There is a standard for creative work that, once you hear it, you cannot unhear it. It comes from Teller — the silent half of Penn and Teller, a performer whose work I have studied through Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic and through watching decades of their performances.
The standard is this: art is real only when your heart is pounding. If you are comfortable, you are repeating yourself. Real art requires entering uncharted terrain, and uncharted terrain feels like fear.
The first time I encountered this idea, I tried to dismiss it. Surely that is hyperbole, I thought. Surely you do not need to be terrified every time you perform. Surely comfort is a sign of mastery, not stagnation.
Then I thought about the last time my heart was pounding during a performance. And I realized it had been months.
The Comfort Zone Problem
By the time I had been performing regularly for about two years, I had developed a set of material that worked. Not spectacularly. Not life-changingly. But reliably. I knew the scripts. I knew the timing. I knew which lines got laughs and which moments got gasps. I could perform my thirty-minute set on autopilot, adjusting only for the specific audience and venue.
And that was exactly the problem.
When you perform material on autopilot, something invisible dies in the performance. The audience may not be able to name what is missing, but they feel it. The difference between a performance that is technically excellent and a performance that is alive is the difference between a photograph of a fire and an actual fire. One is a perfect representation. The other burns.
My performances had become perfect representations. Clean. Polished. Professional. And increasingly dead.
I was not growing because I was not risking. And I was not risking because I had found a level of competence that felt safe. The irony was that the very mastery I had worked so hard to achieve had become the ceiling that prevented me from going higher.
What Risk Actually Means in Performance
I want to be precise about what “risk” means in this context, because it is easy to confuse with recklessness.
Risk does not mean performing material you have not rehearsed. It does not mean attempting technical skills you have not mastered. It does not mean putting yourself in situations where failure is likely. Those are not risks. Those are gambles, and gambles are not creative — they are lazy.
Real creative risk means performing material that challenges you artistically. Material where the emotional territory is unfamiliar. Where the audience relationship is different from what you are used to. Where the script requires you to be vulnerable in a way that your tried-and-true material does not.
For me, the first real risk was adding a genuinely personal story to a mentalism piece. Not a crafted anecdote designed to serve the trick. A real story about a real moment in my life — my initial skepticism about magic, the childhood experience with the clown that made me dismiss the art form for decades, and the strange path that led me back to it as an adult.
The script was ready. The technique was solid. But standing on stage at a corporate event in Salzburg, about to share something genuinely personal with a room full of strangers, my heart was pounding. Not because I was unprepared. Because I was exposed.
That was the night the performance came alive again.
The Pounding Heart as Compass
Teller’s standard is not just an aesthetic principle. It is a diagnostic tool. A compass that tells you whether you are moving toward growth or circling familiar ground.
If you can perform a piece without any nervousness, without any internal tension, without any sense that something is at stake — then you have performed it too many times without evolving it. The material has become routine in the worst sense of the word. It is technically executed but creatively inert.
This does not mean you should feel terrified every night. That would be unsustainable. But you should feel something. A flutter of uncertainty about whether this new transition will work. A quickening of pulse as you approach the part of the set that you rewrote last week and have only tested twice. A heightened awareness that something in tonight’s performance is new, untested, alive.
That feeling is the feeling of growth. And its absence is the feeling of stagnation.
Darwin Ortiz writes that the better you are, the closer they watch. There is a parallel principle at work here: the more comfortable you are, the less alive you are. The audience watches more carefully when you are good. And you perform more vitally when you are slightly uncomfortable.
The Corporate Trap
In the corporate performing context — which is where most of my work happens — there is an enormous incentive to avoid risk. The client is paying you. The event has a schedule. The audience has expectations. Nobody wants to see you experiment.
This creates a trap. You develop material that works in corporate settings. You perform it successfully. The clients are happy. They rebook you. You perform the same material again. They are happy again. The cycle repeats. And slowly, imperceptibly, your performances become a service rather than an art.
There is nothing wrong with service. Service pays the bills. Service builds relationships. Service earns referrals. But if service is all there is, then the creative dimension — the reason most of us started performing in the first place — atrophies.
I have found a practical solution to this trap, and it is deliberately imperfect. I give myself permission to test one new element per corporate performance. Not the whole set. Just one thing. A new opening line. A restructured transition. A different emotional register for the closing piece. Something small enough that the overall performance is not endangered, but significant enough that my heart rate increases when I approach that moment in the set.
This single new element keeps me honest. It ensures that no performance is entirely on autopilot. It means that every time I walk on stage, there is at least one moment where I am in uncharted terrain, where the outcome is genuinely uncertain, where the art is real in Teller’s sense.
What I Learned from Failure
The new elements do not always work. Some of them fail. And the failures have taught me things that the successes never could.
I tried a new opening at a conference in Graz that was designed to be more vulnerable than my usual approach. Instead of starting with confidence and authority, I started with a confession — something I had read about in McCabe’s discussion of confession as a scripting tool. The confession was genuine. The delivery was prepared. But the room was large, the audience was distracted by late arrivals, and the quiet, vulnerable opening was swallowed by the ambient noise.
