cover

CONTENTS

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: The Business of Illusion
1 Mind the Gap
2 Load Up
3 Write the Script
4 Control the Frame
5 Design Free Choice
6 Employ the Familiar
7 Conjure an Out
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright

ABOUT THE BOOK

As an illusionist, David Kwong astounds CEOs, TED Talk audiences and gigantic crowds, making them see, think, and even remember whatever he chooses. Illusion is the ancient art of control – how to command a room, build anticipation, and appear to work wonders. Business leaders like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett are masters of the same skills – swaying opinion and making people believe.

In Spellbound, David reveals seven fundamental principles of illusion that give all of us more power and impact. He reveals how to use what your audience wants to imagine, how misdirection and the illusion of choice can draw them in, and how to take secret advantage of their habits and expectations to really wow the crowd.

Discover a fresh way to sell your ideas, products or skills to make your best shot better than ever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVID KWONG is a magician and New York Times crossword puzzle constructor. He holds a degree in history from Harvard, where he studied the history of magicians. Kwong was the head magic consultant on the worldwide hit Now You See Me and is the secret code adviser on NBC’s Blindspot. Other films he has consulted on include Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, The Imitation Game, and The Magnificent Seven. A TED Talk favorite, Kwong regularly lectures and performs for companies worldwide. He lives in Los Angeles.

title page for Spellbound

TO MY PARENTS AND MY BROTHER—JOANIE, TAI, AND MICHAEL,

THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE, SUPPORT, AND THE LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF CARDS THAT YOU’VE PICKED.

INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF ILLUSION

MANY MAGICIANS PRETEND to have superpowers. They strive to convince spectators that their feats are impossible for mere mortals to comprehend, let alone imitate. Often they claim to have extrasensory or telepathic abilities. Not all illusionists play these games, however. There are those—far fewer in number—who freely acknowledge that their powers are the product of tricks and of years of study. I fall into this latter camp.

Though I, too, pride myself on giving my audiences the thrill of disbelief, of mystery and a sense of the impossible, I don’t pretend that the power of illusion is supernatural. On the contrary, I understand and insist that magic actually takes place in the mind of the spectator. It’s a deeply and fundamentally human process, which is why those who command the true power of illusion are masters, not of ESP, but of insight and influence.

I practice illusionism as entertainment. My audiences range from corporate CEOs to TED talk viewers, and my stock in trade consists of cards and crossword puzzles, ordinary objects and information encoded in the minds of volunteers. I don’t pull rabbits from hats, or use smoke and mirrors. I don’t vanish tigers, or levitate scantily clad women. My foremost advantage as a magician is that I’m always one step ahead (or two or three or four). My hand is quicker than your eye. I know what you’ll notice, and what you won’t. I employ science to conjure feats that only appear impossible.

The original sorcerers used the very same tricks, though most would have rather been burned at the stake than admit it. Magic’s roots stretch back to the occult and shamanistic rituals of high priests, astrologists, and oracles, many of whom used supposedly psychic gifts to direct the conduct of emperors and kings. The ability to hold a royal audience spellbound often led to political power. The sorcerers’ currency was awe, and their audiences were willing to pay dearly for it.

As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Our lives today may appear to be dominated more by global technology than by royal sorcerers, but illusion still plays a fundamental role in all human thought. Every one of us relies on illusory information to help us decide what is true and what’s false, who is trustworthy and who’s not, what the future will hold, and what our options are. Arguably, the principles of illusion have never played a stronger role in determining our leaders, policies, and success stories than they do today.

When Steve Jobs introduced the Apple II, didn’t he have to create an illusion of novelty that telegraphed the exceptionalism of his improvements on Apple I? When Maestro Gustavo Dudamel raises his baton to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, doesn’t he project an illusion of absolute readiness that will override any hesitation among his orchestra members? And when Warren Buffett is bucking trends that dominate Wall Street, mustn’t he simultaneously deploy an illusion of certainty to compel his investors to trust his wisdom and leadership? Business and thought leaders as diverse as Ted Turner and President Obama, Megyn Kelly and Jeff Bezos, have used the principles of illusion to sway opinions and secure power and influence. Some CEOs, such as Kind Snacks’ Daniel Lubetzky, Aaron Levie of Box.net, Supplemental Health Care’s Janet Elkin, and Tony Hsieh of Zappos, literally performed as magicians before entering the corporate world. But whether or not they’ve ever conducted stage illusions, all successful executives are masters of control and agents of command. They understand how the human brain is wired to fill the gap between seeing and believing—and they take advantage of that wiring for their own purposes.

