There is a concept from acting theory that Pete McCabe applies to magic in Scripting Magic, and it landed on me like a falling piano. The concept is the spine — sometimes called the super-objective — and it is this: every performer needs one driving principle that guides all creative decisions. Not a vague aspiration like “be entertaining” or “be funny.” One specific, personal, actionable principle that determines what belongs in your act and what does not.
McCabe is blunt about the implication: “When a trick does not align with your spine, it does not belong in your act — regardless of how strong it is technically.” Regardless. Not “consider removing it.” Not “maybe adjust it.” It does not belong. Full stop.
I read this on a train from Salzburg to Vienna, and I spent the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour ride staring out the window, not seeing the landscape, trying to identify my spine. It should have been easy. I am a strategy consultant. I work with organizational purpose for a living. I help companies identify their core mission and align their activities around it. Surely I could do this for myself.
It was not easy.
The Problem with Multiple Objectives
The reason identifying a spine is difficult is that most performers have multiple objectives, and they resist choosing one because choosing one means subordinating the others. I wanted to be impressive. I wanted to be funny. I wanted to create genuine astonishment. I wanted to connect with the audience. I wanted to demonstrate intelligence. I wanted to surprise people. Each of these is a legitimate objective. Each of them had shaped my material choices and my performance style.
But having six objectives is the same as having no objective, because when they conflict — and they will conflict — you have no basis for making a decision. Should this routine be funnier or more astonishing? If your objectives include both “be funny” and “create astonishment,” you have no way to decide. Should this piece be more interactive or more theatrical? If your objectives include both “connect with the audience” and “demonstrate intelligence,” the answer depends on which objective you prioritize, and without a spine, you cannot prioritize.
The result of multiple unranked objectives is what I had: a show that was good at many things and great at nothing. A show that was funny in some places, astonishing in others, interactive in others, theatrical in others — but that never committed fully to any one quality because it was always hedging its bets. The show was a committee’s work. And like everything produced by committee, it was competent, inoffensive, and forgettable.
Finding the Spine
The process McCabe describes is deceptively simple. You ask yourself: what is the one thing I want the audience to experience above all else? Not the one thing you want them to think about you. The one thing you want them to experience. The distinction matters. “I want them to think I’m clever” is about you. “I want them to experience the uncanny feeling that someone understands how their mind works” is about the audience.
I spent weeks with this question. I journaled about it in hotel rooms. I discussed it with Adam Wilber during a long phone call that started about Vulpine Creations business and veered into performance philosophy. I turned it over during morning runs along the Danube.
The contenders kept narrowing.
“I want them to laugh” was genuine — I enjoy making people laugh, and laughter is powerful — but it was not the deepest truth. Plenty of performers make people laugh. That was not what made my particular experience unique.
“I want them to be astonished” was closer, but it felt incomplete. Astonishment is a momentary state. It peaks and fades. If astonishment was my spine, then my show was a sequence of peaks with nothing between them, and the valleys between peaks would feel purposeless.
“I want them to feel understood” was closer still. The mentalism pieces in my show, where I seemed to know what someone was thinking, generated a quality of reaction that was different from the reaction to any other kind of effect. It was not just surprise. It was recognition. A feeling of being seen. And that feeling lingered long after the astonishment of the method had faded.
But “feel understood” was not quite right either, because it was too passive. The audience was receiving an experience rather than participating in one.
The spine I eventually identified was this: I want the audience to discover something surprising about how their own minds work.
Not watch me demonstrate something. Discover it themselves. Through the experience of participating in the magic, I want them to realize that their perception, their memory, their decision-making, their intuition operates in ways they did not expect. I want them to leave the show not just saying “that was amazing” but saying “I had no idea my mind worked like that.”
This spine is personal to me. It grows directly from my background in consulting, where I spend my professional life helping people see patterns they could not see on their own. It grows from my genuine fascination with psychology and cognition. It grows from the specific kind of magic I am drawn to — mentalism and psychological effects that involve the audience’s inner life rather than external objects. And it gives me a clear, actionable criterion for evaluating every creative decision.
The Cuts
Identifying the spine was the easy part. The hard part was what came next: evaluating every routine in my show against the spine and removing the ones that did not align.
I had a card routine that I loved. It was technically clean, visually beautiful, and consistently generated strong reactions. I had spent months learning it and more months refining it. The audience enjoyed it. It was, by any standard, a good piece of magic.
It did not align with the spine.
The routine demonstrated skill. It demonstrated impossibility. It was impressive and entertaining. But it did not help the audience discover anything about how their minds work. It was not about their perception or their cognition. It was about my ability to do something extraordinary with a deck of cards. The experience it created was “watch this impressive thing” not “discover something about yourself.”
I tried to reframe it. I spent two evenings in a hotel room in Linz trying to find a psychological angle that would bring the routine into alignment. I wrote three different scripts. None of them worked. The routine’s structure was built around visual surprise, not psychological discovery. Reframing it felt forced, like putting a laboratory coat on a showgirl.
