence. I was afraid of the pause. I was afraid that if I waited, the audience would lose interest.
The opposite was true. By not waiting, I was preventing the interest from building into anything with weight.
What “Making Them Care” Actually Looks Like
Making them care is not the same as explaining what is about to happen. Explanation creates understanding. Caring requires emotional investment.
Here is the difference. “I’m going to try to read her mind” is an explanation. The audience understands the premise. They may or may not be invested.
“Sarah wrote down something personal. Something that matters to her. Something she has never told anyone in this room. And I am going to try — without asking her, without looking at what she wrote, without touching that envelope — to tell you what she is thinking right now.” That is investment. The audience is not just understanding the premise. They are worrying about Sarah. They are curious about the secret. They are wondering whether I can actually do this or whether I am about to embarrass myself and Sarah together.
The emotional stakes come from specificity. From personalizing the moment. From making the audience feel that something real is at risk — the spectator’s privacy, the performer’s credibility, the possibility that something genuinely impossible might happen in front of their eyes.
In my consulting keynotes, I often use a mentalism piece where the reveal connects to the theme of the presentation — innovation, decision-making, perception. The “making them care” phase ties the effect to something the audience already cares about professionally. They are not just watching a mind-reading trick. They are watching a live demonstration of a principle they need for their work. The emotional stake is intellectual relevance, and for a room full of executives, that is as powerful as any personal revelation.
What “Making Them Wait” Actually Looks Like
The waiting is where most performers, including me for years, fail. We are terrified of silence. We are terrified of the gap between question and answer. We rush because the tension is uncomfortable for us, and we project that discomfort onto the audience.
But the audience is not uncomfortable. The audience is engaged. The tension you feel is the tension they enjoy. Your discomfort is their entertainment. That is what suspense is — the pleasurable discomfort of not knowing, combined with the desperate desire to know.
Making them wait does not mean standing silently for thirty seconds while the audience stares at you. It means stretching the moment through deliberate action. Walking slowly. Speaking quietly. Looking at the spectator. Looking at the audience. Appearing to concentrate. Appearing to struggle. Allowing the process to feel difficult, uncertain, alive.
In the revised version of my mentalism piece, the first reveal takes about ninety seconds from the moment the spectator seals the envelope to the moment I say the first word of the revelation. Ninety seconds. In the original version, it took about twenty. The extra seventy seconds are not filler. They are the suspense itself. They are where the emotion lives.
During those ninety seconds, I am doing things that look like thinking but are actually pacing devices. I hold the sealed envelope. I look at it. I look at the spectator. I start to speak and then stop, as if reconsidering. I ask a question — “Is this something you think about often?” — that has nothing to do with the method but everything to do with deepening the emotional connection. I take a step closer to the spectator. I lower my voice.
By the time I actually deliver the first reveal, the audience is so invested in the outcome that the reveal hits like a thunderclap. The same words, the same information, the same reveal — but delivered after ninety seconds of built tension instead of twenty seconds of efficient rushing.
The Breath Before the Note
A musician friend in Vienna once told me that in classical music, the most powerful moment in a performance is not the note itself. It is the breath before the note. The silence that precedes the sound. The moment where the audience knows something is coming but does not yet know what it is.
This is the same principle. The reveal is the note. The waiting is the breath. And without the breath, the note is just noise.
I think about this every time I am tempted to rush. When I feel the pull to move quickly, to get to the good part, to stop wasting time — I remind myself that the time between caring and knowing is not wasted. It is the most valuable time in the entire performance. It is where the emotion accumulates. It is where the miracle is built.
Suspense in Structure
The formula does not just apply to individual reveals. It applies to the entire structure of a performance.
In a multi-phase routine, each phase is an opportunity to apply the formula. Make them care about the first phase, then make them wait for it. Deliver it. Then make them care about the second phase — which is easier now because the first phase has proven that something real is happening — and make them wait again. Each cycle of caring and waiting builds on the previous one, and the waiting can get longer with each phase because the audience’s investment deepens.
In a full show, the formula applies to the arc of the evening. The opening establishes caring — who is this person, what are we about to experience, is this going to be worth our attention? The middle sustains the waiting — each routine builds on the last, each climax raises the stakes for the next. And the closing delivers the ultimate payoff — the reveal that justifies all the accumulated tension.
I restructured my forty-minute corporate keynote show around this principle. The first ten minutes are almost entirely caring — establishing who I am, connecting with the audience, creating an emotional framework for everything that follows. The tricks in this section are small and quick, designed to build credibility rather than to astonish. The real astonishment is held back, saved for the middle and end, where the waiting has accumulated enough tension to make the payoffs land with genuine force.
The Fear of Losing Them
The reason most performers rush — and I speak from extensive personal experience — is fear. The fear that if you pause, the audience will drift. That if you wait, they will check their phones. That if you do not deliver the next piece of excitement immediately, you will lose them.
This fear is based on a misunderstanding of what holds an audience’s attention. Speed does not hold attention. Engagement holds attention. An audience that cares about the outcome will wait as long as you need them to wait, provided the waiting itself is engaging. They will wait through silence, through pauses, through slow movements, through quiet words. They will wait because they want to know what happens, and the wanting is stronger than any impatience.
An audience that does not care about the outcome will not be saved by speed. You can deliver reveals as fast as an auctioneer and they will still be bored, because speed without stakes is just noise. The solution to audience drift is not faster pacing. It is deeper caring.
The Three-Second Rule
After the reveal lands — after the audience gasps, after the spectator confirms, after the impossible has been demonstrated — there is another moment where the formula applies in reverse. Now you need to let them react. You need to wait for the reaction to develop, to spread through the room, to reach its peak.
I use a three-second rule: after any major reveal, I count silently to three before I do or say anything else. Three seconds of silence while the audience processes what just happened. Three seconds for the reaction to build, for people to turn to each other, for the emotional impact to peak.
Those three seconds feel eternal when you are the one on stage. They are the hardest seconds in the entire performance. Every instinct tells you to move on, to fill the silence, to start the next thing. But those three seconds are where the audience lives in the moment of impossibility. They are the payoff for all the caring and all the waiting. Cutting them short is like pulling someone out of a dream before they have finished dreaming it.
The Formula in One Sentence
Make them care. Then make them wait. Then let them react.
It is not complicated. It is not a secret. It is one of those principles that is simple to understand and agonizingly difficult to practice, because practicing it means fighting every performer’s instinct to move faster, to fill silence, to get to the point.
But every time I resist that instinct — every time I let the caring deepen and the waiting stretch and the reaction breathe — the effect lands harder than the version where I rushed. Every single time.
Six words from Darwin Ortiz. The best directing advice I have ever received.