Ultimately, compelling leaders know how dependent their audiences are on illusion, and they use that knowledge to impress, persuade, and motivate. Just as you can.

THERE IS NO official instruction manual for practicing illusion. However, in this book I’ve distilled the methods I use onstage into seven core principles that have centuries of beta-tested success behind them. These seven fundamentals empower magicians to command a room, to build anticipation, and to appear to work wonders. They keep us at least one step ahead of the audience, showcasing our abilities and converting skeptics into supporters. But you don’t have to be a magician to master these principles. And you needn’t be an entertainer to benefit from them. On the contrary, they can be game changers for you in any arena—political, corporate, technological, even in your social life.

In the chapters that follow you’ll learn the rules of human behavior and cognition that make your audience susceptible to illusion. You’ll meet thought leaders and innovators throughout history who have used these tenets to leverage their ideas into industry empires. And you’ll discover how these seven principles can give you an edge on the competition and grant you a greater sense of control in your own life.

You know how cutthroat the world is today. Everyone is trying to land a better job, obtain the green light for their project, attract more customers, clients, and friends. Everyone wants to get ahead—and everyone is trying in the same way. That’s their problem. But the principles of illusion will give you a different approach to sell your idea, product, or skills, making your best shot better than everyone else’s.

Let me be clear: I’m not going to teach you how to perform specific magic tricks. For ages, the best of these acts have been handed down from masters to apprentices, from fathers to sons through generations of family trade. This practice is considered so sacred that, for lack of a suitable heir, the pioneering Austrian magician Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser actually ordered his own priceless library destroyed upon his death in 1875. The reason for this secrecy is simple: Knowing exactly how a trick works undermines the illusion. It wrecks the trade. And it ruins the mystery. I would never explain anyone else’s trade secrets. I’m not going to rob you of the joy of watching a magic show. And I’m not going to teach you how to become a magician—though I do believe you’ll appreciate the art of illusion more when you understand its underlying principles.

Nor am I going to show you how to cheat. It is in the nature of magic to deceive, and the line between illusion and con artistry can be slippery, but the purpose of this book is most definitely not to serve as a guide for conning people. On the contrary, I want to emphasize that the more you make your audience believe, the greater your responsibility becomes for the effects of that belief.

Illusion is a powerful business. Between your designs and the other person’s awe, there will always be a certain amount of manipulation. If your manipulations are intended to enrich or empower yourself at your audience’s expense, that could qualify as a con. On the other hand, if you use illusion as a tool to legitimately educate or assist your audiences, then you’ll deserve to be regarded as a hero. Consequences count.

Magic asks you to question what you see before you and envision what can’t possibly be there. To harness the power of the magical gap between what is and what could be, for your own ethical purposes—that is the real business of this book. As a bonus, you’ll learn how to spot a con and protect yourself from the dirty tricks of fraudsters! The best defense is an educated offense, especially when dealing with illusions.

WHAT I WILL reveal to you are the seven essential principles that form the foundation for illusion in magic and in life. In the chapters to come you’ll learn how and why to approach your goals as a magician would:

  1. In Mind the Gap, you’ll learn to recognize and employ the perceptual space between your audience’s ability to see and their impulse to believe.
  2. In Load Up, I’ll help you prepare to amaze your audience.
  3. In Write the Script, you’ll discover the importance of shaping the narrative that surrounds your illusion.
  4. In Control the Frame, we’ll explore the real-life value of a magician’s best friend: misdirection.
  5. In Design Free Choice, you’ll learn the illusionist’s technique of commanding your audience by giving them agency.
  6. In Employ the Familiar, I’ll show you how to take secret advantage of habits, patterns, and audience expectations.
  7. Finally, in Conjure an Out, you’ll learn how to develop backup plans that will keep you one, two, three, or more steps ahead of the competition.

