There is a moment in the life of every magician — amateur, hobbyist, or professional — when they realize they have been lying to themselves. Not about anything dramatic. Not about talent or potential or the meaning of the art. About something far more insidious: about what the audience actually sees.
I had this moment in a hotel room in Linz.
I was practicing a routine that I had been working on for weeks. The handling was clean. The sequence was logical. The method, I believed, was completely invisible. I had rehearsed it in mirrors, filmed it on my phone, watched it back dozens of times. Everything looked right. There was no flash, no awkward pause, no visible moment where the secret work happened. I was confident — genuinely confident — that this routine was ready.
Two days later, I performed it at a small corporate event. Forty people, good energy, attentive audience. I opened with the routine because I believed it was my strongest piece.
It was not.
After the show, a woman came up to me. She was polite, enthusiastic even. She said she had enjoyed the performance. And then she said, with absolute innocence: “I loved the part where you did that thing with your hand before the card changed.”
She described the method. Not in technical terms, obviously. She did not know what the move was called. But she had seen it. She had seen exactly what I was doing at exactly the moment I was doing it. The thing I thought was invisible — the move I had convinced myself could not be detected — she had watched it happen in real time.
How was this possible? I had checked. I had filmed myself. I had watched the footage with critical eyes. How could something be invisible to me on video but visible to a spectator standing three meters away?
The answer, I later discovered, has a name. Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge.
What the Science Says
Gustav Kuhn, a cognitive psychologist and director of the MAGIC-lab at Goldsmiths, University of London, has written extensively about this phenomenon and its specific implications for magicians. The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which the deeper your understanding of something, the harder it becomes to imagine what it is like to not have that understanding. You know how the method works, so you instinctively assume the spectator can sense something suspicious — even though they have no framework for suspicion. Your knowledge contaminates your ability to see the trick the way they see it.
This is not a magic-specific bias. It operates in every field. Experts in any domain struggle to remember what it was like to be a beginner. A seasoned programmer cannot remember what it felt like to not understand loops. A fluent speaker of a second language cannot reconstruct the confusion of early grammar lessons. The knowledge, once acquired, becomes invisible to the person who holds it — they cannot imagine not having it.
For magicians, the consequences are devastating. You know the secret. You know when the secret work happens. You know what to look for. And because you know all of this, you cannot see your own performance the way a naive spectator sees it. When you watch yourself on video, your eyes go to the critical moment because you know the critical moment exists. You scrutinize the exact instant of the move because you know there is a move to scrutinize. And here is the trap: your heightened awareness of that moment makes you either (a) overestimate how visible it is, leading to unnecessary anxiety about a move that is actually undetectable, or (b) underestimate how visible it is, because your familiarity with the sequence causes you to process it as normal.
I had fallen into trap (b). I had watched my own video so many times that the critical moment looked normal to me. It looked like nothing was happening. Because in my mental model, nothing was supposed to be happening. I had normalized the action through repetition and familiarity. The spectator at the event had no such normalization. She was watching a man handle cards. She had no expectations about what was normal. So when something happened that was not normal, she noticed.
The Egocentric Bias Companion
The curse of knowledge does not operate alone. It travels with a companion: egocentric bias. This is the tendency to rely on our own perspective when trying to understand things from another person’s point of view. We do not imagine their experience from scratch. We imagine our own experience and then try to subtract what we know. The problem is that subtraction does not work. You cannot un-know something.
Here is a practical example. Suppose you are performing a routine where you need the spectator to select a specific card. You use a method that gives them a seemingly free choice while actually guiding them to a predetermined outcome. From your perspective, this feels blatantly controlled. You know where the card is. You know how the guidance works. You know the spectator has no real choice. Everything about the procedure screams manipulation — to you.
But the spectator? The spectator has no idea. They experienced a choice. They selected a card. The procedure felt natural to them because they have no framework for understanding how it could be anything other than natural. The procedure is suspicious only to someone who knows what to be suspicious of.
Kuhn’s research quantified this gap. When nearly 100 magicians were surveyed about how “free” different selection methods would feel to spectators, the magicians’ predictions were driven more by how easy the method was to execute — their own knowledge of the method — than by how spectators actually felt. Even more surprisingly, spectators did not rate simply naming a card as a particularly free selection — contrary to what most magicians assumed. The magicians’ predictions about the spectators’ experience were systematically wrong.
Let that sink in. Nearly 100 experienced magicians could not accurately predict how their audience would feel. Their curse of knowledge was so powerful that even explicit attempts to take the spectator’s perspective failed.
