It happened at a corporate event in Linz. One of those after-dinner slots where people are relaxed, drinks in hand, genuinely in a good mood. I was performing a mentalism piece that involved a spectator naming a card she was thinking of. She named the seven of diamonds. The card I needed her to think of was the nine of hearts. And before I could stop myself, I said, “No, not quite.”
Two words. That was all it took.
The warmth in the room shifted. Not dramatically — nobody booed or walked out. But the woman’s smile tightened. The people around her exchanged glances. The collaborative atmosphere I had spent ten minutes building turned, in that instant, into something colder. Something adversarial. I had made the spectator wrong, and the audience instinctively sided with her.
I recovered. I had a fallback. The rest of the set went fine. But I spent the drive back to Vienna replaying those two words in my head, understanding for the first time what I had actually done wrong. It was not a technical failure. It was not a method failure. It was a human failure. I had made someone feel bad in front of her colleagues, and no amount of subsequent astonishment could fully repair that damage.
The Principle That Changed Everything
Pete McCabe articulates this idea in Scripting Magic with a clarity that hit me like cold water: the spectator is always right. Never tell the audience they are wrong. Even when the trick requires an apparent miss, script it so the spectator is not blamed. Frame the conflict as your problem, not theirs.
When I first read that, I thought it was obvious. Of course you should not make spectators feel bad. Everybody knows that. But then I started watching my own performances more carefully — and watching other magicians at conventions and gatherings — and I realized how constantly and casually we violate this principle.
A spectator names a card. “No, sorry.” A spectator guesses a number. “Not quite, try again.” A spectator makes a choice. “Actually, I need you to pick a different one.” Every one of these moments, no matter how gently delivered, sends the same message: you are wrong. You failed. You did not do what I needed you to do.
And every one of those moments creates a tiny adversarial crack in the performance.
Why “Wrong” Is Poison
To understand why this matters so much, you have to think about what the audience is actually experiencing during a magic performance. They are not watching a movie. They are not reading a book. They are participating in a live interaction with another human being, and the social dynamics of that interaction shape everything they feel.
When a spectator is called up to participate — or even when they are engaged from their seat — they are taking a social risk. They are making themselves vulnerable. They are agreeing to play along with a stranger in front of other people. This requires trust, and that trust is fragile.
The moment you say “wrong,” you betray that trust. You have taken someone who made themselves vulnerable for your benefit and punished them for it. The specific words do not matter. “No.” “Not quite.” “That’s not right.” “Try again.” They all carry the same payload: you failed.
Darwin Ortiz makes a complementary point in Strong Magic about the challenge attitude. When audiences perceive a performance as a contest — performer versus spectator — the dynamic becomes adversarial. The performer cannot win in that frame. If the audience figures things out, the performer loses. If the audience does not figure things out, the audience loses. And nobody enjoys losing.
Saying “wrong” triggers exactly this dynamic. It reframes the interaction from a shared experience into a test, and the spectator just failed the test. Now everyone in the room is subconsciously asking: am I next? Will I be the one who gets it wrong in front of everyone?
That undercurrent of anxiety is the opposite of entertainment.
The Consultant’s Parallel
In my strategy consulting work, there is a nearly identical principle, though it took me years to connect the two. When you are facilitating a workshop with a client’s leadership team and someone proposes an idea that is clearly unworkable, you never say “That won’t work” or “That’s wrong.” You say “That’s interesting — let’s explore how that might play out” or “I can see the logic there — let me add something to it.”
You do this not because you are being dishonest. You do it because the moment you shut someone down in a group setting, everyone else in the room gets quieter. The creative energy drops. People stop taking risks with their ideas because they have just seen what happens when you take a risk: you get told you are wrong.
The psychology is identical in magic performance. The audience is a group. The spectator is a participant. The performer is the facilitator. And the facilitator’s job is to make every participant feel smart, valued, and safe — even when the interaction does not go as planned.
Where I See This Mistake Constantly
Once I became sensitized to this principle, I started noticing it everywhere. It is one of the most common scripting failures in magic, and it happens across all skill levels.
The card magician who asks someone to name their card and responds with “Nope” before revealing the real card. The mentalist who has someone write a number and says “That’s not what I predicted — wait, actually it is” in a way that makes the spectator feel they nearly ruined the trick. The close-up performer who asks a spectator to cut the deck and says “Cut deeper” — implying the first cut was wrong.
Each of these moments is a tiny wound inflicted on someone who agreed to help you. And while each individual wound is small, they accumulate. By the end of a performance peppered with corrections, the audience has learned that participating is risky. They stop volunteering. They stop engaging. They watch from a safe distance, arms crossed, waiting for it to be over.
