Michael Weber poses a question in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic that sounds simple and is anything but: if you could only show one trick for the rest of your life, which would it be?
Not which trick is the most technically impressive. Not which trick fools magicians. Not which trick uses the cleverest method. One trick. For the rest of your life. Every audience, every context, every situation — this is the one thing you get to show them. Choose.
I first encountered this exercise on a flight back to Vienna from a business trip. I was reading during the descent, that last forty minutes where your laptop has to be stowed and a book is the only option. I read the question, and I did what most people would do: I started making a mental list of my best material.
And then I stopped making the list, because the question was not asking which trick is my best. The question was asking which trick matters most.
The First Attempt
My first instinct was to choose something visually spectacular. If you only get one shot, go big. Choose the effect that produces the loudest gasp, the widest eyes, the most dramatic reaction. Choose the thing that will make the room explode.
I thought about this for about thirty seconds before realizing that spectacular effects are spectacular partly because they contrast with quieter moments. A visual spectacle in the context of a varied performance stands out because it is the peak. A visual spectacle performed in isolation, over and over, for the rest of your life, would become a party trick. Impressive but shallow. You would be the person who always does that one big thing, and after the third or fourth time someone saw it, the impact would diminish because there would be nothing else to give it context.
My second instinct was to choose something technically demanding. If you are performing one thing forever, it should demonstrate the highest level of skill. This instinct lasted even less time than the first one, because technical skill is the performer’s concern, not the audience’s. A spectator does not know or care whether the method behind an effect requires twenty years of practice or twenty minutes of reading an instruction sheet. They care about the experience. Choosing based on technical difficulty would be choosing based on what impresses me, not on what moves the audience.
My third instinct was to choose a card trick, because card magic is where I started and where I am most comfortable. I know card magic deeply. I could perform a card routine forever and never run out of subtle variations. But this instinct revealed something uncomfortable: I was choosing based on my comfort zone, not on the impact of the experience. Choosing a card trick would be choosing safety. It would be choosing the familiar over the meaningful.
Each instinct I had was telling me something about myself. And none of them were answering Weber’s actual question.
What the Question Really Asks
Weber’s question is not about preference. It is about priorities. When you strip away variety, novelty, technical showmanship, and the ability to curate a set list, you are left with one thing: what do you believe magic is for?
If you believe magic is for fooling people, you choose the trick that is most deceptive. If you believe magic is for demonstrating skill, you choose the trick that is most technically demanding. If you believe magic is for entertaining, you choose the trick that generates the most laughter or applause. If you believe magic is for creating a meaningful human experience, you choose the trick that connects most deeply with the people watching.
The question reveals your values by forcing a single choice. And my values, when I actually sat with the question, surprised me.
The Answer I Did Not Expect
I spent several days with this question. Not continuously — I was working, traveling, living my life — but it kept surfacing in quiet moments. In the shower. While walking to a meeting. In the gap between sleep and consciousness at a hotel in Innsbruck.
I ran through every routine in my repertoire. I ran through routines I had seen other performers do. I ran through routines I had read about but never learned. I imagined myself performing each one in a hundred different contexts — a corporate dinner, a private party, a chance encounter with a stranger, a moment with a close friend — and I asked: which one would I never tire of performing, and which one would never tire the people watching?
The answer was not a card trick.
I had spent years learning card magic. I had spent thousands of hours practicing with a deck in my hands, alone in hotel rooms, building skill and confidence and a deep knowledge of what a deck of cards can do. Card magic was my foundation, my first love, my strongest technical area.
But the one trick I would choose to perform forever was a mentalism piece.
It is a simple piece, structurally. I will not describe the method — that would violate every principle I hold about keeping secrets — but I will describe the experience. A person thinks of something personal and meaningful. Through a process that feels like genuine connection rather than trickery, I demonstrate that I have understood their thought. The moment of revelation is quiet. There is no flash, no explosion, no visual spectacle. There is a silence, and then there is a reaction that comes from somewhere deeper than surprise.
That piece. That is the one I would choose.
Why Mentalism Over Card Magic
When I examined my choice, the reasons became clear, and they taught me something important about where I was headed as a performer.
