I was watching a video of a performer — a very good performer, technically skilled, confident on stage — do a routine in which an object visibly changed from one state to another. The change was clean. The change was visual. The audience reacted. And then the performer moved on.
I watched the clip three times, trying to articulate why the moment felt incomplete despite being technically excellent. On the third viewing, I found it. The effect happened, but the cause was missing. The object changed because… the performer clicked his fingers? Because he waved his hand? Because the magic wanted it to? There was no reason. There was no cause. There was only a result, hanging in midair like a sentence without a subject.
That night in a hotel room in Graz, reading through my notes from Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic, I found the sentence that clarified everything: “The magic is the process, it is what causes the effect. The effect is just the part that we see.”
The effect is just the part that we see.
I read it again. And again. And something fundamental reorganized itself in my understanding of what I was supposed to be doing on stage.
The Standard Model
Most magic, as it is commonly performed, follows what I think of as the standard model. The performer demonstrates an effect — a card changes, a coin appears, a thought is revealed, an object penetrates another object. The audience reacts to the impossibility of the result. “How did you do that?” they ask. The performer smiles knowingly. The routine ends.
In this model, the magic lives in the effect. The magical moment is the moment of change — the instant when the impossible thing becomes visible. Everything before that moment is procedure. Everything after that moment is reaction. The effect is the star of the show. The effect is the point.
I performed this way for a long time. My routines were structured around climactic moments of impossibility. Everything was designed to make that moment as visually striking and as clean as possible. I practiced the moment endlessly. I refined the moment. I lived for the moment.
And the audiences reacted. They were surprised. They were impressed. They applauded. They asked how I did it.
They asked how I did it.
That question, which I used to interpret as a compliment, gradually revealed itself as a failure. Because “How did you do that?” is not a response to wonder. It is a response to a puzzle. The audience is not expressing awe. They are expressing analytical curiosity. They want to solve the problem. They want to find the mechanism. They want to reduce the experience to a method.
And the reason they want to reduce it to a method is that I gave them nothing else to hold onto. I gave them an effect without a cause. I showed them what happened without establishing why it happened. And when the why is missing, the mind fills the gap with how. The analytical mode activates because the narrative mode was never engaged.
The Shift
Brown’s insight — that the magic lives in the cause, not the effect — inverted my entire approach. Instead of building routines toward a climactic effect and hoping the effect was strong enough to carry the experience, I started building routines around a compelling cause and letting the effect feel like its natural consequence.
What does a compelling cause look like? It looks like a reason. A reason why the impossible thing happened. Not a real reason — not a scientific explanation or a revelation of method — but a narrative reason. A story-level cause that gives the audience something to hold onto that is not “the performer did something I did not see.”
Consider two versions of the same experience. In the first version, I hold up a sealed envelope, a volunteer names a word, I open the envelope, and the word is inside. The effect is strong. The impossibility is clear. But the cause is nonexistent — the word is there because… magic? Because I am a magician and this is what magicians do? The audience’s only available response is “How?”
In the second version, I tell a story about pattern recognition. About how our minds are not random but structured, and how the structures that shape our thinking can be understood and even predicted if you know where to look. I describe, conversationally, how our word associations are influenced by context, by recent experience, by the invisible architecture of language itself. I talk about how the envelope was sealed before I knew who would be in the room, before I knew who would volunteer, before any decisions had been made. And then the volunteer names a word, and I open the envelope, and the word is inside.
The effect is identical. The impossibility is identical. But the audience’s response is different. Instead of “How did you do that?” the response is closer to “How is that possible?” — which sounds similar but is fundamentally different. “How did you do that?” seeks a method. “How is that possible?” contemplates the impossible. The first response is analytical. The second is philosophical. The first closes down the experience. The second opens it up.
The difference is the cause. In the second version, I established a cause — the idea that the mind is predictable, that our choices are less free than we think, that the invisible architecture of thought can be read. The cause is not the real explanation. But it is a narrative explanation that the audience can hold onto, and it is more interesting, more provocative, and more emotionally resonant than “a magician did a trick.”
Cause as Experience
Here is what changed when I started thinking about cause first: my routines became experiences rather than demonstrations.
A demonstration says: look what I can do. An experience says: look what just happened to you. A demonstration puts the performer at the center. An experience puts the audience at the center. A demonstration is about skill. An experience is about meaning.
When the audience has a compelling cause to hold onto, the effect becomes part of a larger story rather than the whole story. They are not analyzing a moment of impossibility. They are processing an idea — an idea about prediction, about influence, about the hidden patterns in human behavior, about whatever narrative cause you have established. The effect is evidence within that idea rather than an isolated spectacle.
