10 posts in this series
I spent two years practicing sleight of hand every night in hotel rooms. Then one sentence in Darwin Ortiz's Strong Magic made me realize I'd been practicing only half the craft.
Read MoreI spent a year reading everything I could find about magic presentation. Most of it told me to smile more or be more entertaining. None of it told me how.
Read MoreI noticed something strange when I reviewed a recording of myself performing at a corporate event in Linz. Every time I turned away from the table, the audience leaned in toward it.
Read MoreI assumed my audience was following the trick. Then I listened to a recording of myself and realized they were following my words -- and my words were sending them to the wrong place.
Read MoreI was performing perfectly still, and nobody was watching me. Then a waiter walked behind me carrying a tray, and every eye in the room followed him instead.
Read MoreA door slammed during my keynote in Graz and every head turned. In that moment I understood something Darwin Ortiz had been trying to teach me about the oldest attention mechanism in the human nervous system.
Read MoreI spread a deck of cards face-down on the table and one card was face-up. Nobody looked at anything else. That is when I understood contrast as an attention weapon.
Read MoreI left a prop on the table for three minutes and nobody cared. Then I introduced an envelope and every eye in the room locked onto it. Newness is a timer, and it starts counting down the moment something appears.
Read MoreI spent months learning to direct attention with my eyes, my body, and my words. Then I discovered the one tool where the audience does all the work for you -- if you build the right kind of curiosity first.
Read MoreI kept losing my audience at the critical moment, and I could not figure out why. Then I realized the thing they cared about and the thing that would answer their question were in two different places -- and their attention was torn between them.
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