Card magic, for all its beauty and history and technical richness, is fundamentally about objects. Cards are selected, moved, transformed, found, and revealed. The focus is on what happens to the cards. The spectator participates, but the spectator’s role is to be a witness to what happens to the objects. The drama is in the cards, not in the person.
The mentalism piece I chose is fundamentally about people. There are no objects at the center of the experience. The focus is on what happens between two human beings. The spectator is not a witness — the spectator is the experience. Their thought, their memory, their personality is the material. The drama is in the connection, not in any prop.
This reflects something that had been shifting in me for months without my fully recognizing it. I had been moving away from object-centered magic and toward person-centered magic. Not because one is better than the other in any absolute sense, but because person-centered magic aligns with who I am and what I value. As a consultant, my work is about understanding people — their motivations, their fears, their decision-making patterns. As a performer, the magic that excites me most is magic that does the same thing.
Weber’s question did not change my direction. It revealed a direction I was already traveling.
The Ruthless Implication
There is a consequence to answering this question honestly, and it is not comfortable. If the one trick you would choose to perform forever is a mentalism piece, then what does that say about the card tricks that fill the rest of your set?
It does not say they are bad. It does not say they should be cut. But it does say that they are not what matters most. And if they are not what matters most, then they need to serve the things that do matter most. Every card routine in my set should be building toward or supporting the kind of experience that my mentalism piece creates. If a card routine is just a card routine — if it exists only to demonstrate that I can do things with cards — then it is occupying stage time that could be used for something more aligned with my actual values.
This is the ruthless implication of Weber’s thought experiment. It does not just identify your best trick. It reorganizes your entire repertoire around a central priority. The one trick you choose becomes the standard against which everything else is measured. Routines that support that standard earn their place. Routines that do not are candidates for revision or removal.
I did not cut all my card material. But I did start asking a new question about every piece in my show: does this move the audience closer to the kind of experience that my chosen piece creates? Does this build the connection, the intimacy, the sense that something real is happening between human beings? Or does this just demonstrate that I can do something clever?
Several pieces failed that test. They were clever. They were technically clean. They were not moving the audience in the direction I now knew I wanted to go.
The Exercise for Everyone
I want to make the case that this thought experiment is valuable far beyond magic. Weber’s question, adapted to any discipline, becomes: if you could only do one thing in your field for the rest of your career, what would it be?
For a consultant: if you could only deliver one type of engagement, what would it be? Not the most profitable. Not the most prestigious. The one that matters most to you, that you would never tire of doing, that creates the most value for the people on the other side.
For a speaker: if you could only give one talk forever, what would it be about? What is the one idea you care about enough to refine and deliver for the rest of your professional life?
For anyone in any creative or professional discipline: what is the single thing that, if everything else were stripped away, you would still want to do?
The answer reveals your priorities. And your priorities, once revealed, can guide every decision you make about how to spend your time, your energy, and your attention.
What Happened After
I returned to my set with new eyes. I did not burn it down. I did not start from scratch. But I began a slow, deliberate process of alignment. Each routine was evaluated against the standard set by my answer to Weber’s question. Each routine was asked to justify its existence not in terms of audience reaction or technical difficulty but in terms of contribution to the larger experience I wanted to create.
Some routines were fine. They were already aligned, already contributing, already moving the audience in the right direction. A few were even stronger than I had realized, because in the light of Weber’s question, I could see how they supported the core experience in ways I had not consciously appreciated.
Others needed work. They were good routines that were doing the wrong job. They were entertaining without being meaningful, impressive without being connecting, skillful without being human. These I began to rewrite, not in terms of method but in terms of story and framing, looking for ways to make the experience they created consonant with the experience my one chosen piece creates.
And a few I let go. Not immediately, not dramatically, but gradually. I stopped rehearsing them. I stopped including them in set lists. I let them fade from my active repertoire and into the archive of things I can do but have chosen not to.
The result was a tighter, more coherent, more intentional show. A show that feels like it is about something, not just a collection of impressive things. A show that reflects who I actually am and what I actually believe magic is for.
All because Michael Weber asked a simple question that is not simple at all.