For years, I thought about misdirection the way most people who study magic think about it: as the art of directing the audience’s attention away from something. You have a secret. You do not want them to see it. So you misdirect — you create a diversion, a distraction, something that pulls their eyes and their minds away from the place where the secret lives.
This framing felt natural. It felt like common sense. It even felt a little thrilling, in a clandestine sort of way. You are the magician, and you have something to hide, and misdirection is how you hide it. The audience looks left while the real action happens right. They watch your face while your hands do the work. They think about the card while you do the thing with the other card.
I operated under this framework for a long time. And it caused problems that I did not even recognize as problems until I encountered a single reframing in Dariel Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians that reorganized everything I thought I knew about attention management.
Fitzkee wrote that misdirection is just a subdivision of pointing. Not a separate concept. Not an opposing force. A subdivision. A specific application of a larger, more fundamental principle.
That single sentence changed how I design every moment of every routine I perform.
The Problem with “Away”
The traditional framing of misdirection — directing attention away from the secret — has a structural problem that becomes obvious once you see it. It defines the performer’s job in negative terms. You are trying to prevent something. You are trying to stop the audience from seeing what is actually happening. Your mental model is defensive. You are a goalkeeper, and the audience is taking shots, and your job is to block.
This defensive mindset creates several practical issues.
First, it makes you self-conscious about the secret. If your primary relationship with the audience’s attention is “keep them from seeing the thing,” then the thing looms large in your mind. You become hyper-aware of the secret action. Your body tenses. Your movements become careful in a way that can itself signal that something is being hidden. The more you try to direct attention away, the more you radiate the energy of someone with something to hide.
Second, it leads to artificial diversions. If your job is to pull attention away from point A, you need something at point B to pull attention toward. So you create a diversion — a gesture, a joke, a sudden movement, a verbal distraction. But diversions that exist solely to create cover often feel exactly that way. They feel disconnected from the logic of the performance. The audience may not consciously recognize them as diversions, but they create a subtle dissonance — a moment that does not quite fit, a gesture that seems unmotivated, a joke that arrives at a suspiciously convenient time.
Third, it puts you in a reactive relationship with the audience’s attention. You are not leading. You are managing. You are not creating an experience. You are preventing an observation. The difference in mental posture between those two things is enormous, and it affects every aspect of your performance, from your body language to your vocal delivery to the confidence with which you execute each moment.
The Pointing Framework
Fitzkee’s reframing eliminates all three problems by replacing “away” with “toward.”
Pointing, in Fitzkee’s framework, is the stressing of all factors toward a definite aim. It is the concentration of emphasis — every element of the performance directing the audience’s attention toward a specific objective. Pointing tells the audience: “This is it. This is what matters. Look here.”
Misdirection is simply a special case of pointing. Instead of thinking “I need to direct their attention away from the secret,” you think “I need to direct their attention toward something so compelling that the secret becomes irrelevant.”
This is not a semantic distinction. It is a fundamental shift in how you design performances.
In the pointing framework, your job is not to hide anything. Your job is to create something so interesting, so engaging, so emotionally compelling that the audience voluntarily concentrates their attention on it. They are not being tricked out of seeing the secret. They are being drawn toward something better. The secret is not hidden behind a wall. It is simply overshadowed by something more interesting.
Why “Toward” Is More Powerful Than “Away”
There is a practical reason why directing attention toward something works better than directing it away from something, and it has to do with how human attention actually functions.
Attention is not a searchlight that you can point in one direction or another. It is more like a resource allocation system. Your brain has a limited pool of attentive resources, and it allocates those resources based on perceived importance. Things that are interesting, novel, emotionally relevant, or potentially threatening get more resources. Things that are boring, familiar, or unimportant get fewer.
When you try to direct attention away from something, you are fighting against the audience’s natural resource allocation. If the secret action is visually interesting or logically relevant, the audience’s brain wants to allocate resources to it. Your diversion needs to be powerful enough to override that natural allocation. You are in a tug-of-war with the audience’s own perception system.
When you direct attention toward something, you are working with the system rather than against it. You are providing the audience’s brain with something genuinely worthy of attentive resources — something interesting, novel, emotionally engaging, personally relevant. The brain happily allocates resources to this compelling stimulus, and the secret action, which receives no resources, simply does not register.
The difference is the difference between pushing and pulling. Pushing a person’s attention away from something takes effort and often produces resistance. Pulling their attention toward something takes less effort and produces willing engagement. The audience is not being manipulated. They are being offered something they want to pay attention to.
How This Changed My Design Process
Before I understood the pointing framework, I designed routines in two layers. First, I designed the effect and the method. Second, I designed the misdirection — the specific moments where I needed to divert attention to cover the method. The misdirection was an overlay, applied after the fact to solve problems created by the method.
