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Introduction

What Is a Magician?

All three of us are magicians, and each of us is something else, too. One is a corporate and political consultant whose clients have included the likes of Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Corazon Aquino, and Barack Obama. Another is the former acting director of the CIA who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, advises companies and governments on intelligence and foreign policy issues, and is a national security analyst with MSNBC. The third is regarded among his fellow magicians as something of a living legend and is the author of The Experience of Magic, Gourmet Close-up Magic, Growing in the Art of Magic, Magic and Meaning (coauthor), Mastering the Art of Magic, and Strange Ceremonies. He is also a highly-regarded philosopher and historian of religion with degrees in philosophy and divinity from Yale.

When we tell people what we do, the consulting, the CIA credentials,

and the philosophy and divinity degrees stir interest, but it’s the magic that unfailingly stops them in their tracks. Eyes go wide, and then they narrow to a squint. In some, this is a sign of bewilderment. In others, it’s more like confusion.

Our typical audiences consist of political or community leaders, CEOs or teachers, symphony directors or software developers. And what ignites our own imagination is the experience of seeing audiences return in an instant to the magic of their childhood, to a place where dreams were bigger, where each moment was more present, and where magic was pure and real. What also excites us is when something we do fires the imagination of an audience to envision new possibilities in their own lives and work—to think different, to think magic, to disrupt from within themselves.

Understand, however, that most people have no idea what a magician is. Adults and older children do have an abiding faith in the visible, provable, and usually self-evident chains of cause and effect that create what we call business as usual. Ask a volunteer to pick a card from the deck, memorize it, return it to the deck, then shuffle the deck, and this abiding faith assures everyone watching that it will be very hard for the magician to retrieve the one and only correct card. If, contrary to ingrained expectation, the magician manages to produce it immediately, this faith is shaken—albeit delightfully. If the magician pulls the card not out of the deck, but out of the volunteer’s shirt pocket, faith is not merely shaken, it is shattered. This creates, in some small way, the sensation of a whole new reality. In consequence, the delight is ratcheted up even higher.

But interestingly, when magicians try to capture the same effect before an audience of young children, they soon bump up against the challenge that, for children, this kind of magic is part of their everyday way of thinking. The effect, astounding to adults, challenges no innate assumptions of children. They have not yet had to struggle through the laws of physics or the elements of logic (they are developmentally incapable of doing so), so they assume that this is just “the way things are.” In this sense, their thinking is quite naturally “magical thinking”—the belief that one’s thoughts alone can bring about a tangible effect in the world.

In adults, magical thinking may find expression in religious faith or psychosis. In young children, by contrast, it is the normal way in which the mind creates reality from ages two to seven, as the great twentieth-century child developmentalist and self-described “genetic epistemologist” Jean Piaget demonstrated. A child holds a balloon on a string. In the yard next door, a dog barks. The balloon pops. Through her tears, the child understands that the dog’s barking made her balloon pop—just as the chosen card appeared in the man’s shirt pocket because the magician made it appear.

Magicians find it truly challenging to amaze little people who think magically. Only after we “grow out of” magical thinking does magic come to seem magical as opposed to ordinary—precisely because magic disrupts our expectations. The poet William Wordsworth keenly felt the heavy weight of nostalgia for childhood, which he saw as a wondrous age of magical thinking, a time in which simply to imagine reality was to create it. “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” the thirty-eight-year-old poet asked in his celebrated “Intimations” ode; “Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

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What is a magician? The man or woman who can, in adult life, still summon the visionary gleam, the glory and the dream, and for whom magical thinking is the height of imaginative sanity.

Sanity, for most people, is first control: confidence in your competence to understand and productively impact reality. Second, it is normality: confidence that you have pretty much the same understanding of reality as others have.

But think deeper, and you will soon realize that we go through life feeling remarkably little control over reality: “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” or “Accidents happen,” or “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” or “Bet on red, spin the wheel, hope for the best.” And as for everyone thinking pretty much like everyone else, who among us admires the people who think just like everyone else? In fact, we celebrate the Shakespeares, the Beethovens, the Edisons, the Jobses. We revere the outliers, the people who think, who see, who imagine different. We honor the disrupters.

When the average member of the average audience watches a very good magician, everything in the show looks easy. Want to see a spectacular and inexplicable kink in the chain of cause and effect? Nothing to it. Yearning to witness a miracle? No problem. Very few are even dimly aware of the enormously complex and physically and intellectually elaborate undergirding beneath the surface of the show. Instead, what the audience believes it sees is an entertainingly adept performer spontaneously manipulating reality.

Spontaneity is the opposite of control. To bend the spontaneous moment to your will—that slice of time the content of which is impossible to foretell, a span of seconds utterly up for grabs—to bend this spontaneous moment to your will is to work a real miracle. Or to appear to do so.

A case in point is Max Katz Breit, born in 1873 in Ostrov, a hamlet straddling the Polish-Austrian border. It was a place of mud and misery, dull, oppressive, and hopeless. For a Jewish family like the Breits, it was decidedly a place to leave. They emigrated to America, hoping to find magic in New York. What Max found was the magic in himself by disrupting the status quo claustrophobia of mud, misery, and oppression that had shaped his first reality. His journey was, in every possible sense, a voyage from Old World to New.

Short, bald, and very round—five foot three and portly—Max Katz Breit performed as Max Malini. He astounded monarchs, presidents, senators, celebrities, regular folk, and fellow magicians with the utter audacity of his effects. A great man—an ambassador, a movie star—extends a handshake to him. Malini responds by seizing the proffered hand. Raising it, along with the great man’s jacket cuff, to his mouth, Malini unceremoniously bites off a button.

Animal!