This is particularly powerful in the context of corporate keynotes, which is where I do most of my performing. In a keynote, the audience is already in idea-processing mode. They came to think about strategy, innovation, leadership, decision-making. When I present a magical effect not as “a trick” but as “a demonstration of a principle we have been discussing,” the effect inherits the meaning of the keynote content. The cause is the principle. The effect is the evidence. And the audience processes the entire experience as a continuation of the business content rather than an interruption of it.
I performed a piece at a leadership conference in Klagenfurt in which the magical effect — which I will not describe in detail — was framed as a demonstration of how our assumptions about other people are simultaneously wrong and useful. The effect was the same one I had been performing for months. The difference was entirely in the framing. I gave it a cause that connected to the conference theme, and the audience’s response shifted from “That was a great trick” to “That changes how I think about my team.” The effect became a vehicle for an idea rather than an end in itself.
Building the Cause
How do you build a cause into a routine? The process I have developed, through trial and error and many late nights writing in hotel rooms across Austria, follows a sequence that might seem backward.
I start with the meaning. What is this routine about? Not “what is the effect?” but “what is the idea?” What concept, principle, or emotional truth does this routine communicate? If I cannot answer this question in a single sentence, the routine does not yet have a cause.
Then I build the narrative. The cause must be established before the effect, the way a story establishes context before it reaches its climax. The audience needs to understand the framework — the why — before they see the what. This means the opening of the routine is not about the props or the procedure. It is about the idea. I might talk for ninety seconds before a prop is even visible. Those ninety seconds establish the cause that will give the effect its meaning.
Then I design the connection. The effect must feel like a consequence of the cause. Not a literal consequence — nobody believes that talking about pattern recognition literally makes a prediction possible — but a narrative consequence. Within the story-logic of the routine, the effect should feel like “and therefore this happened” rather than “and also this happened.” The and-therefore creates a causal chain. The and-also creates a coincidence. Causal chains produce wonder. Coincidences produce puzzlement.
Finally, I calibrate the timing. The cause must be fresh in the audience’s mind at the moment the effect is revealed. If too much time passes between the establishment of the cause and the moment of the effect, the connection weakens. If too little time passes, the audience does not have time to absorb the cause before the effect demands their attention. The optimal window, in my experience, is about ten to fifteen seconds — enough time for the cause to settle into the audience’s awareness, not so much time that it fades.
What I Stopped Doing
Building routines around cause rather than effect forced me to stop doing several things that I had been doing unconsciously for years.
I stopped clicking my fingers as a trigger for magical moments. The finger-click is perhaps the most common magical “cause” in the repertoire, and it is perhaps the weakest. A finger-click does not explain anything. It does not establish meaning. It says “the magic happens now” without saying why. Every time I clicked my fingers, I was announcing the effect without providing a cause, which is like announcing a punchline without telling the joke.
I stopped saying “Watch.” The word “watch” is a signal that something impossible is about to happen, which activates the audience’s analytical mode at precisely the wrong moment. Instead of watching with wonder, they watch with scrutiny. Instead of experiencing the moment, they study it. “Watch” is a method-seeking invitation disguised as a performative command.
I stopped treating the moment of the effect as the climax of the routine. The climax, I discovered, is actually the moment when the cause and the effect connect — when the audience sees the relationship between the idea and the impossibility. The effect itself is the evidence. The climax is the understanding. And the understanding does not happen at the moment of the effect. It happens a beat later, when the audience processes the connection.
The Ongoing Recalibration
I want to be transparent: I have not solved this. I am better at it than I was a year ago, and I was better a year ago than I was two years ago, and I will be better next year than I am now. The shift from effect-centered thinking to cause-centered thinking is not a technique you learn once. It is a perspective you adopt and then spend the rest of your performing life refining.
Some nights, the cause lands and the effect feels inevitable, and the audience’s response has that particular quality of stunned silence that tells you something important just happened. Other nights, the cause does not connect, and the effect feels like what it technically is — a trick — and the audience responds with the polite appreciation that tells you the experience stopped at the surface.
The difference is not in the effect. The effect is always the same. The difference is in the cause. When the narrative cause is vivid, specific, emotionally resonant, and properly timed, the effect becomes magical. When the cause is vague, generic, or poorly timed, the effect becomes a puzzle.
Brown was right. The magic is the process. The magic is the cause. The effect is just the part that we see. And once you understand that, you stop trying to make the effect more impressive and start trying to make the cause more compelling. The first approach has a ceiling. The second approach has none.