So I cut it.
This was painful. Not professionally painful — the show would survive without one card routine. Emotionally painful. I had invested time, energy, and pride in that piece. It worked. The audience liked it. Cutting it felt like throwing away something valuable because of a principle that the audience would never know about and would never care about.
But McCabe’s words were clear: regardless of how strong it is technically, if it does not align with your spine, it does not belong. And I trusted the principle more than I trusted my attachment to the piece.
I cut two other pieces over the following month, for the same reason. Both were good. Both got reactions. Neither aligned with the spine. Neither helped the audience discover anything about their own minds. Both were demonstrations of ability rather than facilitations of discovery.
What Replaced Them
The space created by cutting three routines was, at first, just space. A shorter show with gaps where the cut pieces used to be. My instinct was to fill the gaps immediately — to find new material that aligned with the spine and slot it in.
I resisted that instinct. Instead, I let the remaining routines expand. I gave them more room to breathe. I extended the interactions with audience members. I added moments of reflection where the audience could process what they had just experienced before moving to the next piece. I slowed down.
The show, with three fewer routines and more space between the remaining ones, was better. Not just because the remaining material was more aligned, but because the space itself served the spine. Discovery requires processing time. If you hit the audience with effect after effect after effect, they do not have time to discover anything — they are too busy reacting. By creating space, I gave the audience room to think, to reflect, to connect what they had experienced to their own understanding of how their minds work.
Gradually, I developed new material to fill some of the space. But the new material was designed from the beginning to serve the spine. Instead of asking “what effect would be impressive here?” I asked “what would help the audience discover something new about their own cognition here?” The questions produced different answers, and the answers produced different routines.
The Spine as Decision-Making Tool
The spine’s real power is not in the initial curation of your set list. Its real power is as an ongoing decision-making tool.
When someone teaches me a new effect at a magic gathering, the spine helps me evaluate it instantly. Not “is this clever?” but “does this serve the audience’s discovery of how their minds work?” If yes, I explore it further. If no, I appreciate it and move on. This has saved me enormous amounts of time that I used to spend learning effects that would never fit my show.
When I am writing a script for a new routine, the spine keeps me focused. Every line of dialogue either serves the spine or it does not. Lines that do not serve it get cut, no matter how funny or clever they are. The spine is the editor that my own ego cannot be.
When I am making production decisions — music, lighting, audience management — the spine provides criteria. Music that creates an atmosphere of curiosity and exploration serves the spine. Music that creates an atmosphere of spectacle and showmanship does not. Lighting that allows the audience to see each other’s reactions serves the spine, because discovery is enhanced by shared experience. Lighting that isolates the performer in a spotlight does not.
I have used similar decision-making tools in consulting for years. A company’s strategic purpose — its spine, in McCabe’s language — is the criterion against which every initiative, every investment, every hire should be evaluated. Companies that lack a clear strategic purpose make scattered, inconsistent decisions. Companies that have one make focused, coherent decisions. The parallel to performance is exact.
The Spine Is Not a Prison
One concern I had when I first identified my spine was that it would become a creative prison. If every routine has to serve the audience’s discovery of their own cognitive processes, am I limited to mentalism? Am I locked into a narrow band of effects? Does the spine prevent me from ever doing something purely fun or purely spectacular?
The answer, I discovered, is no. The spine is a compass, not a cage. It points in a direction. It does not restrict every step to a single path. I still have moments in my show that are purely funny. I still have moments that are visually spectacular. But these moments serve the larger journey. The funny moments create the comfort and trust that make the discovery moments possible. The spectacular moments punctuate the journey and reward the audience’s engagement. Everything serves the spine, but “serving the spine” does not mean “being the spine.” Supporting characters serve the protagonist without being the protagonist.
The spine gives me freedom by giving me constraints. Within the constraint of “help the audience discover something about their own minds,” there is enormous creative space. The constraint eliminates options that would not serve the show, which is not a loss — it is a gift. Fewer bad options means more energy directed toward good ones.
The Lesson Beyond Magic
I have started applying the spine concept outside of magic. In my consulting practice, I have asked myself: what is my professional spine? What is the one thing I want every client engagement to achieve? The answer has clarified my practice and helped me choose which projects to pursue and which to decline.
In my keynote speaking, the spine is even more directly applicable. Every keynote I deliver now has a spine — one driving objective that every story, every data point, every interactive moment serves. The keynotes that have a clear spine are consistently stronger than the ones that try to do multiple things equally.
And in my relationship with Vulpine Creations — the company Adam and I built — the spine concept has influenced how we think about product development. Each product we create should serve a clear purpose. Not multiple purposes. One purpose, executed brilliantly.
McCabe gave me the language. Acting theory gave me the concept. But the application has extended far beyond the stage. The spine is one of those ideas that, once you understand it, you see everywhere. And everywhere you see it, it is doing the same thing: creating coherence from chaos, focus from diffusion, meaning from noise.
One driving objective. Everything serves it. What does not serve it does not belong.
Simple. Brutal. Transformative.