I was proud of the routine. It was my most ambitious piece — a five-minute segment in my corporate keynote that combined mentalism with a business narrative about innovation, decision-making, and the psychology of risk. It had everything. A personal story about a failed startup I had consulted for. A scientific reference about cognitive bias. A volunteer interaction that demonstrated group dynamics. A humorous callback to something I had said in the opening. And a climax that connected all of these threads to a prediction that the audience did not see coming.
It had everything. And that was exactly the problem.
After performing the routine at a conference in Vienna, I asked my standard post-show question to a friend in the audience: “What was that piece about?” She paused. Thought about it. And said, “It was about… a lot of things? Innovation? Decisions? Risk? I am not sure.”
She was not sure. She had watched the entire piece, engaged with it, enjoyed it, and could not tell me what it was about. Because it was about four things. And four things, when you are trying to communicate through a five-minute performance, is the same as zero things.
The Advertising Principle
Pete McCabe introduces what he calls “The One Thing” in Scripting Magic 2, and he draws the concept from advertising. The principle is simple and absolute: an ad can only communicate one idea effectively. If you try to communicate two ideas, you communicate zero.
This principle has been validated repeatedly in marketing research. An advertisement that tries to communicate both “our product is affordable” and “our product is premium quality” communicates neither, because the two messages compete for the audience’s limited processing capacity. The audience retains neither message clearly because both messages interfere with each other. The result is a vague impression rather than a clear takeaway.
McCabe applies this directly to magic: each trick should deliver one clear emotional or intellectual message. Not two. Not three. Certainly not four. One. If your patter tries to be funny and mysterious and educational and touching, it ends up being none of those things. The audience cannot process multiple competing messages simultaneously. They will retain the message that was most vivid or most recent, and the rest will blur into undifferentiated content.
When I read this, I thought immediately of my overloaded routine. Innovation and decision-making and risk psychology and cognitive bias and group dynamics and a startup story and a scientific reference and a callback. The audience’s processing capacity was overwhelmed. They could not identify the one thing because there was no one thing. There was a collection of interesting things, each competing for attention, each undermining the clarity of the others.
The Overloading Instinct
Why did I overload the routine? The answer is embarrassingly simple: because I could. Because each additional element felt like it was making the piece richer, more layered, more impressive. Because my consulting brain, trained to build comprehensive analyses and multi-factor frameworks, naturally wants to include every relevant angle on a topic. Because leaving something out feels like losing something.
This instinct — the instinct to add, to include, to make the piece more — is the enemy of The One Thing. It is the collector’s instinct applied to ideas, and it produces the same result as the collector’s instinct applied to effects: a show that has everything and communicates nothing.
I see this instinct in other performers too. Routines that try to be funny and dramatic. Presentations that try to be educational and entertaining. Scripts that reference three different themes and resolve none of them. The performer thinks they are adding value. They are adding noise.
The discipline of The One Thing is the discipline of subtraction. Not “what can I add to make this piece better?” but “what can I remove to make the message clearer?” Every element that does not serve the one thing is not enriching the piece. It is competing with the one thing for the audience’s attention. And the one thing always loses that competition, because the one thing is subtle and specific and the competing elements are loud and varied.
The Stripping Process
After the Vienna conference, I took the overloaded routine apart. I wrote each of its themes on a separate piece of paper and spread them across the desk of my hotel room. Innovation. Decision-making. Risk psychology. Cognitive bias. Group dynamics. Five themes. Five competing messages. Five reasons why the audience could not tell me what the piece was about.
Then I asked the question McCabe recommends: “Write in one sentence what this trick is really about.”
The sentence I settled on, after many false starts, was: “Your decisions are less free than you think they are.” That was the one thing. The one idea that the routine was designed to communicate. Not innovation. Not risk. Not group dynamics. Just the uncomfortable truth that our sense of free choice is an illusion.
With the one thing identified, the stripping process became mechanical. Every element in the routine was tested against a single question: does this serve the idea that your decisions are less free than you think they are?
The innovation theme did not serve it. Cut. The startup story did not serve it, because the story was about organizational failure, not personal decision-making. Cut. The scientific reference about cognitive bias served it, but the specific reference I was using was too broad — it covered multiple biases rather than focusing on the one bias most relevant to free choice. Narrowed. The group dynamics demonstration served it beautifully, because watching a group of people make identical “independent” choices is a vivid illustration of decision predictability. Kept and expanded. The callback to the opening did not serve it. Cut.
The routine went from five minutes to three minutes. From five themes to one theme. From a collection of interesting ideas to a focused exploration of a single idea. And the single idea, freed from the competition of four other ideas, became vivid, memorable, and powerful in a way that it never was when buried in the crowd.
What Focus Does to Performance
The focused routine performed differently than the overloaded routine in ways I did not expect.
First, I was more confident performing it. This surprised me. With the overloaded version, there was always a low-level anxiety about managing all the threads — making sure the innovation theme connected to the risk theme, which connected to the cognitive bias reference, which set up the callback. It was cognitive juggling, and cognitive juggling on stage divides your attention between content management and audience connection. With the focused version, there was nothing to juggle. One idea. Everything in the script served that idea. I could focus entirely on the audience rather than on my own internal outline.
