Michael Close said something in his interview with Pete McCabe that has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about magic. He said: “Performance is a gift. Art is a gift. Art is my saying, you know, I look at the world this way, take a look and see if that means anything to you.”
When I first read that, I was in a hotel room in Innsbruck, preparing for a keynote the next morning. I had been thinking about my performance that evening in purely mechanical terms — does this routine flow properly, is the timing right, will the method hold up. The usual checklist.
Close’s words stopped me. Because they reframed everything I was about to do. I was not about to execute a set of procedures. I was about to give a group of people something they would carry with them after they left the room. Something intangible. Something that would exist only in their memory.
A gift of memory.
What the Audience Actually Takes Home
Here is something I have learned from performing at corporate events and conferences across Austria over the past several years: people do not remember tricks. They remember moments.
After a show, nobody comes up to me and says, “I was really impressed by the third phase of your card routine where the selection reversed itself.” They say things like, “I cannot stop thinking about that moment when the card was in my pocket.” Or: “My colleague and I have been arguing about whether you actually read my mind or not.” Or, most valuably: “I felt something I have not felt in a long time.”
The specific trick — the method, the mechanics, the sequence of events — fades from memory within hours. What remains is the feeling. The surprise. The delight. The momentary experience of impossibility. The laughter that happened right before the revelation. The look on the volunteer’s face.
These are the memories. These are the gifts.
Joshua Jay makes a related point in How Magicians Think when he discusses how astonishment works. Astonishment is fleeting, Jay argues. The instant of pure shock lasts only seconds before the rational mind steps in to analyze. But the emotional residue — the feeling of having been transported, however briefly, into a world where the impossible was possible — that can last a lifetime.
I have had people approach me at events years after I performed for them. They cannot describe what I did. They cannot recall the specific effects. But they remember how they felt. They remember the moment their certainty about how the world works was briefly, delightfully shattered.
That memory is the gift. Not the trick. The memory.
Designing for Memory, Not for the Moment
Understanding that your gift is a memory changes how you approach every aspect of performance.
When you design for the moment, you optimize for impact — the biggest reaction, the loudest gasp, the most dramatic reveal. You chase the spike. You want the audience to lose their minds right now.
When you design for memory, you optimize for resonance — the experience that sticks, that replays in the mind, that becomes a story the audience tells to others. You want the experience to live beyond the room.
These two goals are not always the same. The loudest gasp does not always produce the most durable memory. Sometimes a quiet, intimate moment — a whispered prediction that turns out to be correct, a meaningful coincidence that feels personal rather than theatrical — creates a memory that outlasts the spectacular pyrotechnics.
I learned this from a show I did in Graz. I had two effects in my set that evening. One was a big, theatrical reveal with strong visual impact. The audience loved it in the moment — applause, laughter, the whole response. The other was a much quieter piece, a mentalism demonstration where I seemed to read a volunteer’s genuine, private thought. The reaction in the moment was subdued by comparison — no big applause, just a slow look of disbelief on the volunteer’s face.
Three months later, I ran into someone who had been at that show. She did not mention the big theatrical piece at all. What she remembered — what she had told friends about, what she still thought about when she was falling asleep — was the quiet moment. The reading. The feeling that something real had happened.
The quiet moment had become a gift. The loud moment had become a pleasant blur.
The Gift Economy of Performance
Michael Close’s framing of performance as a gift connects to something Austin Kleon explores in Steal Like an Artist: the idea that creative work, at its best, is something you give away. Not in the sense of working for free, but in the sense that the transaction is fundamentally generous. You are saying: here is how I see the world. Here is something I find beautiful or astonishing or meaningful. Take a look and see if it means anything to you.
This framing is the opposite of the demonstration mentality that pervades a lot of magic. The demonstration mentality says: watch what I can do. Admire my skill. Be impressed by my cleverness. The gift mentality says: let me give you something. Let me take you somewhere you have not been. Let me create an experience for you that you will carry with you.
The difference is not subtle. The audience can feel it. When a performer is demonstrating, they are the center of the experience. When a performer is giving, the audience is the center.