In the pages to come you’ll also meet a host of business, political, and thought leaders, from FBI negotiators to social networking mavens, from tech entrepreneurs to corporate CEOs, who’ve applied these principles to solve problems, inspire followers, and win the support they most need to succeed. I’ll introduce you to figures throughout history, not just legendary magicians, but also heads of state and ancient power brokers who used these same principles to win wars, subdue enemies, and build nations. Most important of all, you’ll learn how to apply these principles to the challenges you face in your own career and personal life.

To benefit from the art of illusion you don’t need to learn how to palm cards or saw a trusting volunteer in half. All you need are these seven principles. No top hat necessary!

1

MIND THE GAP

MICHAEL SCOT WAS a man who navigated the gap between science and illusion with extraordinary fluency. Born circa 1175, the Scottish mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer became famous in his day for divining the future based on planetary position and motion. Then he traveled to foreign lands, where he translated Muslim and Hebrew texts into Latin. People back in Britain began to associate him with the mysticism that he interpreted.

It was said that Scot tamed a devil by giving him the never-ending task of making rope out of the sand of Kirkcaldy beach; that he captured the plague and locked it deep within a vault in Glenluce Abbey. He supposedly summoned a demon-horse, which he commanded to stomp its hoof three times: The first stomp made the bells of Notre Dame ring; the second caused the palace towers to crumble to the earth; and before the third blow, the French king acquiesced to Scot’s demands that the French plundering of Scottish ships cease.1 Michael Scot had some serious power, and not all of it was fictional.

In 1223, Pope Honorius III offered Scot the position of archbishop of Cashel, and four years later Pope Gregory IX tried to make him archbishop of Canterbury. Although Scot declined both appointments, he continued to travel in illustrious circles. Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily, warmly welcomed the philosopher-magician into his court as imperial tutor to teach him the scientific laws of the universe—including augury.2 Scot was not the first, and he wouldn’t be the last to turn the art of illusion into an instrument of power, but he was one of the few real-life Merlins to hold so many reigning kings and popes spellbound.

MY OWN INTRODUCTION to the hidden benefits of illusion might seem laughably modest next to Michael Scot’s, but mine involved a hero who was no less than a king in my eyes: the incomparable Will Shortz.

It was January 1, 2010. I was thirty years old and meeting the New York Times puzzle master for the second time in my life. We’d first met when I was a teenager, after Shortz gave a talk at the Wellfleet public library on Cape Cod. Already then a card-carrying member of the National Scrabble Association, I successfully converted LACKIES + P to SPECIAL K during the audience participation segment, and Shortz made my year by inscribing a dedication in my book of Games magazine puzzles: “To David, a puzzle ‘champ.’” It wasn’t long before I began corresponding with the guru of games through my own crossword submissions to the Times, and eventually this magnanimous wordsmith even accepted a few. But we hadn’t met in person again, until this New Year’s Day.

We were to play table tennis. Shortz had once been told by a neurobiologist that table tennis activates all parts of the brain that crosswords do not, though, like puzzle construction, the game requires both a driven pursuit of excellence and a desire to command the person on the other side of the net. So for more than three decades Shortz had been an avid player and tournament competitor. He believed that if “every day I do puzzles and table tennis, I’m getting an all-around brain workout.” In 2009, he’d founded the Westchester Table Tennis Center, the largest of its kind in North America and the site of our first match.

But I had a hidden agenda. I had a trick—literally—up my sleeve, as well as in my pockets, where I’d concealed a deck of cards, a kiwi fruit, a knife, a Sharpie, and some invisible string. Jeans and a button-down long-sleeved shirt were required to hide this cache, but they made the worst possible outfit for professional-level table tennis. Shortz, whose athletic prowess was the result of thousands of hours of drilling, repetition, and trial and error, predictably wiped the floor with me. In three games I won just two points. But then came my chance to redeem myself.

