There’s a moment before a keynote where I stand in the green room and flip through a small card I carry in my jacket pocket. Not a script. Not notes. More like a list of internal reminders. Things I know but predictably forget when I’m thirty seconds away from walking on stage.
Slow down. Pause after the moment. Let them respond before you move on.
I’ve been performing for years now. I know these things. I’ve written about them, taught them, lectured on them. And yet I still carry the card, because I’ve learned something uncomfortable: knowing a principle and remembering it under pressure are two completely different cognitive tasks.
The Checklist Is Not for Amateurs
When Atul Gawande wrote The Checklist Manifesto, the insight that disrupted the medical community wasn’t that checklists help beginners. It was that checklists help experts. The most experienced surgeons in the world — people who have performed thousands of procedures, who could reconstruct the protocol from memory — were still making preventable errors because under pressure, under fatigue, in the middle of complex situational demands, they were skipping steps they knew perfectly well.
The solution wasn’t more training. It was a card on the wall with a list of reminders.
Pilots understood this long before surgeons did. Even veteran commercial pilots with tens of thousands of flight hours follow checklists. Not because they’ve forgotten the procedures — they haven’t — but because the checklist externalizes critical memory at precisely the moments when internal memory is least reliable.
This is the insight I’ve tried to import into performance. Not because magic is as consequential as surgery or aviation, but because the cognitive dynamics are identical: high stakes, high complexity, high arousal, limited available attention, and a set of things you know but might forget.
What Actually Happens Under Pressure
Here’s what I’ve observed in myself. In practice, in the hotel room, working through a routine alone or with one trusted person watching, I’m relaxed and precise. I hit my pauses. I slow down at the right moments. I let the audience breathe. I don’t rush past the reactions.
Then I walk on stage in front of a corporate audience in Vienna or Graz, and something changes. The arousal level spikes. The presence of real people watching creates a kind of urgency that practice never fully simulates. And in that state, the things I forget are not random — they’re specific and predictable. I rush transitions. I talk through moments that should be silent. I don’t give the audience time to fully register what happened before I’m already moving on.
What’s interesting is that the specific things I forget are the same things I always forget. The pattern is consistent. Under pressure, I consistently sacrifice the same principles: patience at the moment of effect, genuine curiosity about the audience’s reaction, and the discipline to stop talking when stopping is right.
Once I recognized this pattern, the question became: what’s the most efficient intervention? The answer was embarrassingly simple. Write them down. Put the card in your pocket. Check it before every performance.
The Humility Problem
I resisted this for a while. There’s an ego involved in being an expert and carrying a reminder card. It feels like admitting you don’t fully know your craft. Like you’re not really an expert if you need a cheat sheet.
This is backwards.
The expert who doesn’t carry reminders is the one who believes their expertise is immune to the effects of pressure, fatigue, and arousal. That belief is itself a form of incompetence — an overconfidence in the reliability of memory under stress. The real expert knows exactly where their performance degrades under pressure and has built systems to compensate.
I remember reading about this in the context of the sports world — elite athletes who keep notes from coaches, who have physical cue words written on their wrists or shoes, who have a pre-performance ritual that includes explicit verbal review of key technical points. These aren’t people who haven’t learned the material. These are people who have learned the material so thoroughly that they understand precisely how their bodies and minds fail under competitive pressure, and they’ve built compensations.
That’s what I’m doing with the card. Not compensating for ignorance. Compensating for a known, predictable failure mode.
What Goes on the Card
I’ve refined my reminder card over time. Early versions were too long — five or six bullet points, which is too much to hold in mind during pre-performance nerves. I’ve gotten it down to three things, sometimes two.
The criteria for what gets on the card: it must be something I know and consistently forget under pressure. Not something I’m still learning. Not a technical reminder about how to perform a specific effect. Those belong in rehearsal, not pre-show.
The card is purely about performance mindset — things that are true in practice and get dropped when the stakes go up. Currently it says something like:
Breathe before you start. Trust the silence. Their reaction is the effect.
Three things. All of them things I know in my bones. All of them things I’ve walked on stage and forgotten within the first two minutes.
Your list will be different. The point isn’t the specific reminders — it’s the process of identifying your personal failure modes under pressure and building a simple external system to compensate for them.
The Self-Knowledge Required
Developing a useful reminder card requires something that’s harder than it looks: accurate knowledge of how you perform under pressure versus how you perform in practice.
Most people have a rough sense of this. I get nervous. My hands shake. I forget words. But the precision matters. Under pressure, which principles do you specifically sacrifice? What gets worse? What gets better? What stays consistent?
For me: timing gets worse (I rush). Patience with silence gets worse (I fill it). Technical execution gets better under pressure, not worse — the adrenaline sharpens focus on the physical. So my reminders are never about technical execution. They’re always about pacing and presence.
If you haven’t observed yourself closely enough to know your specific pressure failure modes, that’s the first work to do. Video yourself performing under different conditions — alone in practice, then in front of a small trusted group, then in a real performance. Compare. The differences you observe are your failure modes. Those are what go on the card.
The Pre-Performance Ritual
The card is most useful as part of a deliberate pre-performance ritual, not just an occasional reference. I read it every single time before I perform, even if I know what’s on it by heart.
The act of reading is less about receiving new information than about deliberately shifting mental state. It’s a signal to the part of my brain that manages performance: we’re going into a mode where these things matter. It’s priming, essentially. Research on pre-performance routines supports this — athletes who follow consistent pre-competition rituals perform more consistently under pressure than those who don’t, independent of the specific content of the ritual.
The consistency is what does the work. Not the content per se, but the habitual act of directing attention toward what matters before it matters.
I’ve watched performers who seem effortlessly natural on stage, who seem to have no gap between their practice self and their performance self. I’ve come to believe they’re not more talented or more relaxed. They’ve just done so many repetitions under pressure that their failure modes have been progressively extinguished over time. The principles they used to consciously remind themselves of have become automatic.
That’s the goal. But it takes longer than most people expect. In the meantime, the card bridges the gap.
What This Is Really About
The cheat sheet principle is, at bottom, about intellectual humility. It requires you to accept that knowing something is not the same as reliably executing it under pressure, and that building external systems to compensate for human cognitive limitations is a sign of sophistication, not weakness.
This runs against a certain mythology of mastery — the idea that the true expert needs nothing external, that real knowledge lives entirely inside you. It’s a seductive idea. It’s also wrong.
The best surgeons use checklists. The most experienced pilots use checklists. The athletes at the peak of their physical careers use physical cues and rituals to keep themselves aligned with what they know. The idea that a performer should be above such things is just ego dressed up as professionalism.
I carry a card. It helps. It always helps. And I’m no longer embarrassed about that — because I understand what the card is actually for. It’s not a substitute for expertise. It’s a tool built by an expert who knows precisely where expertise breaks down under pressure.
That’s the distinction. Know your failure modes. Write them down. Check them before you walk on stage. Not because you don’t know them. Because you do.