When I started thinking seriously about incorporating storytelling into my performances, I made a predictable mistake.
I reached for the big stories.
Not deliberately — it felt natural. If you’re performing for an audience of corporate professionals, you want to demonstrate relevance and credibility. You reach for the experiences that seem appropriately large: the major client engagement, the pivotal strategic decision, the keynote in front of a thousand people. The stories that prove you have something worth listening to.
I would open with something like: “I’ve had the chance to work with companies across twelve countries on questions of strategic transformation, and what I’ve found consistently is that…”
Nobody moved toward me when I said that. They settled back in their chairs. They went slightly more distant.
It took me longer than I should admit to understand why.
The Counterintuitive Truth
Matthew Dicks, in Storyworthy, makes a claim that feels wrong the first time you hear it: the most powerful stories are small.
Not small in significance — small in scope. They are about single moments, limited in time and space, involving ordinary human experience. They are not about the three-year journey or the panoramic insight or the sweeping transformation. They are about the specific moment on a specific Tuesday when one small thing shifted.
The reason is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it: the audience can only go where you take them. And audiences can only follow you into experiences they can inhabit themselves.
A story about “working across twelve countries on strategic transformation” is too large and too smooth to inhabit. There’s nowhere to put yourself in it. There’s no human scale. The listener hears it from the outside and evaluates it — impressive, perhaps, but distant. There’s nothing to grab onto.
A story about a specific moment in a meeting room when I realized the thing I’d been saying confidently for twenty minutes was wrong — that’s small. That’s humiliating in a specific, relatable way. That’s a moment the listener has had some version of. They can inhabit it. They’re inside the story rather than observing it.
The counterintuitive discovery is that the small story, precisely because it’s small, creates more connection than the large one.
What This Means for Magic
The parallel in performance is exact and somewhat uncomfortable.
The instinct in magic and mentalism, particularly for performers who are still building confidence, is to reach for scale. To talk about the astonishing things you’ve done, the famous people you’ve performed for, the spectacular effects you’ve produced. To signal credibility through the size of your track record.
This is the performing equivalent of the twelve-countries story. It creates distance.
The moments that actually connect an audience to a performer are almost always small. The first time a trick completely failed in front of ten people and you had to figure out what to do with the next thirty seconds. The moment backstage when you realized you’d forgotten a key prop. The specific evening when a routine suddenly stopped feeling mechanical and started feeling like something else entirely — and you still don’t quite know what changed.
These moments are small. They’re human. They’re the kinds of moments the audience has had, in different contexts. The performer who offers them gains something that no amount of credential can produce: the audience recognizes a fellow human being.
The Consultant’s Trap
I’m a consultant, which means I’m professionally trained to communicate in abstractions and frameworks. That training is genuinely useful in certain contexts and genuinely destructive in others.
In performance, it’s mostly destructive — at least until you learn to compensate for it.
The consultant mind naturally reaches for: “What I’ve found across many contexts is that…” or “The pattern here is…” or “At a structural level, this is about…”
These framings are accurate. They’re also completely wrong for performance. They take the listener to a level of abstraction where human experience doesn’t live. You can’t feel a pattern. You can’t be moved by a structural observation.
You can be moved by the specific hotel room in Graz where you practiced the same sequence for the fortieth time and then sat there in the dark for ten minutes wondering why you cared about this so much. That’s small. That’s specific. That lives at the right level.
The discipline I’ve had to develop is refusing to let my natural tendency toward abstraction eat the stories before they can be told. The abstraction is fine after the story. It kills the story if it comes first.
Small and Universal
Here’s the paradox that Dicks illuminates, and that I’ve found to be completely reliable in practice: the smaller and more specific a story is, the more universal it becomes.
This seems backwards. Surely a story about “working across twelve countries” connects with more people than a story about “one Tuesday in Graz”? More people have broad professional experience than have been in that specific hotel room.
But universality doesn’t come from breadth of subject. It comes from depth of human truth. And human truths live in the small moments, not the large ones.
The moment of sitting alone late at night, wondering whether you’re spending your time on something that matters — that’s universal. Every person in an audience has had some version of that moment. The specific circumstances (hotel room, cards, trying to learn something new as an adult) are particular to me. But the emotional core of the moment — the late-night uncertainty, the mix of commitment and doubt — is completely universal.
The small story accesses that universal core because it gets specific enough to touch it. The large story slides past on the surface.
The Rewrite Process
When I started applying this, I went through my patter and looked for any place where I was describing big things.
Whenever I found “I’ve performed at corporate events across Austria and internationally,” I asked: what is one specific moment from one specific event that captures what I want to say? And I replaced the summary with the moment.
Whenever I found “I spent years learning and refining this,” I asked: can I give them one evening? One specific attempt? One moment of failure or breakthrough that stands for the years?
The result was patter that was, line by line, more interesting to listen to. Not because the experiences were more impressive — they were smaller. But because small experiences can be lived. Large experiences can only be admired from a distance.
The Hardest Part
The hardest part of this for me — and I suspect for many people who come from analytical or professional backgrounds — is the feeling that small is somehow less credible.
You feel exposed, choosing the small story. You feel like you’re revealing something inadequate about yourself. You’re not talking about the impressive sweep of things; you’re talking about one confused Tuesday.
The paradox is that the exposure is exactly what builds credibility. An audience trusts a performer who is willing to be human. They don’t trust performers who remain consistently impressive. Consistent impressiveness is just a different kind of distance.
Dicks put it clearly: authenticity is the only currency that matters in storytelling, and authenticity lives in the small moments, not the grand ones.
I’ve found this to be exactly right.
Make it little. The smaller the moment, the bigger it lands.