I asked Will if he’d like to see some magic, and he enthusiastically summoned a crowd to the reception area, where I served up one of my standard “openers.” First, I made four jacks appear from my bare hands. Then, with a twist of the palm, they turned to aces. After this quick and flashy start, I handed over the kiwi fruit for audience inspection. Separately, I asked Shortz to sign a dollar bill, which a wave of my hand turned into one thousand Korean won. Though he probably lost about fourteen cents on that transaction, he was nevertheless pleased by the transformation. Next, I returned to the deck and asked several spectators to choose a playing card for what is known as a “multiple selection routine.” Ten cards were taken, and through a variety of dexterous cuts, flashy waterfall shuffles, and pop-out moves, I located each and every card. For the finale, I asked Shortz to slice open the kiwi, and inside he found his one-dollar bill, covered in seeds and juice but still bearing his signature.

The puzzle master was gobsmacked! My hero, the encyclopedic guru of all things enigmatic and puzzling, couldn’t figure out a single one of my illusions.

This was the moment when the ultimate value of magic crystallized for me. My skill was like a secret key. Magic made me impressive and memorable, just as it had Michael Scot. It garnered interest and respect, even from the most exalted of audiences. What I’d glimpsed was the inherent power of illusion as a force for personal command.

To be sure, magic typically distills this power into an art form that impresses in order to entertain audiences, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that illusion exerts its influence over virtually every field of human activity, from politics and religion to science and industry. So success in any field requires mastery of the principles of illusion.

THE PERCEPTUAL GAP

Instinctively, we humans believe what we observe with our own eyes. We trust our senses and our powers of perception. We assume that we’re smart and alert enough to distinguish the real deal from the phony, and we have faith in our ability to tell a smart idea from a stupid one, an upright citizen from a cheat, a genius from a wannabe. Seeing is believing. This equation guides our choice of friends and mates, of our most trusted employees, advisors, and leaders. It helps us decide where to live, how to vote, and what to buy. It’s in our DNA.

If we weren’t wired this way, we couldn’t function. We’d have no ego, no self-confidence, no courage. If we didn’t trust our senses to guide us, we’d probably never get out of bed. But while our faith in our own perceptiveness allows us to act decisively and take calculated risks, it also leaves us vulnerable to illusion. That’s because our perceptions are riddled with blind spots—gaps that our mind fills automatically with assumptions that can be logical, or magical, or as misleading as a mirage of water shimmering over a desert highway.

Consider the simple flip, or “flick” book, which was a precursor to animation and film. A series of pages are drawn to show a progression of images, like Mickey Mouse in “Steamboat Willie.” Then the drawings are bound so the pages can be flipped to create the illusion of a single, seamlessly moving picture. The illusion works because our brains fill the gaps between the pages, allowing our minds to “see” more than our eyes can.

The same wiring allows us as kids to “see” the suggested picture even before drawing the lines in connect-the-dots puzzles. It allows us to admire images of water lilies, haystacks, and families picnicking on the grass in paintings by Impressionist painters that actually consist of tiny disconnected spots of paint. It also allows us to read by bridging the gaps between letters to form words, between words to form sentences, between sentences to “see” larger ideas, arguments, and stories. Without your brain’s natural aptitude for illusion, this page would simply appear to you as a bunch of black squiggles on a white background.

Illusionists take full advantage of the processes by which the mind connects the dots of perception. One of these is called amodal completion. You see the front of a dachshund to one side of a tree trunk, and the hind end to the other side, and you mentally picture the whole continuous dog behind the tree. That’s amodal completion at work. A magician, however, would know that it’s also possible to position two dogs (perhaps even more) behind the tree, or maybe two stuffed half dogs. This same magician could then blow your mind by “stretching” the dachshund to a seemingly impossible length, or by “cutting the dog in half,” all by exploiting the gap between what you truly can see and what you assume.

KANIZSA’S TRIANGLE

Illusory contours are visual illusions in which your brain fills the gap with edges because of clues instead of changes in light. One of the more famous examples of an illusory contour is Kanizsa’s Triangle, created by Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa in 1955:

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The upside-down triangle does not exist, but your mind perceives a solid shape even though there are no enclosed spaces. The Kanizsa Triangle is emblematic of Gestalt psychology, which centrally holds that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In other words, in this chaotic world where we are bombarded by visual stimuli, our mind organizes perceptions into meaning. Thus, where there are incomplete objects, we see them as whole. Where there are gaps, we fill them with contours to create shapes we can recognize.

