John Graham has performed a single routine at least twenty-five thousand times. He estimates this number based on years of restaurant work, performing at nearly every table, six or seven nights a week, for years. When he transitioned from close-up to stage, that routine came with him. It expanded. It breathed. It grew. A piece that originally ran about seven minutes now runs twenty to twenty-five minutes, after more than twenty years of continuous development.
Twenty-five thousand performances. Twenty years. And the routine is still evolving.
I want to start there — with someone else’s timeline, someone else’s numbers — because the contrast with my own journey is the whole point of this post. I do not have twenty years of performing experience. I do not have twenty-five thousand repetitions of anything. I came to magic as an adult, a strategy consultant who bought a deck of cards to keep his hands busy in hotel rooms. My performing history is measured in years, not decades. My show count is measured in dozens, not thousands.
And yet. Even in my much shorter journey, I can see the same principle at work. The same evolution happening in miniature. The same truth revealing itself: a show is never finished. It is a living thing, and if you let it live, it will grow into something you could not have designed from scratch.
The Myth of the Finished Show
There is a moment in every performer’s development where they believe the show is done. The effects are selected. The order is set. The transitions are smooth. The script is memorized. Every prop is in its place, every cue is programmed, every line has been tested. The show works. It gets good reactions. Event organizers rebook. Audiences enjoy themselves.
The temptation at this moment is profound: to lock it in. To treat the show as a finished product, a deliverable, something that has been built and now simply needs to be maintained. This is the consulting brain at work — the part of me that spent years building strategy presentations, refining them until they were airtight, and then deploying them in boardroom after boardroom without changing a word.
Scott Alexander has a warning about this exact moment, and it is one of the bluntest things I have read about the craft. He says that if you work really hard and get all your ducks in a row and then say “wow, I now have a perfect act,” you are dead in the water. If you stop coming up with new things to make your act better, you will stagnate.
Dead in the water. That phrase has the quality of a slap. Not because it is mean, but because it is true, and it targets the exact complacency that feels like accomplishment. You have done the work. You have built the thing. And now the work begins again, because the thing is alive, and alive things either grow or die.
Graham reinforces this with his own observation, placed near the end of his book like a parting warning: there is never a trick, a joke, a music cue, or even a table or case that cannot be improved. Never. Not “rarely.” Not “after a certain point, diminishing returns set in.” Never. Everything in the show can always be made better.
My Version of Twenty Years, Compressed
I built my thirty-minute corporate keynote show over the course of about eight months. The first version was rough — I knew this going in. You run a magic company with Adam Wilber, you need to be able to perform. So I put together the show with the best material I had, the best structure I could devise, and the best scripts I could write, and I started performing it.
Version one was functional. It worked in the sense that the effects landed, the audience was entertained, and nobody demanded their money back. But watching the recordings afterward — always the recordings, never trust your memory of a show — I could see the gaps. Transitions that were too long. A joke that worked in the mirror but died in front of real people. An effect that was technically impressive but emotionally flat. A music cue that came in too early. A closing line that fizzled instead of crackled.
Version two came about six weeks later, after four or five performances. I cut one effect entirely and replaced it with something more visual. I rewrote two transitions. I moved the mentalism piece from the middle to the second-to-last position, creating a stronger build. The show was tighter by about three minutes and stronger by a margin I could feel in the audience’s responses.
Version three came two months after that. I had been performing regularly enough to start noticing patterns in the feedback. There was a section in the middle where audience energy consistently dipped — not dramatically, but enough to register on the recordings. I restructured the pacing, added a brief interactive moment where there had been a monologue, and the dip disappeared.
Version four. Version five. Each one a response to something I noticed in performance, something that revealed itself only when the show was in front of real people in real rooms. A line that always got a laugh in Innsbruck but never worked in Vienna, leading me to investigate whether it was a cultural reference that did not travel. A prop transition that looked smooth to me but read as fumbling from the audience’s perspective. A moment of silence that I had been filling with words, not realizing that the silence was more powerful than anything I could say.
I am now somewhere around version seven or eight, and the show bears only a structural resemblance to version one. The core effects are mostly the same, but almost everything around them — the scripts, the transitions, the pacing, the music, the staging — has been revised, sometimes multiple times. The show is about four minutes shorter than version one and gets approximately twice the reaction.
The Principle of Continuous Refinement
What I am describing is not perfectionism. Perfectionism is the enemy of this process, because perfectionism believes there is a perfect version to be reached and that once you reach it, you can stop. Continuous refinement is the opposite: it is the acceptance that there is no perfect version, that every performance reveals new information, and that the show will continue to evolve for as long as you continue to perform it.
Graham’s twenty-year timeline makes this vivid. If a routine that has been performed twenty-five thousand times is still being refined, then refinement is not a phase you go through on the way to a finished product. It is the permanent condition of the work. The show is never done because the show is a conversation between the performer and the audience, and conversations do not have final drafts.
This mindset was not natural for me. In my consulting work, deliverables have deadlines. A strategy deck is finished when it is presented. A project reaches completion. There is a moment where the work is done and you move on. Magic does not work this way. There is no deadline for a show. There is no moment of completion. There is only the next performance, which will teach you something new about the performance that came before it.