Second, the audience was more engaged. Not because the focused routine was more entertaining — the overloaded version actually had more entertainment value in raw terms, more jokes, more variety, more visual interest. But entertainment value and engagement are not the same thing. Engagement requires clarity of purpose. The audience needs to know what they are investing their attention in. When the purpose is clear — “this piece is about how your decisions are less free than you think” — the audience invests fully because they know what to expect and what to think about. When the purpose is unclear — “this piece is about… several things?” — the audience hedges their investment because they do not know where to direct their attention.
Third, the climax was more powerful. In the overloaded version, the prediction at the end was impressive but confusing — the audience was not sure which of the five themes the prediction was supposed to illustrate. In the focused version, the prediction was devastating, because the audience knew exactly what it meant. They had been thinking about free choice for three minutes. They believed, at some level, that their choices in the demonstration were free. And then the prediction revealed that their choices were exactly what I had written down before the piece began. The one thing — “your decisions are less free than you think” — landed with the force of personal experience rather than intellectual argument.
Applying The One Thing Across the Set
After the success of stripping one routine, I applied the principle to every piece in my working set. For each routine, I wrote the one-sentence answer to “What is this trick really about?” and then evaluated every element against that sentence.
The results were revealing. Two of my routines had clear one-things already — they had evolved naturally toward focus through repetition and audience feedback. Two routines were moderately overloaded — they had a clear primary theme buried under one or two unnecessary secondary themes. And two routines were disasters — collections of interesting but unrelated elements that communicated no clear message at all.
The two disasters required the most radical surgery. One of them I rebuilt entirely around a new one thing, discarding the original script and starting from scratch with Moore’s six elements as my framework. The other I retired, because when I stripped away the competing elements, the one thing that remained was not interesting enough to sustain a performance. The routine had been surviving on variety rather than on the strength of its central idea, and once the variety was removed, there was nothing left.
This was a painful discovery. I had spent months developing that routine, rehearsing it in hotel rooms, performing it at events. Admitting that it had no real idea at its core — that it was, in McCabe’s terms, a trick without a message — felt like admitting that those months were wasted. They were not wasted, because the process of developing and discarding the routine taught me what I needed to know about The One Thing. But the routine itself was a dead end, and recognizing dead ends quickly is a skill I value in my consulting work and am learning to value in my performing work.
The Paradox of Simplicity
The One Thing principle sounds like it should make routines simpler. In one sense, it does — the audience receives a clearer, more focused message. But in another sense, it makes routines harder, because the performer must do more with less.
When you have five themes to play with, you can always reach for the next theme when the current one feels thin. The variety provides a safety net. When you have one theme, there is no safety net. You must explore that one theme with enough depth, enough creativity, and enough variety of expression to sustain the audience’s interest for the entire duration of the piece. You must find the angles, the facets, the surprises within a single idea rather than switching to a new idea when the first one runs dry.
This requires better writing. It requires deeper thinking about the one thing. It requires finding the emotional resonance, the humor, the surprise, and the insight within a single concept rather than importing them from multiple concepts. It is the difference between a conversation that touches on many topics lightly and a conversation that explores one topic deeply. The second is harder and more rewarding.
I have come to think of The One Thing as a form of creative constraint, similar to the constraints that Austin Kleon describes in Steal Like an Artist: limitations that force better work. When you can only communicate one idea, you are forced to communicate that idea brilliantly. There is no fallback. There is no “but also.” There is only the one thing, explored with every tool at your disposal.
The Standard I Apply Now
Every routine I develop now begins with the one-sentence test. Before I write a script, before I choose a method, before I select a prop, I write one sentence: “This piece is about [one thing].”
If the sentence is not interesting, the piece will not be interesting, regardless of how strong the effect is. If the sentence is vague — “This piece is about magic” or “This piece is about impossibility” — it is not a one thing. It is a category. A one thing is specific: “This piece is about the moment you realize your most confident belief was wrong.” That is specific. That is interesting. That is a sentence that generates a script.
If I cannot write the sentence, the piece is not ready. I go back and think. I talk to Adam about it during our Vulpine Creations calls. I read more. I observe my audiences. I wait for the one thing to reveal itself.
And when it does — when the sentence crystallizes and the focus sharpens and the one thing becomes clear — the script writes itself. Not easily. Not quickly. But inevitably. Because a piece that knows what it is about knows what every line should say. And every line that serves the one thing makes the one thing more powerful. And the one thing, communicated clearly and explored deeply, is more powerful than five things communicated vaguely.
McCabe borrowed this from advertising. Advertising borrowed it from the fundamental architecture of human attention. We can hold one idea. We can process one message. We can remember one thing. The performer who respects this limitation creates experiences that are focused, memorable, and powerful. The performer who fights this limitation creates experiences that are rich, varied, and forgotten.
I know which one I want to be. It took an overloaded routine at a conference in Vienna to teach me. But the lesson, once learned, is itself a one thing: focus. Everything else follows from that.