But the role of illusion in our lives extends way beyond vision. When we listen to an orchestra we hear a single unified piece of music, rather than sixty separate instruments. Even when we read a mangled line such as, Fr scre and svn yrs ago or fthrs brt frth on ths cntnnt, a nw ntion, cncved in Lbrty, nd dedcted to th prpsition tht ll mn ar creted equl, we have little difficulty filling in the missing vowels and recognizing the beginning of the Gettysburg Address. When we take a bite of yellow cake we register the overall taste of cake, rather than the separate flavors of salt, flour, eggs, butter, milk, vanilla, and sugar. The larger general impression quickly overwhelms any notice of the individual component ingredients—unless you happen to be a connoisseur like some culinary taste testers who have trained themselves to notice the micro flavors within the macro.

Our cognitive tendency to fill in gaps also dominates our ability to solve problems and read character, using what we do know to help us make assumptions about what we don’t—assumptions that we then view as reliable facts. This can easily lead to unintended consequences, as some British voters discovered in 2016 after casting a “protest vote” for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Prior to the referendum, national polls showed that the majority of voters preferred to remain in the EU, which led many disgruntled citizens to assume that their “leave” vote wouldn’t matter. They merely wanted to voice their frustration against the British government. The day after the Leave campaign won, many had voters’ remorse. One BBC reporter tweeted, “most told us they woke up thinking ‘what have I done?’ & didn’t actually expect the UK to leave.”3

In business, entrepreneurs who are mindful of the gap between their own practices and assumptions can avoid such unwelcome surprises. They also tend to think more creatively and proactively. Aaron Levie, who was a kid magician before he founded the online file storage company Box.net, suggests, “Look at the organization and figure out what’s missing. Ask, where are our gaps? Where are our weaknesses? And then, how do we solve for those things?” The mistake many companies make, he says, is to concentrate exclusively on their strengths. While it’s important to identify your strengths, to develop and invest in those areas, “it’s really important that you constantly know why you wouldn’t succeed, and what you need to do to change that.” Don’t get trapped, in other words, by the illusion that you’re bulletproof.4

What we “know” about other people can be even more misleading. Just ask anyone who’s ever been fooled in love, or surprised by a friend’s “uncharacteristic” behavior, or taken in by a charismatic pitch person. Whether or not we realize it, illusion plays a role in virtually every human interaction, as well as in every decision we make and everything we do.

Instead of being blindsided by the gap between assumptions and facts, illusionists of all stripes, from magicians to savvy politicians to visionary entrepreneurs, take advantage of this fundamental human reality. They use it to impress, persuade, motivate, and lead their audiences, to shape what other people think they see, and to direct what they feel and believe.

British illusionist Derren Brown is totally up front about this. “Much, if not all, of conjuring relies on the performer creating a false trail of events that clearly leads to a particular climax,” he explains. “The magician creates a very strong sense of A leads to B leads to C leads to D, where A is the start of the trick and D is the impossible climax.”5 But that causal connection is not necessarily real. Although it’s been engineered by the magician, “it exists only in the head of the spectator.” Which is to say that magic takes place between what’s known and what’s believed.

DANIEL LUBETZKY, CEO of Kind Snacks, is another entrepreneur whose leadership practices are influenced by his history as a teen illusionist. “The thing I love the most about magic,” he says, “is that you’re creating something new, something surprising, something different.… You learn so much about fundamental human relations and how to relate to one another, and how to get them to pay attention to what you want.… We try to create magical solutions and think outside the box in everything we do at Kind. It really follows from, as a kid, learning how to surprise and delight people with something that they were not expecting.”6

This is the power that so thrilled me when I stymied Will Shortz.

But long before that, I knew that illusion had power over me. As a kid I devoured beginners’ books on the subject—The Klutz Book of Magic, Bill Tarr’s Now You See It, Now You Don’t!, and eventually the bible of card sleights, The Royal Road to Card Magic. I practiced illusions obsessively throughout my teens, and then, as a wide-eyed freshman at Harvard, I attended a lecture given by the great historian of magic Ricky Jay.