The irony is that the performers doing this usually have no idea they are doing it. They are focused on the method, on the technique, on getting to the climax. The spectator’s emotional experience in that moment is invisible to them because they are seeing the performance from the inside, not from the audience’s perspective.
The Emotional Cost Budget
Eric Mead, one of the contributors McCabe references, frames this beautifully: there should be no emotional cost to the spectator. The spectator should not be embarrassed, humiliated, or made the butt of the joke. Ever.
I think of this as an emotional cost budget. Every performance has one. Every moment where a spectator feels good — appreciated, included, amazed, delighted — adds to the budget. Every moment where a spectator feels bad — corrected, embarrassed, confused, ignored — subtracts from it.
You want to end your performance with the budget deep in the positive. You want every person who participated to feel better about themselves than they did before you started. That is what makes people remember you. That is what makes people hire you again. That is what makes someone walk up to you afterward and say, “That was incredible.”
Nobody walks up afterward and says, “The trick where you told me I was wrong was incredible.”
Rewriting My Own Scripts
After that night in Linz, I went through every piece in my repertoire and identified every moment where a spectator could potentially feel wrong. Every moment where the script implied a test. Every moment where the audience might perceive a correction.
There were more than I expected.
I found lines like “Think harder” — which implies they were not thinking hard enough. I found transitions where I said “No, watch” — which implies they were not watching correctly. I found moments where I asked someone to shuffle and then said “Give it one more” — which implies the first shuffle was insufficient.
None of these were cruel. None were intended to humiliate. But all of them, when viewed from the spectator’s perspective rather than my own, carried the same subtle message: you are not doing this right.
I rewrote all of them. “Think harder” became “Take a moment — really picture it.” “No, watch” became “Now watch this.” “Give it one more” became “Perfect — mix them up as much as you like.” The factual content was nearly identical. The emotional content was completely different. In every case, the new version made the spectator feel competent, respected, and valued.
The Rule Beyond Magic
This principle extends far beyond magic performance, and I think that is why it resonates so deeply with me as someone who came to this art from the business world.
In keynote speaking, when an audience member asks a question that misses the point, you never say “That’s not what I was talking about.” You say “Great question — and it connects to something I want to build on.”
In negotiation, when the other party makes an offer that is unacceptable, you never say “That’s wrong.” You say “I can see where you’re coming from, and here’s what I’m thinking.”
In parenting, in teaching, in management, in friendship — in every domain where one human being interacts with another in a context where vulnerability is present — the principle holds: making someone feel wrong is the fastest way to destroy the connection you are trying to build.
Magic is just the clearest laboratory for this principle because the stakes are so visible. The spectator is standing in front of a room full of people. Their response is public. Their feelings are on display. When you make them wrong, everyone sees it. When you make them right, everyone feels it.
The Deeper Truth
There is a deeper truth embedded in this principle that took me longer to understand. It is not just that saying “wrong” makes the spectator feel bad. It is that saying “wrong” reveals something about the performer’s priorities.
When you correct a spectator, you are prioritizing the trick over the person. You are saying, in effect, “The outcome of this procedure matters more than your dignity.” And the audience — who are, fundamentally, people watching another person interact with people — reads that priority loud and clear.
The best performers I have studied, whether in magic or in any other performance art, share one quality: they make people feel seen. They communicate, through every word and gesture, that the person in front of them matters more than the trick, more than the script, more than the applause.
The spectator is always right. Not because spectators are infallible. Not because you should never redirect or adjust. But because the spectator’s dignity, comfort, and emotional safety are always more important than any trick you will ever perform.
That is the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it.
What I Do Now
These days, when a spectator says something unexpected — names the wrong card, guesses the wrong number, gives a response I did not anticipate — I have trained myself to pause before I respond. One beat. Just long enough to consciously choose my words.
In that beat, I ask myself one question: how do I make this person right?
Not “How do I get back on track with the trick?” Not “How do I cover for their mistake?” How do I make this person right? Because if I can find a way to validate whatever they just said — even if it was factually incorrect, even if it was not what I needed — then the spectator feels good, the audience relaxes, and the performance remains a shared experience rather than a test.
The trick can take care of itself. The spectator cannot. That is my job.
I learned this the hard way, in a conference room in Linz, from a woman who was generous enough to volunteer and received nothing in return but the word “no.” I owe her a better performance than that. I owe every spectator a better performance than that.
The spectator is always right. Even when they are wrong.