A moment later, amid the shock he has created, Malini magically restores button to cuff, stitches and all.

Bold and audacious, yes. But spontaneous? Hardly.

In the 1920s, Malini spent a year, perhaps two, systematically bribing a Washington, D.C. tailor who was patronized by the city’s political upper crust to sew certain playing cards inside the suit and evening jackets of several of the most prominent United States senators. By now an entertainer who had delighted more than one American president and had delivered a command performance at Buckingham Palace, Max Malini, child of dull, dangerous Ostrov, now citizen of the New World, is at this time an avidly sought-after dinner guest. At a formal D.C. affair, he recognizes one of the senators he knows is a regular customer of the tailor he bribed months before. Malini greets the dignitary, and the man, unsurprisingly, begins cajoling him into doing a piece of magic.

“I’m not prepared!” the magician protests. “Please understand…out of the question…”

The more Malini demurs, the more the senator insists. With a sigh, at length the magician surrenders and asks if anyone—anyone at all—happens to have a deck of cards. Of course, no one brings playing cards to a formal Washington dinner. Indeed, had someone volunteered a deck, the audience rapidly gathering around Malini would have instantly smelled a rat. But no one thinks twice that the magician himself is carrying a deck. It’s his stock in trade. He holds it out to the senator’s wife, “forcing” a card on her—in other words, handling the deck so that she “chooses,” apparently of her own free will (but only apparently), the very card he wants her to take.

With the “chosen” card securely in the lady’s possession, Malini asks her to produce it.

“Of course,” she giggles.

But she cannot. Flustered, she cannot find it. It has vanished.

“I just had it! Where did it go?”

Malini frowns.

“This is most unusual,” he frets. Then, brightening, he asks, “Is anyone here carrying a knife?”

Of course not. Even in Washington, men and women in formal dress do not carry knives.

“Well,” he says, “I have one.”

Turning to the senator, Malini brandishes his blade. With the man wide eyed, the magician asks his kind indulgence to allow him to perform a minor operation. The senator, speechless for once, neither protests nor agrees as Malini begins to cut through the elegant evening coat, stopping just at the silken lining, where he finds—the missing card!

Spontaneity—the notion that a lot of things “just happen when they happen” and are beyond anyone’s knowing or control—is an article of commonsense faith for just about everyone. It’s part of the picture of “reality” all adults share. For this reason, the greatest magicians embrace spontaneity. They embrace it, but they never rely on it. They shape it.

They bend it to their will. They anticipate it. They arrange for it.

The greater they are, the more they prepare. The props “casually” arrayed on their table? They know, by memory, precisely where every item is. All the magician needs to do is reach, never once looking away from the audience.

The stage is large. But magicians choreograph every move across it. They have thought through in theatrical terms every action and each event, no matter how small or apparently insignificant. Everything, they know, everything communicates, and the objective is to be several steps ahead of the audience at every step. The “miracle” the people are about to see has effectively already occurred—in the thought devoted to it, in the preparation for it.

Understanding how a magician plans spontaneity will help you plan the “spontaneity” of your next pitch, negotiation, criminal investigation, presentation, lesson, business consultation, marketing analysis, or design. We know it will, because all three of us use what we’ve learned from magic for purposes such as these all the time. By the same token, learning how great magicians stay steps ahead of their audience will help you to imagine how you can stay steps ahead of your competition, and even more important, ahead of the customers and clients you serve.

Great magicians are masters at analyzing their audience. They climb into their point of view. They create precisely the perception they want and that they understand the audience wants to perceive. And, having come into the performance steps ahead of the audience, they never let them catch up. They create empathy with their audience, and they adjust their approach by picking up the feedback continually sent to them via audience facial expressions, applause (or its absence), gasps, laughter, the collective intake and expulsion of breath, and (above all) silence. They work the audience as expertly as they manipulate the props they bring with them onstage, and they think ahead to how they might still achieve a successful outcome even if a trick goes badly wrong. The magic business is, in one respect, exactly like every other enterprise. It is a business of people—of understanding and anticipating wants, needs, desires, contingencies, and perceptions, and of using this understanding and anticipation to create delight and satisfaction.

A great magician once said that any good magic trick is performed three times. It is performed first when the magician “does” it. It is performed again when a member of the audience remembers it. And it is performed yet a third time when that audience member tells someone else about it. In this way, magic is like any truly valuable and valued product or service. It converts consumers into advocates, proselytizers, and champions. It creates followers.

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The English word magician is derived from the Latin magus, usually translated as “magician,” or more specifically, “learned magician”—hence the three magi in the Nativity story: “wise men.” The Latin word is derived from the Greek magos, which the Greeks applied to any member of the ancient Persian learned and priestly caste.

Before it became magician, the Latin magus was anglicized as mage. It is difficult to ignore the fact that mage lacks but one vowel to become image. As a noun, image came into English from Old French early in the thirteenth century and referred at that time to any statue or painting or any other artificial visual representation of a person or a thing. As a verb, image debuted in our language later, toward the end of the fourteenth century, when it referred to the formation of a mental picture—that is, to “image” an image in the imagination. That last word, imagination, is also of fourteenth-century origin in English, derived from Old French imaginación, meaning a mental picture, a concept, even a hallucination, an “imagining.”

Through all these etymological transformations, the core remains unchanged. From the beginning and always, magic and imagination share the same central syllable. And it is hardly an accident that they do.

In writing this book, our objective is not to create a new generation of magicians, but to publish in one place and for the first time the CREATING BUSINESS MAGIC strategies of the world’s greatest magicians—to use the force and metaphor of magic to empower boundless imagination, drive leadership, and create success in your business, your career, and your future. At the core of this book is the belief that imagination can make magicians of us all.