That afternoon the university’s ivy-covered Agassiz Theatre was packed, buzzing with excitement from the legendary sleight-of-hand master’s fans. Jay was speaking about nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century lithographs in conjunction with “The Imagery of Illusion: Nineteenth Century Magic and Deception,” an exhibit he’d curated at the Harvard Theatre Collection at Pusey Library. He told tales of Herrmann the Great, Carter the Great, and Chung Ling Soo—illusionists who were widely believed to have supernatural abilities.

I was so inspired by Jay’s stories that the very next week I marched into Robinson Hall and declared the history of magicians and vaudeville as my concentration (Harvard’s pompous term for a major). Over the ensuing semesters I learned that the special relationship between illusion and the power to direct emotions and beliefs extends far beyond flip books.

THE ILLUSIONIST AS DIRECTOR

The best example of the directorial power of illusion is the motion picture industry, which in many ways grew out of stage magic. One of the earliest filmmakers, Georges Méliès (portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film, Hugo), was an illusionist who’d bought the Théâtre Robert-Houdin from the famous magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, whose name Harry Houdini would later borrow. On December 28, 1895, Méliès attended a special demonstration of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph—an early motion picture camera that also functioned as a projector—and he was smitten.

Méliès recognized the same potential that the legendary director Ingmar Bergman would describe a century later when writing about the “little rickety machine” projector that he called his “first conjuring set” because it allowed him to take advantage of “the blankness between the frames” to sway his audience’s emotions—“make them laugh, scream with fright, smile, believe in fairy stories.”7 To direct audience emotions, in other words, by minding the gaps of cognition.

Seeing this same promise in his own little rickety machine, Méliès soon had the Théâtre Robert-Houdin projecting Thomas Edison’s one-minute shorts before packed houses. But Méliès was not content with those first films’ straightforward footage of athletes and parades. Like Bergman, he wanted to orchestrate the frames of film to move people emotionally. And as an innovator, he saw that, while certain principles of illusion were built into this new technology, still others could be transferred from stage magic to create novel special effects. As a visionary, he recognized that the power of illusion is unlimited.

Méliès honored his love of magic by using theatrical acts of illusion as the subject for many of his early films. They also inspired many of the cinematic effects he masterminded. In 1896, for instance, he directed and starred in Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin, or The Vanishing Lady, which reinvented a spectacle that the magician Buatier de Kolta had made famous at London’s Egyptian Hall. On celluloid Méliès enhanced the story by using a “stop trick”—turning off the camera while a change is made—to seemingly transform the woman on-screen into a skeleton before making her reappear. This special effect, possible only in the new medium of film, allowed him to turn a simple illusion into an existential story of life and mortality. Over the course of making more than five hundred films, he would go on to experiment with multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and painted film—all variants of magic that touched the human heart.

Georges Méliès understood that movies and illusion both involve “controlled perspective.” When directors hold their fingers in two L shapes to create a frame, they are in effect re-creating the proscenium of the magician’s stage. And by adjusting the audience’s perception of the world within that frame, they can deliver surprise and amazement, which in turn establishes them as forces of ingenuity, talent, and influence. In this sense, all directors are illusionists, and all illusionists, whether they be magicians, CEOs, salespeople, or bloggers, are directors.

ILLUSION IN THE ART OF BUSINESS

It’s no wonder, given this connection between illusion and cinema, that I was drawn to Hollywood. After graduating from college, I made a beeline for the entertainment industry and began juggling magic gigs and entry positions at companies like HBO and DreamWorks Animation. I discovered with glee that one of the greatest directors of all time, Orson Welles, had also been an accomplished magician. “Orson the Magnificent” sawed Marlene Dietrich in half as part of his Mercury Wonder Show for Service Men during World War II. He demonstrated his magic tricks on-screen in Follow the Boys (1944), Magic Trick (1953), and Casino Royale (1967), and was working on Orson Welles’ Magic Show for television when he died in 1985.