Learning to live with this permanent incompleteness was one of the hardest adjustments of my performing life. I wanted the show to be done. I wanted to reach a point where I could perform it on autopilot, where the preparation was finished and the delivery was the only remaining variable. That point does not exist. The preparation is never finished because every performance changes what needs to be prepared.
What Each Version Taught Me
Looking back across the versions, I can identify what each major revision taught me.
The first revision taught me about cutting. The effect I removed was one I had spent weeks preparing. I was emotionally attached to it. It was technically demanding and I was proud of having mastered it. But the audience did not care about my technical achievement. They cared about their experience, and this particular effect slowed the show down without adding enough emotional value to justify its position. Cutting it was painful. The show was immediately better.
The second revision taught me about order. Moving the mentalism piece changed the audience’s experience of the entire second half of the show. The same material, in a different sequence, produced a different emotional arc. This taught me that a show is not a list — it is a structure, and the relationship between the pieces matters as much as the quality of the individual pieces.
The third revision taught me about the audience’s energy, specifically that it is not constant and not under my complete control. There are natural rhythms in a thirty-minute experience — moments where attention naturally peaks and moments where it naturally dips. I cannot eliminate the dips, but I can plan for them: placing interactive moments at the dip points so that audience participation carries the energy when my material alone cannot.
The fourth revision taught me about language. I rewrote nearly every line of my scripts, not because the words were wrong, but because they were written words rather than spoken words. Sentences that read well on paper sounded stiff on stage. I replaced written English with spoken English — shorter sentences, simpler vocabulary, more pauses, more sentence fragments. The show started sounding like a person talking instead of a person reciting.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh revisions taught me about subtlety. Small adjustments: a pause extended by half a second, a gesture added during a beat of silence, a music cue shifted by two bars, a prop placed on a different side of the table. Each change was barely noticeable in isolation. Together, they accumulated into a show that felt qualitatively different from what I had started with.
The Real Pros Are Always Looking
Alexander makes a point that stopped me in my tracks: the real pros are always looking for a new line, a new bit, or a new subtle way to make their act just a little better. He lists performers who have been working for decades — names that carry enormous weight in the magic community — and notes that they are always finding something new to put in. It may be just a look, or a slight twist of a phrase, but they are always, always trying to improve.
Always, always. Not “periodically.” Not “when they feel inspired.” Always. The refinement is continuous because the performers are continuously performing, and continuous performance generates continuous information about what can be improved.
This is the part that resonates most deeply with me, because it reframes the entire enterprise. The show is not a product to be perfected and deployed. The show is a relationship to be maintained and deepened. Every performance is both a delivery and a research session. Every audience is both a recipient and a teacher. And the work of show development is not something you do before you start performing — it is something you do because you are performing, and it continues for as long as the performing continues.
What Twenty-Five Thousand Looks Like From Here
I will never reach twenty-five thousand performances of any single routine. My performing life is not structured that way — I am not working restaurants six nights a week, I am performing corporate keynotes and events, which happen with less frequency but in higher-stakes settings. My repetition count will be in the hundreds, not the thousands.
But the principle scales. Whether you perform a routine twenty-five thousand times or two hundred and fifty times, the process of evolution is the same. You perform. You observe. You identify what can be improved. You improve it. You perform again. You observe again. The cycle continues. The show evolves.
Graham’s twenty-year timeline is inspiring not because it represents a target to aim for, but because it represents a commitment to the process. He did not reach year twenty and say “now the routine is done.” He reached year twenty and the routine is still growing, still changing, still being refined. The timeline is not a measurement of progress toward completion. It is a measurement of engagement with the work.
I am maybe three years into my version of this process. My thirty-minute show has gone through seven or eight versions. Each version was better than the last. Each version revealed things about the show that the previous version had hidden. And I am certain — as certain as I am about anything in this craft — that version twelve will be better than version eight, and version twenty will be better than twelve, and if I am still performing this show in five or ten years, it will have evolved into something I cannot imagine from where I stand today.
The Antidote to Stagnation
Alexander’s warning about being “dead in the water” is not just about complacency. It is about the relationship between growth and energy. A show that is growing generates energy — for the performer and for the audience. The performer brings a freshness to each performance because something is new, something has been changed, something is being tested. The audience feels this freshness even if they have never seen the show before, because the performer’s engagement is palpable.
A show that has stopped growing leaks energy. The performer goes through the motions. The material is familiar, the beats are predictable, and the engagement dims. The audience cannot pinpoint what is wrong — the show still “works” — but they sense the absence of vitality. The show is technically competent and emotionally flat. It is fine, and fine is the most dangerous word in entertainment.
The antidote is to never stop looking. Never stop listening. Never stop asking: what can be improved? What did the audience teach me tonight? Where did the energy dip? Where did it surge? What moment surprised me? What moment felt stale?
These questions keep the show alive. They keep the performer alive. And they ensure that the show you perform in five years is something fundamentally better than the show you perform today — not because you overhauled it, but because you never stopped refining it. One line at a time. One pause at a time. One music cue at a time. For as long as the performing continues.
Graham’s routine is still evolving after twenty years and twenty-five thousand performances. Mine is still evolving after a few years and a few dozen performances. The timescales are different. The principle is identical. The show is never finished. The show is alive. And alive is exactly where you want it to be.