How magician Simon Coronel designs tricks, seeks brutal feedback, and performs under pressure

Executive overview

Most performers avoid negative feedback. Simon Coronel — award-winning magician and two-time FISM world champion — builds systems to actively solicit it, including paying audiences dollar coins for every criticism they can offer.

Magic is live special effects engineering, not mysticism. Designing a show means obsessing over audience experience, not technical method. The framework here covers trick creation (top-down vs. bottom-up), feedback systems, deliberate practice, and pre-show preparation.

The show is not the product — the audience experience is.

Leaving a stable career to perform full-time

• Stayed at Accenture five years longer than planned, held back by fear and uncertainty
• The decision came down to two realisations: regret is worse than failure, and readiness never arrives
• "I'm never going to feel ready" was the epiphany that triggered writing the resignation letter
• Best time to start: 10 years ago. Second best: right now

Creating a show: structuring the set

• Everything starts with the time slot — an 18-minute set and a 90-minute show require completely different approaches
• Assembling a show is like a band building a set list: flow, texture, no two similar tricks back-to-back unless thematically linked
• Concept-first approach: design around the ending, then work backwards — like a writer starting with the twist
• Repertoire-first approach: select the best material, then assess how it flows as a whole

Designing a trick: top-down vs. bottom-up

• Top-down: start with a concept ("turn water into wine"), then search for a method to achieve it
• Bottom-up: discover an interesting method or principle first, then build a performance concept around it
• Collaboration beats solo brainstorming — magicians are better at methodology, non-magicians are better at judging whether it lands
• Non-magicians are the target audience; their reaction is the only metric that matters

The feedback system: paying for criticism

• Magic culture traditionally avoids asking how tricks are done — Coronel treats this as a flaw to correct
• Created the Institute of Audience Studies: formal and informal survey systems to understand what audiences actually experienced
• Key question: "If someone offered you a million dollars to guess the method, what would you say?" — bypasses politeness without putting them on the spot
• Physically placing dollar coins on a table and offering $1 per criticism makes the point viscerally: negative feedback has real value
• Feedback goes beyond tricks: one audience member was distracted by unpolished shoes — everything in the show is part of the show
• Applies to any business: packaging, demeanour, delivery are all part of the product

How magic tricks the brain

• The brain uses lazy evaluation: it recognises familiar patterns and fills in detail from memory rather than actively processing everything
• A coin apparently moving from hand to hand fools adults because they've seen that gesture thousands of times — the brain autocompletes it
• Children are harder to fool precisely because they haven't built those shortcuts yet
• Counterintuitive finding: smarter people are often easier to deceive — higher cognitive efficiency means more reliance on pattern-matching

Deliberate practice and skill acquisition

• Eight months to learn a single coin-rolling flourish — practiced in fragments of minutes, not hour-long sessions
• "It's not the hours, it's the minutes" — squeezing practice in while waiting, on the toilet, during TV
• The people who get good are those who find the practice itself intrinsically interesting — not the ones enduring it for the destination
• Teller's advice: keep doing it because you love it, not because you're expecting success — that's the only way to outlast the long odds

Performing under pressure

• A performance quality scale helps manage risk-taking: aim for "one of the best things they've ever seen" but never dip below "no one felt they wasted their time or money"
• Catastrophic show failures are not missed tricks — they're injuries, property damage, or causing offence
• Pre-show nerves are useful; their absence is actually a warning sign that you've stopped caring
• When not in the mood: mentally run a montage of the entire journey — the awkward beginnings, the fear, the sacrifice — then channel that onto stage
• An expectant crowd has a primal effect; it triggers performance state almost regardless of physical or emotional condition

On goals, planning, and structure

• Coronel is self-described bad at internal goal-setting: goals he creates himself don't feel real
• External deadlines with real consequences (a festival slot, a competition) consistently move mountains
• Planning is useful but not a prerequisite — many great things get done in a ramshackle way
• The alternative to jumping in unprepared is often not doing it at all

Video reviews as a feedback loop

• Records performances and watches them from the audience's perspective
• The question is always: what could be better? — not just what went wrong, but what's good that could become great
• Reviews cover everything: posture, pacing, word economy, body language
• Iterates — expects to fix maybe 20% of identified issues in the next performance