Now I design routines in one layer. Every moment of the routine is a pointing moment — it directs the audience’s attention toward something specific. The “misdirection” moments are not diversions layered on top. They are organic parts of the routine that happen to be so engaging that the audience’s attention is naturally concentrated on them, leaving no resources for anything else.
Let me give a concrete example without revealing any methods. In a card routine I perform, there is a moment where the audience needs to be focused on the cards rather than on my hands. In the old design, I would have created a diversion at that moment — perhaps a joke, or a gesture, or a question directed at the audience. Something to pull their eyes from my hands to somewhere else.
In the redesigned version, the moment where their attention needs to be on the cards is the moment where something visually interesting is happening with the cards. Not a diversion. A genuine event that the audience wants to see. Their attention is on the cards because the cards are the most interesting thing in the room at that moment. My hands are not hidden. They are simply less interesting than the cards. No diversion needed. No artificial moment. Just good design that makes the interesting thing and the necessary thing the same thing.
The Emotional Layer
The pointing framework extends beyond visual attention. It applies equally to emotional and cognitive attention.
When the audience is emotionally engaged — laughing, feeling suspense, empathizing with a volunteer, wondering about the outcome of a choice — their cognitive resources are allocated to that emotional experience. They are not analyzing the mechanics of what you are doing because their minds are busy processing emotions, predictions, and social dynamics.
This is why personality and storytelling are such powerful attention management tools. Not because they distract from the method, but because they provide the audience with something so emotionally rich that method analysis does not compete for resources.
When I tell a personal story during a routine — something about my experience as a consultant, something about the gap between perception and reality, something about a moment that surprised me — the audience’s attention naturally concentrates on the story. They are processing narrative, character, emotion, and meaning. These are all things they voluntarily allocate attention to because human beings are wired to find stories compelling.
In those moments, I am not misdirecting. I am pointing — toward a story that is genuinely worth their attention. And because their attentive resources are legitimately engaged with the story, there are no leftover resources available for method analysis. The secret is not hidden. It is simply outcompeted by something more interesting.
The Practical Test
I now apply a simple test to every moment in my routines where the audience’s attention needs to be concentrated in a specific direction. I ask: is this moment interesting enough, on its own merits, to earn the audience’s attention?
If the answer is yes — if the thing I am asking them to look at or think about is genuinely compelling independent of its function as cover — then the moment works. The audience will look where I want them to look because they want to look there.
If the answer is no — if the thing I am directing them toward is only interesting as a diversion, if its sole function is to cover the secret — then the moment needs to be redesigned. Because a diversion that exists only as a diversion is fragile. It depends on the audience not noticing that they are being diverted. And audiences, even when they cannot articulate what is happening, often sense the artificiality of a moment that exists for no reason other than to draw their eyes somewhere.
The Confidence Dividend
There is one more benefit to the pointing framework that I did not anticipate: it eliminates a significant source of performance anxiety.
When I thought about misdirection as hiding secrets, I was anxious during the moments when the secrets were most exposed. My body language changed. My voice tightened. My movements became careful and controlled in a way that probably looked unnatural, even if the audience could not identify why.
Now, in those same moments, I am not hiding anything. I am pointing toward something interesting. My mental posture is not defensive but generous — I am offering the audience something engaging. The anxiety of concealment is replaced by the confidence of presentation. I am not worried about being caught because I am not, in my own mind, doing anything that needs catching. I am simply directing a performance, moment by moment, toward the things that matter most.
This confidence is visible. The audience sees a performer who is relaxed and in control, not a performer who is carefully managing their sightlines. That relaxation itself contributes to the illusion, because tension signals deception while ease signals authenticity.
The Universal Application
Fitzkee’s reframing — misdirection as a subdivision of pointing — applies far beyond magic.
In my consulting work, when I present a strategy that requires the client to let go of a previous assumption, I do not spend time arguing against the assumption. I point toward a new framework that is so compelling, so well-supported, so clearly useful that the old assumption becomes irrelevant. The client does not feel manipulated out of their previous belief. They feel drawn toward a better one.
In communication, in leadership, in teaching, in parenting — wherever you need to direct someone’s attention — the same principle holds. Directing away creates resistance. Directing toward creates engagement. Do not pull people from where they are. Draw them toward where you want them to be.
Fitzkee wrote this in the 1940s. The psychology has not changed. Human attention still follows interest. It still resists being pushed and welcomes being pulled. And the performer who understands this — who designs every moment as a pointing moment, who makes every element of the performance genuinely worth the audience’s attention — that performer does not need misdirection at all.
They just need to be worth looking at. And the secret takes care of itself.