It failed. Not catastrophically — I recovered quickly and the rest of the set went well. But the opening did not land, and I had to adjust on the fly.
That failure taught me something I could not have learned from success: the confessional opening requires a quiet room. It requires the audience’s attention to already be focused. It works in intimate settings but not in large conference halls with foot traffic. This is practical knowledge that I would not have gained by playing it safe, and it directly improved my material selection for different venues going forward.
Every failure of a new element is data. Every risk that does not pay off tells you something about the boundaries of your material, your audiences, and yourself. The willingness to fail — not the desire to fail, but the willingness to accept failure as a possible outcome of creative risk — is what separates a performer who grows from a performer who plateaus.
The Hotel Room Test
I have developed a personal test for whether a piece of material passes Teller’s standard. I call it the hotel room test, because that is where I rehearse.
I stand in the hotel room, late at night, and I run the piece. Not just the technical handling. The complete performance, including the emotional content. If I can run it without feeling anything — without any flutter of anxiety, without any sense of exposure, without any internal resistance — then the piece has become too comfortable. It needs something new.
Usually what it needs is not a new trick or a new method. It needs a new emotional layer. A personal story I have not told before. A moment of vulnerability I have been avoiding. A creative choice that pushes me toward a part of myself that I have not yet shown an audience.
The hotel room becomes a laboratory for emotional risk. I practice not just the technical execution but the experience of being exposed. I rehearse the feeling of vulnerability so that when I encounter it on stage, it is familiar enough to navigate but still alive enough to fuel the performance.
This is a strange kind of practice. You are not practicing to eliminate nervousness. You are practicing to channel it. To make the pounding heart a source of energy rather than a source of paralysis.
Kleon’s Creative Seasons
Austin Kleon writes about creativity having seasons — periods of growth and periods of dormancy. I think the pounding heart test is how you know which season you are in.
When your heart pounds during creative work, you are in a season of growth. You are pushing into new territory. You are discovering something about yourself and your art that you did not know before.
When your heart is calm during creative work, you may be in a season of refinement — polishing existing material, deepening existing skills. This is valuable work. It is not less important than growth work. But if the calm lasts too long — if months go by without a single moment of creative anxiety — then the season of refinement has become a season of stagnation.
I have learned to track my creative seasons by tracking my anxiety. When I notice that I have been comfortable for too long, I deliberately introduce a new challenge. A new piece. A new audience type. A new performance context. Something that restores the pounding heart and with it, the vitality of the work.
The Paradox of Mastery
There is a paradox at the core of Teller’s standard that I find endlessly thought-provoking. Mastery is supposed to bring comfort. That is the whole point of practice — to transform the difficult into the effortless, the terrifying into the routine. Mastery is the journey from incompetence to competence to unconscious competence.
But Teller says that unconscious competence is the enemy of real art. That the place where you are most comfortable is the place where your art is most in danger.
I do not think these two ideas actually contradict each other. I think the resolution is temporal. Mastery is the process of making one thing comfortable so that you can move on to the next thing that is uncomfortable. You master a technique so that you can attempt a more challenging one. You master a performance so that you can evolve it into something you have not yet tried.
Mastery is not the destination. It is the platform from which you reach for the next level. And each new level, at the moment you reach for it, makes your heart pound.
The performers who stop reaching — who arrive at a level of mastery and decide it is good enough — are the performers whose work gradually loses its life. They are technically excellent. They are reliably entertaining. But there is a spark missing, and the audience feels it even if they cannot name it.
The performers who keep reaching — who treat mastery as a platform rather than a destination — are the ones whose work stays alive for decades. Penn and Teller have been performing together since the 1970s. Their show is one of the longest-running in Las Vegas. And they are still, by their own account, entering uncharted terrain. Still taking risks. Still finding material that makes their hearts pound.
What I Do Now
My rule now is simple: if my heart is not pounding at least once during every performance, something needs to change. Not the audience. Not the venue. Not the client. The material.
This rule has made my creative life more uncomfortable and my performances more alive. It means I am never fully settled, never fully safe, never performing on pure autopilot. There is always at least one moment in every show where I am in the territory where art lives — the territory where the outcome is genuinely uncertain and the experience is genuinely real.
I do not always succeed in that moment. Sometimes the new element works beautifully. Sometimes it stumbles. Sometimes I learn something that makes the next performance better. Sometimes I learn something that makes me abandon the experiment entirely.
But the pounding heart is always there. And as long as it is there, I know the art is real.
Teller’s standard is not comfortable. It is not meant to be. It is a standard that demands continuous growth, continuous vulnerability, and continuous willingness to enter terrain where failure is possible.
But it is also a standard that produces work worth doing. Work that is alive. Work that matters.
And if the price of that work is a pounding heart, then the heart is a small price to pay.