Close puts it beautifully: “How often do you see magic performed that you have any sense that this is why the guy’s performing — because he wants you to have something special?” The implication is devastating: most of the time, the audience has no sense of this. Most of the time, the performer’s motivation — conscious or not — is self-oriented. Look at me. Appreciate me. Be impressed by me.
The performers who give rather than demonstrate are rare. And they are the ones whose audiences remember the experience years later.
Building the Memory Architecture
If the gift is a memory, then the performer’s job is to build the architecture of that memory during the performance itself.
Here is what cognitive science tells us about how memories form: we remember beginnings, endings, and emotional peaks. We forget middles. We reconstruct events based on the most intense moment and the final moment, a phenomenon psychologists call the peak-end rule.
This has direct implications for performance design.
Your opening matters because it establishes the frame of the memory. If you open with warmth, authenticity, and genuine engagement, the memory of the entire performance will be colored by that impression.
Your closing matters because it is the last thing the audience experiences, and the last thing disproportionately shapes how they remember everything that came before. A weak ending can retroactively diminish a strong performance. A powerful ending can elevate even a middling show into something memorable.
And the peak — the single most intense emotional moment — matters because it becomes the anchor of the memory. Everything else in the performance supports, leads to, or follows from that peak.
When I script a set, I think about these three elements explicitly. What is the opening impression? What is the peak moment? What is the final image the audience takes with them? If I can get those three things right, the memory architecture is sound. The gift will hold.
The Feeling Will Remain
Derren Brown writes in Absolute Magic that the goal of magic should not be to make the audience say “You are very clever” but to make them feel something has shifted in their world. That they have been briefly transported to a place where different rules apply.
I think Brown is describing the gift. The feeling of transportation — however fleeting — is what remains after the mechanics fade. The audience will not remember the sequence of cards. They will not remember the specific words you said. They will not remember the method, because they never knew it. What they will remember is the feeling: that for a moment, reality was not quite what they thought it was.
That feeling is the most valuable thing a performer can create. More valuable than laughter, more valuable than applause, more valuable than the social media post the audience member might share. Because the feeling lives in the body, in the emotional memory, in the part of the mind that does not analyze but simply experiences.
I think about this every time I set up for a keynote or a corporate event. The audience is about to give me their most precious resource — their attention, their time, their willingness to be present. In exchange, I owe them something worth keeping. Not a demonstration of what I have learned. Not a display of technique. A memory. An experience. A gift.
What This Means for Practice
If the gift is a memory, then practice is not about perfecting technique. Practice is about perfecting the experience you are creating.
Technique serves the experience. It must be flawless so that it does not interfere with the experience. But technique alone does not create a memory worth keeping. A flawless card move does not make anyone’s life better. A flawless card move embedded in a genuine human moment — a moment of connection, surprise, or wonder — that creates a memory.
So when I practice, I do not just practice the mechanics. I practice the moments. The pause before the reveal. The look on my face when the impossible happens. The way I engage the volunteer. The words I use to frame what is about to happen. The silence after the climax that gives the audience time to feel the impact.
These are not technical skills. They are experiential skills. They are the skills that determine whether the audience goes home with a memory or just goes home.
The Memory Test
Here is a test I apply to every effect in my repertoire: if someone saw this six months from now, would they remember it? Not the details. Not the method. Not even the specific effect. Would they remember the feeling?
If the answer is no — if the effect is technically impressive but emotionally forgettable — then it is not a gift. It is a demonstration. And demonstrations do not earn their place in a repertoire that aims to create memories.
If the answer is yes — if there is something about the experience that would stay with the audience, that would become a story they tell, that would make them feel something when they recall it — then the effect has value beyond its mechanics. It has the potential to be a genuine gift.
Close says: “Magic at its best just throws a bucket of water on people. Just for a minute it wakes them up and reminds them to stop being a zombie and look around and see what’s going on.”
That moment of waking up. That is the gift. That is the memory.
And it is the only thing that matters.