Adam Wilber once watched me rehearse a routine and said something that stuck with me: “You hesitate in the same spot every time.”
He was right. There was a moment — about two minutes into a five-minute mentalism piece — where I would pause. Not a dramatic pause. Not a scripted pause. A hesitation. A fraction of a second where my brain was deciding what came next instead of already knowing. It was invisible to most audiences. But Adam saw it, because Adam sees everything.
“Do the whole thing in one minute,” he said. “Right now. Go.”
I looked at him like he was insane. The routine was five minutes long. It had carefully timed pauses, deliberate pacing, spectator interaction. How could I possibly do it in one minute?
“Don’t think about the pauses. Don’t think about the pacing. Just go. As fast as you can. Every line, every action, no stops. Go.”
So I did. I blurred through the routine at roughly five times normal speed. The words came out in a stream. The physical actions blurred together. The carefully constructed dramatic arc compressed into a frantic sprint.
And two things happened that changed how I practice forever.
First, I stumbled in exactly the same spot that Adam had identified. At full speed, the hesitation was not a subtle micro-pause. It was a full stop. My brain hit a wall — the connection between one section and the next was not automated. It required active thought. At performance speed, that active thought was a barely perceptible hesitation. At five times speed, it was a brick wall.
Second, I discovered three other hesitation points that neither of us had noticed at normal speed. They were so small, so well-covered by my rehearsed pacing, that they were invisible in regular performance. But at five times speed, there was nowhere to hide. Every moment of uncertainty, every transition that required conscious navigation, every line that was not truly memorized — all of them were exposed.
The X-Ray Effect
Speed practice is not about performing fast. Nobody wants to watch a mentalism routine delivered at auctioneer pace. Speed practice is a diagnostic tool — an X-ray that reveals the skeletal structure of your routine by stripping away everything that disguises it.
At normal performance speed, you have time to cover hesitations. You can fill a moment of uncertainty with a natural-seeming pause or a gesture. You can smooth over a rough transition by slowing down slightly, by adding a filler word, by pretending the hesitation is deliberate. These cover-ups work. The audience never notices.
But the hesitations are still there. They consume mental energy. Each one pulls a small fraction of your attention away from the audience and toward the question “what comes next?” That mental energy is finite. Every moment spent navigating a hesitation is a moment not spent connecting with the spectator, reading the room, responding to what is happening in front of you.
Pete McCabe’s distinction between script and patter is relevant here. “Patter” is meaningless chatter that fills silence. A “script” is intentional communication that serves the performance. Hesitations are the places where your script degrades into patter — where you are filling silence with noise because you are not quite sure what comes next. Speed practice identifies these exact spots.
How to Do It
The process is simple, but it requires a specific kind of courage — the courage to look terrible. Speed practice is ugly. It sounds ridiculous. If someone walked into the room while you were doing it, they would think you had lost your mind. This is precisely why it works.
Step one: perform the routine at normal speed once, as a baseline. Note any spots that feel uncertain or rough.
Step two: immediately perform it again at approximately double speed. Skip all dramatic pauses. Compress all interactions. If the routine involves spectator participation, simulate the spectator’s responses in fast-forward. The goal is to get through the entire routine without stopping, even if some words get mangled or some actions are approximate.
Step three: perform it again at approximately triple speed. At this point, you will start to feel physical tension in your throat and hands — your body is being asked to execute sequences faster than it has been trained to. The tension reveals habitual slowdowns — moments where your body expects to rest or pause that are actually unnecessary.
Step four: perform it at the fastest speed you can manage while still maintaining the sequence. Not every word needs to be articulated. Not every action needs to be completed. But the order must be preserved. If you skip something, that skipped element is a weak link — something your brain does not consider essential to the flow.
Step five: after the speed run, immediately perform the routine at normal speed. You will feel a dramatic difference. The routine will feel spacious. The pauses will feel earned rather than necessary. The transitions will feel smooth because you have just practiced them at a speed that demanded instant recall.
What Speed Practice Reveals
Beyond hesitations, speed practice reveals three other critical structural qualities.
Unnecessary material. At five times speed, anything that is not essential becomes glaringly obvious. A line that seemed clever at normal speed reveals itself as a detour. An action that seemed important reveals itself as filler. If a moment does not contribute to the forward motion of the routine, speed practice makes it feel like an anchor — something that drags when you are trying to move fast.
I have cut more material from my routines based on speed practice than on any other form of analysis. Eugene Burger’s principle — “presentation is the elimination of non-moments” — comes alive at high speed. At normal speed, a non-moment hides. At five times speed, it screams.
