For years, I let my credit card pick my show.
Not on purpose. Nobody sits down and decides to do that.
It happens like this.
You buy a trick. It’s not cheap. You practice it, you build it into the act, you finally take it out and perform it…
and it dies.
Not a disaster. Disasters are memorable. This is worse.
It just sits there. A polite little pocket of nothing right in the middle of your show.
And here’s what you do next, because I did it for a long time.
You keep it in.
You keep it in because that thing cost you two hundred bucks, and by God you are going to get your money’s worth out of it if it takes the rest of your career.
So week after week you stand up there and perform it to a symphony of silence and indifference.
There’s something wired into us about this. Just because we bought something doesn’t mean we have to use it.
Try telling that to the guy holding the receipt.
Let me give you the cleanest example I’ve got.
Professor’s Nightmare.
I have watched magicians I genuinely respect absolutely destroy with that routine. Big laughs, real applause, the whole thing.
Me?
Crickets. Every. Time.
Doesn’t matter how I script it. Doesn’t matter how clean the handling is. It just does not come out of my hands right.
Now flip it around.
Mouth coils. Most guys get a decent, pleasant response out of a mouth coil. Nice little moment, on to the next thing.
The way I do it? I could close a show with a mouth coil. And I have.
Same two tricks. Same magic. Completely different results depending on which of us is holding it.
Some of us are just built differently. That’s not a flaw in the trick, and it sure isn’t a flaw in you.
But — and this took me way too long — “it didn’t play” isn’t automatically the end of the conversation either.
About fifteen years ago I bought a Losander Floating Table.
(It has since gone up to Dead Props Heaven. I’m still not over it. Moving on.)
I practiced that thing every single day. If you’ve done the Floating Table you know that on the initial lift, your hands cannot move. At all.
Mine didn’t. The handling was clean and it was genuinely magical.
And I could not buy a good reaction with it.
I was about a month away from shoving it in a closet.
Then I changed the music.
That’s it. That’s the whole fix.
The new track had a build in it, so I couldn’t lift on my old cue anymore. I had to wait.
So I waited.
And that pause did everything. The kids locked onto the table. The anticipation stacked up. The ta-da landed exactly where the music had promised them it would.
That table was my go-to closer for years after that.
So sometimes the routine is fine and the fit is off, and you fix the fit.
And sometimes you rework a thing eleven different ways and it still dies. That’s Professor’s Nightmare. You let it go and you sleep great.
Either way, the mistake was never buying the wrong trick. Everybody buys wrong tricks.
The mistake was letting the receipt have a vote.
Your audience gets a vote. Your character gets a vote. Your gut gets a vote, once you’ve honestly given the thing a real rework.
The receipt doesn’t get a vote. It never did.
I whined about this on the podcast once — all the money I’ve thrown at props over the years that never made it into a single paid show.
My friend Jim Kleefeld heard it and set me straight. He told me every one of those purchases that didn’t work out is part of your education.
He’s right, and I think about it constantly now. I make a six-figure-plus living doing this. All that dead stuff in my basement was tuition.
Expensive school. Good school.
Here’s my favorite one.
A while back I paid $399.99 for a stage drawing duplication. I love drawing duplications, and I wanted to support the creator instead of just building his method myself out of parts.
The box came. I opened it.
The materials were made so badly that you literally could not perform the trick with what was in there. Not “eh, it’s a little cheap.” Could not do it.
Old me keeps that box and forces it into the show out of spite.
What I did instead was keep the effect and throw out the method. I went back through my notes and built my own version — one that works every time, with nothing flimsy in it to fail on me in front of 200 middle schoolers.
I called it Serendipity.
But you don’t need to buy a thing this week.
Here’s your homework instead.
Go through your show and find the one routine that’s in there because of the receipt and not because of the reaction.
You already know which one it is. You thought of it four paragraphs ago.
Give it one honest rework. The music, the script, the pacing, the beat you keep rushing past. One real attempt.
If it comes alive, congratulations — you may have just found your closer.
If it dies again, take it out.
Nobody is coming to your house to check whether you got your money’s worth.
Your audience only knows what’s in the show.
Have a great week!