My Linz Realization
Back to that hotel room in Linz, and the aftermath of the corporate event. I sat with the feedback for days. Not because it was harsh — it was not. The woman had been kind. But because it exposed a crack in my entire evaluation process. If I could not trust my own assessment of my own work, how was I supposed to improve?
The answer was uncomfortable: I could not trust my own assessment. Full stop.
This is not a personality flaw. It is not a failure of attention or dedication. It is a feature of how human cognition works. The moment you learn a secret — any secret, in any domain — you lose the ability to see the world as if you did not know it. You can try. You can squint and pretend. But the knowledge is there, always, shaping what you notice and what you dismiss.
For years before I read the research, I had been operating under the assumption that careful self-evaluation was sufficient. Film yourself, watch it back, be honest about what you see. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like the advice a responsible practitioner would give. And it is partially true — filming yourself is valuable, and watching it back with critical eyes is better than not doing so. But it is not sufficient, because the critical eyes you bring to the footage are contaminated eyes. They know the secret.
What Actually Works
Once I understood the curse of knowledge, I changed my evaluation process. Not overnight, and not without resistance. The ego does not enjoy being told that its judgment is unreliable. But the evidence was clear.
First, I started seeking feedback from people who did not know the methods. Not magician friends. Not Adam, who knows everything I do. Real spectators. After performances, I would ask specific questions: “What did you see?” Not “did you like it?” but “what happened?” The gap between what I thought they saw and what they actually saw was, at times, enormous. Moments I thought were invisible were sometimes noticed. Moments I thought were obvious — conditions I had painstakingly established to prove fairness — were completely missed.
This connects to another principle I encountered in Darwin Ortiz’s writing: “Audiences have contrary intelligence. They’re dumb when you want them to be smart and smart when you want them to be dumb.” The curse of knowledge explains why this feels so unpredictable to the performer. You are expecting the audience to see what you see, to notice what you notice, to value what you value. But they are operating with entirely different knowledge, entirely different expectations, entirely different processing.
Second, I learned to trust simplicity. Before understanding the curse of knowledge, I had a tendency to overcomplicate methods — adding extra precautions, extra steps, extra handlings — because I was convinced the audience would catch the simple version. They would not. The simple version was often more deceptive than the complicated one, precisely because the complexity I was adding was designed to address suspicions that only existed in my own head.
Third, and most importantly, I learned humility. Not the false humility of saying “I still have so much to learn” while secretly believing you are better than most. Real humility. The kind that comes from accepting that your brain is lying to you in a specific, measurable, well-documented way, and that no amount of willpower can override the lie. The curse of knowledge is not a problem you solve. It is a condition you manage.
The Broader Lesson
I am a strategy consultant by profession. I have sat in hundreds of boardrooms, helping companies understand their customers. And here is what I have learned from both magic and consulting: the curse of knowledge is the single biggest obstacle in any communication challenge.
The executive who cannot understand why customers do not see the value in a product they spent two years developing — that is the curse of knowledge. The engineer who cannot write documentation that a non-engineer can follow — that is the curse of knowledge. The teacher who cannot remember what it was like to not understand algebra — that is the curse of knowledge.
And the magician who cannot imagine what it is like to watch his own trick without knowing the secret — that is the curse of knowledge.
The trap is the same in every domain: you project your own understanding onto the person who does not share it. You fill in the gaps with your own knowledge and then conclude that they must be seeing what you are seeing. They are not. They never were.
In magic, this has a specific implication that I want to state as plainly as possible: your personal assessment of your tricks is unreliable. Not somewhat unreliable. Fundamentally unreliable. The very knowledge that makes you capable of performing the trick makes you incapable of evaluating it accurately from the audience’s perspective.
This does not mean you should stop evaluating your work. It means you should stop treating self-evaluation as the final word. Film yourself, yes. Watch it back, yes. But then show it to someone who does not know the secret and ask them what they saw. Their answer will surprise you. It will almost certainly be different from what you expected. And the distance between your expectation and their answer — that distance is the curse of knowledge, measured in real time.
That woman in Linz did me a favor she will never know about. She showed me the gap between my inner experience and the audience’s outer experience. She showed me that the thing I was most sure about — the invisibility of my method — was the thing I was most wrong about.
And she taught me the most important lesson in the science of magic: you cannot see your own trick. Not really. Not the way they see it. The secret, once learned, becomes a permanent resident in your perception, and no amount of squinting will make it leave.
The only way out is through other eyes.