I first encountered Kreskin the way most people my age who are not American encounter him: through a reference in a book about magic. Someone mentioned his name in passing, and I went looking. What I found was not just a performer. It was a case study in how one person can single-handedly expand the market for an entire art form.
This is not just a magic story. This is a business story. And as someone who has spent his career in strategy consulting, the business story is what fascinated me most.
The Kreskin Phenomenon
The Amazing Kreskin — born George Joseph Kresge Jr. — did something that very few performers in any discipline have ever accomplished. He took mentalism, a niche within a niche, a subset of magic that most people had never heard of and even fewer understood, and turned it into a mainstream entertainment category.
He did this not by being the most technically brilliant mentalist, not by having the most innovative effects, and not by reinventing the art form in any fundamental way. He did it by being visible. Relentlessly, strategically, brilliantly visible.
Over the course of his career, Kreskin made hundreds of television appearances. He was a regular on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. He had his own television series. He appeared on talk shows, game shows, news programs, and variety specials. He became, in the consciousness of the American public, what a mentalist looked like, sounded like, and did.
And here is the key point: in doing so, he did not just build an audience for himself. He built an audience for mentalism.
The Market-Making Principle
In strategy consulting, we have a concept called market-making. A market-maker is someone who does not just compete within an existing market — they create a market where none existed before. They define a category, educate consumers about that category, and establish the terms on which everyone in the category will subsequently compete.
Kreskin was a market-maker for mentalism. Before Kreskin’s television presence, if you told someone at a dinner party that you were a mentalist, they would likely have no idea what you were talking about. After Kreskin, they had a reference point. They had seen someone read thoughts on television. They knew what mentalism looked like. They might not understand how it worked, but they understood that it existed as an entertainment category and that it was something they might enjoy.
This is enormously valuable. For every mentalist who came after Kreskin, the job of explaining what they did was already done. The market had been educated. The category had been established. The demand had been created.
Ken Weber makes this point in Maximum Entertainment when he discusses how strong performers boost demand for the entire art form. A great act does not just sell tickets for that performer — it sells the idea that live entertainment in this category is worth attending. A mediocre act does the opposite: it makes people think the entire category is not worth their time.
Kreskin was the ultimate positive example of this principle. By being excellent on television — engaging, surprising, entertaining, memorable — he made millions of people think, “I would enjoy seeing a mentalist perform.” And many of those millions subsequently hired mentalists for corporate events, private parties, and conferences who were not Kreskin but who benefited from the market he had created.
What Made Kreskin Effective on Television
I have watched dozens of Kreskin’s television appearances, and what strikes me is how well he understood the medium. Television is not stage performance. It has different rules, different rhythms, different requirements. And Kreskin adapted to those requirements with remarkable skill.
First, his effects were simple and clear. On television, you have a few minutes at most. There is no time for elaborate setups or complex procedures. Kreskin’s television effects were immediately understandable: he would find a hidden object, he would reveal a thought, he would demonstrate an apparent influence over someone’s choices. The audience could grasp what was supposed to be impossible within seconds, which meant the reveal could land with maximum impact.
Second, he was a personality. He was not just a technician performing effects. He was a character — enthusiastic, slightly eccentric, entirely committed to the idea that what he was doing was real. His energy was infectious. He made mentalism seem exciting, dramatic, and fun. On a talk show couch next to a comedian and a movie star, he held his own because he was genuinely entertaining as a human being, not just as a performer.
Third, he understood the stakes game. One of Kreskin’s most famous innovations was his practice of offering to forfeit his entire performance fee if he could not find his paycheck, which had been hidden somewhere in the venue by a committee of audience members. This was brilliant theater. It created tension. It gave the audience something to root for or against. It transformed a mentalism demonstration into a narrative with real consequences. And it generated enormous press coverage, because a performer willing to work for free if he fails is a story that writes itself.
The Imperfect Master
Here is where the Kreskin story becomes more nuanced and, I think, more instructive.
Kreskin was not without his flaws as a performer. When I read about him in Weber’s book and in other sources, the picture that emerges is of someone who was brilliant at the macro level — the career strategy, the media presence, the market positioning — but inconsistent at the micro level of individual performances.
His body language was sometimes described as quirky to the point of distraction. He had a habit of name-dropping that could grate. He sometimes seemed more interested in proving that his abilities were genuine than in entertaining the audience. These are not fatal flaws — his career is proof that they were not. But they are worth noting because they illustrate an important principle: you do not need to be perfect to be transformative.
Kreskin’s impact on mentalism was enormous despite his imperfections, not because of them. He proved that the market-making function — the visibility, the accessibility, the sheer volume of exposure — can outweigh individual performance inconsistencies. He was good enough, often enough, with enough reach, to change an entire industry.