Weak transitions. The places where you shift from one section to another are the places where speed practice is most brutal. A strong transition — one that flows naturally from the preceding section to the next — survives high speed without trouble. A weak transition — one that requires conscious navigation or an awkward shift in energy — creates a visible stumble.
I have a rule now: if a transition breaks at speed, I rewrite it. If it breaks twice, I restructure the sections it connects. If it breaks three times, I consider whether those two sections belong next to each other at all.
The real skeleton. What survives the speed run is the skeleton of your routine — the minimum viable sequence of events, lines, and actions that makes the routine work. Everything that fell away during the speed run was, by definition, not essential. This does not mean you should perform the skeleton. It means you should know what the skeleton is, because the skeleton is what the audience actually follows. Everything built on top of the skeleton is elaboration — valuable elaboration, often essential elaboration, but elaboration nonetheless.
Knowing your skeleton gives you something invaluable: the ability to adjust on the fly. If you are running long, you know exactly what to cut. If the audience is restless, you know which sections are essential and which can be compressed. If something goes wrong mid-routine, you know the minimum path from where you are to the ending. The skeleton is your emergency map.
The Consulting Parallel
In my strategy work, I use a similar technique for presentations. Before any important presentation, I deliver the entire thing at triple speed in my hotel room. No slides. No props. Just the argument, compressed to its essence.
This reveals the same things that speed practice reveals in magic: hesitations where I am not sure of the next point, unnecessary slides that do not advance the argument, weak transitions between sections, and the real structure underneath the polish.
Darwin Ortiz writes in Strong Magic that your job is to make things as easy as possible for the audience, not as easy as possible for yourself. Speed practice is hard on you. It is embarrassing, uncomfortable, and revealing. But it makes the performance easier for the audience because it eliminates every moment of uncertainty that, even at normal speed, creates a subtle barrier between you and the people watching.
Speed Practice and Memorization
There is a specific benefit of speed practice that I did not anticipate when I started: it dramatically accelerates memorization. Not just rote memorization of lines, but deep, structural memorization — the kind where the routine is so embedded in your procedural memory that you could perform it while holding a conversation about something else entirely.
The reason is neurological. When you perform at high speed, your brain is forced to access the routine from procedural memory rather than declarative memory. At normal speed, you can consciously recall the next line (“What comes after this? Oh, right, the bit about the envelope…”). At five times speed, conscious recall is too slow. Your brain must retrieve the next element automatically, the way your fingers retrieve the next note of a well-practiced song without your conscious mind directing them.
Each speed run strengthens these automatic pathways. After ten speed runs, the routine begins to feel like something your body knows rather than something your mind remembers. This is the transition from knowing the routine to owning the routine — from “I can perform this if I concentrate” to “I can perform this the way I tie my shoes.”
The Fear Factor
I want to acknowledge that speed practice is psychologically uncomfortable. It requires you to look foolish. It requires you to fail in a way that is obvious and ungraceful. It requires you to confront the gap between how prepared you think you are and how prepared you actually are.
This discomfort is the point. The hesitations that speed practice reveals are hidden precisely because you have learned to cover them. They are comfortable weaknesses — problems you have lived with so long that they feel normal. Speed practice makes them uncomfortable again, which is the prerequisite for fixing them.
Every speed run is a small act of courage. You are choosing to expose your weaknesses rather than hide them. You are choosing the useful discomfort of honest self-assessment over the comfortable illusion of false preparedness.
Making It a Habit
I now do at least one speed run for every routine before every performance. It takes between one and three minutes, depending on the length of the routine. I do it in my hotel room, usually while getting dressed or during the last few minutes before I leave for the venue.
The practice has two effects. First, it identifies any weak spots that have developed since the last performance — transitions that have gotten sloppy, lines that have drifted from the script, moments where uncertainty has crept in. Second, it loads the routine into procedural memory, priming the automatic pathways so that when I perform at normal speed, the entire routine flows from muscle memory rather than conscious recall.
The difference between performing from muscle memory and performing from conscious recall is the difference between a driver who knows the route by heart and a driver who is following GPS directions. Both arrive at the destination. But the driver who knows the route can pay attention to the road, respond to unexpected situations, and enjoy the drive. The driver following GPS is always one missed turn away from being lost.
Speed practice ensures you know the route. And when you know the route, you are free to pay attention to what actually matters: the person in front of you, the room around you, and the moment you are creating together.
Do your five-minute routine in one minute. It will be ugly. It will be revealing. And it will make the real performance better than any amount of comfortable rehearsal at normal speed.