Max Maven, through Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, poses three questions that every performer must be able to answer. Three questions that, if answered well, form the foundation of everything you do on stage. Three questions that, if left unanswered, ensure that no amount of technical skill or beautiful effects will save you.
The questions are: Who is this person? What story are they telling? Why is it worth my time?
I read these questions in a hotel room in Klagenfurt late on a Tuesday evening, after a corporate event where I had performed well by every measurable standard. The effects were clean. The audience was engaged. The event organizer was happy. By any professional metric, the show was a success.
And yet, when I held my performance up against Maven’s three questions, I could not answer a single one of them.
Question One: Who Is This Person?
This is the question the audience is asking, consciously or not, from the moment you step in front of them. Not “what is your name” or “what do you do.” Those are biographical questions. Maven’s question is theatrical: who is the person I am watching? What kind of human being is this? What is their relationship to the world, to the audience, to the material they are performing?
When I tried to answer this question about my own performance, I came up empty. Who was I on stage? I was… a guy doing magic. A pleasant, reasonably articulate man in good clothes who showed the audience some impossible things and talked between them. That was the character. A guy doing magic.
This is not an identity. This is a void where an identity should be. “A guy doing magic” tells the audience nothing about who I am, what I care about, what lens I see the world through, or what kind of experience they are about to have. It gives them no framework for interpreting what they are watching, no reason to root for me, no basis for emotional connection.
Compare this to performers who have clearly answered the question. Derren Brown is the intellectual provocateur who challenges you to question your own perception. David Blaine is the quiet outsider who treats magic as a genuine form of communion with strangers. Penn and Teller are the irreverent debunkers who celebrate the art form by revealing its contradictions. Each of these performers has answered “who is this person?” with such clarity that you know what you are getting before the first effect begins.
I had no such clarity. I was walking on stage as a professional who happens to do magic, which is technically accurate but theatrically useless. The audience could see that I was competent. They could see that I was professional. But they could not see a character, a perspective, a point of view. They were watching a demonstration by a pleasant technician.
Question Two: What Story Are They Telling?
This question follows directly from the first. Once you know who you are, the story you are telling becomes clear — or at least, the kind of story you can authentically tell becomes constrained in useful ways.
The story is not the script of any individual routine. The story is the larger narrative that the entire performance communicates. What is this show about? What is the through-line? If someone asked the audience afterward “what was the show about?”, what would they say?
For my performance at that time, the honest answer to “what was the show about?” would have been: “He did some card tricks and some mind-reading. It was good.” That is not a story. That is a list of things that happened. A list of events is not a narrative any more than a list of ingredients is a meal.
A story requires a thread — something that connects the beginning to the end and gives the audience a sense that they went somewhere. My performance did not go anywhere. It started with an opening effect, proceeded through several more effects, and ended with a closing effect. Each piece was strong individually. But there was no connective tissue. No arc. No sense of journey. The audience arrived at the end having seen five impressive things but having experienced zero narrative progression.
This bothered me more than the first question, because as a consultant, I know the value of narrative. I build narratives for a living. Every strategy presentation I deliver has a through-line, an arc, a sense of beginning and middle and end. I would never walk into a boardroom and present five disconnected data points and call it a strategy. I would be fired.
But that is essentially what I was doing on stage. Five disconnected effects. No strategy. No story.
Question Three: Why Is It Worth My Time?
This is the hardest question because it demands honesty that most performers — including me — instinctively avoid.
Why should anyone watch you? Not magic in general. You. What do you offer that no one else offers? What experience can you create that justifies the audience’s investment of time and attention? In a world with infinite entertainment options, why should a hundred people sit in chairs and watch you for thirty minutes?
The answers that do not work are: because magic is amazing, because my effects are strong, because I am technically skilled. These might be true. They might even be sufficient reasons for some audience members to enjoy themselves. But they do not answer Maven’s question, which is about differentiation and value. Many performers have strong effects and technical skill. What is unique about the experience you create?
When I tried to answer this question about my own show, I felt the ground shift under me. I did not have a good answer. I had a generic answer — “I provide a memorable entertainment experience that combines impossibility with audience interaction” — but that is marketing copy, not an answer. Any competent magician could make that same claim.
The real answer, the one I was avoiding, was that I did not yet know why my show was worth anyone’s time beyond the generic value of witnessing something impossible. I had not done the work of identifying what makes my specific perspective, my specific approach, my specific person valuable enough to justify an audience’s attention.