This is a lesson I carry with me in my own work. The pursuit of perfection can become an excuse for invisibility. You wait until your act is perfect before you perform. You wait until your presentation is flawless before you book the gig. You wait until you have eliminated every weakness before you put yourself in front of an audience. And while you are waiting, nobody is seeing what you do, and no market is being built for the category you want to occupy.
Kreskin did not wait. He performed. He appeared. He put himself in front of every camera and every audience he could find. And by doing so, he made mentalism a thing that people knew about and wanted to see.
The Television-to-Live Feedback Loop
One of the most interesting aspects of Kreskin’s career, from a strategic perspective, is the feedback loop he created between television and live performance.
Television gave him visibility, which created demand for live appearances. Live appearances gave him material and credibility, which made his television appearances more compelling. The two channels reinforced each other in a virtuous cycle that sustained his career for decades.
This is relevant for anyone performing today, even though the media landscape is radically different. The principle remains the same: visibility in one channel creates demand in another. A YouTube clip that goes viral creates demand for live bookings. A strong live performance creates content for social media. The channels have changed, but the loop is identical.
I have seen this in my own work on a much smaller scale. When a clip from one of my keynote performances circulates among the corporate event planners in Austria, booking inquiries increase — not just from people who saw the clip, but from people who heard about it from people who saw it. The visibility creates a ripple effect that extends far beyond the initial audience.
Kreskin understood this instinctively, decades before anyone was talking about content strategy or audience funnels. He knew that being seen was as important as being good, and that maximum visibility created maximum opportunity.
What Kreskin Teaches About Positioning
There is a branding lesson in Kreskin’s career that I think about often. He positioned himself not as a magician who did mental effects, but as a mentalist. Full stop. He owned the category. He was “The Amazing Kreskin,” and what he did was mentalism, and mentalism was what he did.
This categorical clarity was powerful. It meant that when anyone thought about mentalism, they thought about Kreskin. He was not competing with magicians or variety acts or comedians. He was in his own lane, the dominant player in a category he had helped define.
Compare this with the mentalists who position themselves as magicians who also do mentalism. Or the magicians who throw in a mind-reading piece as part of a mixed act. These performers are competing in a broader, more crowded space, and their connection to the mentalism category is diluted by all the other things they do.
I wrestle with this in my own positioning. I am a keynote speaker who uses magic and mentalism. I am a co-founder of a magic company. I am a strategy consultant who performs. My positioning is deliberately broad because my career is deliberately broad. But I have noticed that the gigs where I am booked specifically as someone who will demonstrate the psychology of decision-making through mentalism-style demonstrations — when my mentalism identity is clear and specific — are the gigs where the audience engagement is highest and the post-event feedback is strongest.
Kreskin’s lesson is that clarity of positioning multiplies impact. Not just for the individual performer, but for the category they represent.
The Legacy Question
Kreskin passed away in 2024, and his legacy in mentalism is complex. On one hand, he made mentalism visible and viable as a mainstream entertainment category. On the other hand, his insistence that his abilities were genuine — that he was not doing tricks but demonstrating real psychic sensitivity — rubbed some performers and critics the wrong way. The ethical question of whether a mentalist should claim real powers or be transparent about the theatrical nature of the performance is one that the community continues to debate.
I fall firmly on the transparency side of that debate, influenced heavily by Derren Brown’s approach. But I can separate the ethical question from the strategic question. Strategically, Kreskin was a genius. He understood visibility, positioning, category creation, and the feedback loop between media and live performance in ways that were decades ahead of their time.
And the market he created continues to benefit every mentalist performing today. Every time someone hires a mentalist for a corporate event, every time an event planner includes “mentalist” as a category on their booking form, every time an audience member says “I love mentalism” — that is, in part, Kreskin’s legacy.
He did not just perform mentalism. He made mentalism something worth performing. He took a niche art form and gave it a market, an audience, and a future.
What I Take Away
The Kreskin story reinforces something I have learned across all my professional lives: being great at what you do is necessary but not sufficient. You also need to be visible, positioned clearly, and committed to educating your audience about why what you do matters.
In consulting, the firms that thrive are not just the ones that do the best work. They are the ones that publish, speak, and make their thinking visible. In the startup world, the companies that scale are not just the ones with the best products. They are the ones that define their category and educate their market.
And in mentalism, the performer who changed everything was not the most technically brilliant. He was the one who showed up, every night, on every screen, and made an entire world believe that what he did was worth watching.
That is the Kreskin lesson. Not how to perform mentalism. But how to make mentalism matter.