This was the most uncomfortable moment I have had in my development as a performer. More uncomfortable than bombing. More uncomfortable than forgetting a routine on stage. Because bombing and forgetting are technical failures that can be fixed with practice. Not knowing why you are worth watching is an identity failure that requires a fundamentally different kind of work.
The Strategy Consultant With No Performance Identity
Here is the irony that nearly crushed me. In my consulting work, I had clear answers to all three of Maven’s questions.
Who is this person? A strategy consultant who brings analytical rigor and creative problem-solving to complex business challenges. Someone who sees patterns across industries and translates complexity into clarity.
What story are they telling? The story of transformation — how a company can move from where it is to where it needs to be, through deliberate strategic choices.
Why is it worth my time? Because this person has a track record of helping companies navigate uncertainty, and the frameworks and insights they bring are specific, tested, and actionable.
Those are clear, differentiated, compelling answers. I had spent fifteen years developing them. They were the foundation of my professional reputation.
On stage, I had none of that. The strategy consultant who could articulate his value proposition in his sleep could not articulate why anyone should watch him perform magic. The person with the clearest professional identity had the vaguest performance identity.
The Work Begins
Maven’s three questions became my homework. Not something to answer in one evening and move on. An ongoing project that I worked on for months, in hotel rooms and on flights and during long walks through Vienna on days when I had time to think.
For the first question, I started by listing everything that was authentically true about me and that might translate to the stage. Not what I wanted to be. What I actually am. An analytical thinker. A naturally curious person. Someone who asks questions and genuinely cares about the answers. A person who came to magic from the outside and brings an outsider’s perspective. A consultant who has spent years studying how people make decisions. A person who finds the intersection of psychology and impossibility genuinely fascinating, not as a performer’s pose but as a real intellectual interest.
From this raw material, a character began to emerge. Not a fictional character. An amplified version of my real self. The strategy consultant who became fascinated by the psychology of decision-making and perception, who uses magic as a lens for exploring those ideas, who invites the audience into experiments that reveal something surprising about how their minds work. Not “a guy doing magic.” A specific person with a specific perspective doing magic for a specific reason.
For the second question, I looked for a through-line. What connects the disparate effects in my show? If each piece is an experiment in perception and decision-making, then the through-line is the journey of discovery — each effect revealing a different facet of how our minds construct reality, building toward a cumulative understanding that what we think we know about our own perceptions is incomplete. The story is not about me. The story is about the audience discovering something about themselves.
For the third question, I looked for differentiation. What do I offer that most magicians do not? The answer was embedded in my biography: I am not a lifelong magician. I am a strategy consultant who came to magic through intellectual curiosity, who approaches it from the outside, who brings a framework of analytical thinking that is different from the framework most magicians use. The experience I create is not “watch a skilled performer” but “join an intellectually curious person in exploring something fascinating.” That is a different proposition. That is worth someone’s time for reasons that go beyond the generic value of witnessing impossibility.
Testing the Answers
Answering the questions was only the first step. The real test was whether the answers worked on stage.
I restructured my show around the new answers. I rewrote my opening to establish who I am — not through biography but through attitude, language, and the way I frame the first interaction with the audience. I rewrote the transitions between effects to create the narrative through-line — each piece building on the last, each discovery leading to the next question. I rewrote the closing to pay off the journey, to give the audience a sense of arrival.
The first full performance of the restructured show was at a conference in Salzburg. Sixty people. A forty-five-minute after-dinner slot.
The difference was not subtle. It was categorical. The audience was not just impressed — they were invested. They were not just watching effects — they were following a story. They were not just reacting to impossibility — they were processing ideas. After the show, people approached me not to say “great tricks” but to say “that thing you said about how we make decisions under pressure — is that really true?” They wanted to continue the conversation. They wanted to explore the ideas further.
That had never happened before. Not once. In all my previous performances, the after-show conversations were about the tricks. Now they were about the ideas. The magic had become a vehicle for something larger, and the audience could feel it.
The Questions Never Stop
I do not consider Maven’s three questions answered permanently. They are living questions that evolve as I evolve. As I perform more, learn more, and develop as both a person and a performer, the answers shift. The character deepens. The story becomes more nuanced. The value proposition becomes more specific.
But the questions remain constant. Before every new routine, before every script revision, before every show: Who is this person? What story are they telling? Why is it worth my time?
If I cannot answer these three questions clearly, I am not ready to perform. Everything else — the method, the technique, the handling, the props — is secondary. The foundation is identity, narrative, and value. Max Maven, through McCabe, gave me the diagnostic tool. The work of answering is mine, and it is ongoing.