More recently, another kid magician, J. J. Abrams, grew up to be the prolific director of blockbusters such as Star Trek, Super 8, Mission: Impossible III, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The linkage was no more coincidental for Abrams than it was for Welles. An original sign from Tannen’s Magic, a legendary Manhattan magic shop, is prominently displayed at Bad Robot, Abrams’s production company, and he keeps in his office a “mystery box” from Tannen’s (“mystery” as in grab bag; the contents were not revealed on the package) that he’s had for more than thirty years and never opened. Magic and mystery, Abrams has said, represent “infinite possibility.”8

Thinking “outside the box,” then, means protecting and working around the mystery of what’s inside. In terms of illusion, it means protecting and employing that gap between what we can see and what we can’t, between what we perceive and what we believe.

IN 2009, I learned about a screenplay that was being developed about a vigilante gang of magicians who operate like superheroes. I jumped at the opportunity to get involved and became Now You See Me’s lead magic consultant, collaborating with the screenwriters to devise original methods for how the heroes could use illusion to pull off bank heists. When Lionsgate gave the production the green light, I moved to New Orleans to create illusions on set and teach the actors sleight of hand.

What the filmmakers really wanted to highlight was how a magician thinks. We wove tenets like misdirection and being “ahead” into the plot to give audiences a peek behind the curtain of illusion. That way they could better understand the actions of the magician heroes—and root for them.

Even then, though, I had more to learn about the magic of cinema. One steamy Louisiana evening we were shooting an opening scene in which Jesse Eisenberg is charming a young woman with his sleight of hand. He was supposed to move his hand along a neon tube, transforming the gas-filled glass into a sparkling necklace, but the execution was too difficult, and I was out of tricks. Noticing my panic, director Louis Leterrier pulled me aside and told me, “Don’t worry. I’m a magician too.” In other words, he could control where people looked and what they remembered by adjusting the pace of a scene or moving the camera quickly through a sequence he wanted to minimize. His sleight of hand would simply be performed in the editing room instead of onstage.

I began to think about the specific ways that the art of illusion is transferable to other fields and endeavors. Wouldn’t we all like to control what others know and think about us? Don’t we all try to highlight our successes and make our failures disappear? Don’t those who appear to be several steps ahead of the competition usually wind up leading the pack?

Virtually all innovators, leaders, and CEOs push the boundaries of human experience and convince their audiences that the impossible is not only possible but necessary. They have plans and backup plans. They reverse-engineer. They read their surroundings with acute attention and capitalize on opportunities that others never notice. They implement unwavering command over the impression they leave on others. And that impression, when the illusion works, is one of respect and amazement.

THE WOW FACTOR

If the concept of the gap is central to the mechanics of illusion, the wow factor is the reason why illusion holds such power. To understand why, we again need look no further than human nature.

Just as we’re wired to believe what we see, and to “see” with our minds more than our eyes can physically perceive, we’re also preconditioned to sit up and take notice and, perhaps most important of all, to remember when we’re surprised by something new. As humans, we love novelty. New dances. New inventions. New fashions. New flavors. Can you remember your first day of school? Your first flight in an airplane? Your first kiss? If so, you can thank the power of novelty. You remember the first experience not because it was intrinsically better or different than others that followed it but because it was totally new and different from anything that came before. In this sense, it surprised your expectations and made a deep impression.

During human beings’ earliest developmental stages, experiences of surprise and puzzlement are integral to the learning process. One Johns Hopkins study of eleven-month-old infants explored the idea that babies learn best when they encounter events that “violate prior expectations.” Cognitive psychologists Aimee Stahl and Lisa Feigenson presented babies with a number of simple illusions. One test group watched a ball roll down a ramp and pass through a seemingly solid wall. Then they were shown other, more ordinary, ways the ball moved. Another group watched a ball roll down the ramp and stop—predictably—at the wall, before being shown the same ball moves as the first group. The babies that had been surprised by the ball’s behavior showed much more curiosity and learned more about the object. They experimented by banging, dropping, and rolling it like little scientists. In contrast, the group that had seen the ball behave predictably soon lost interest in it.

According to Feigenson, even the youngest infants form predictions about the world based on their prior observations and experiences. “When these predictions are shown to be wrong, infants use this as a special opportunity for learning.”9 Surprise, in other words, is a force for education.

Adults are no different. When an illusion delivers an amazing surprise, your audience remembers. But they don’t just remember being surprised: They remember everything you told them; every detail you directed them to notice will also stay with them. The more surprising the effect, the more indelible the impression. And perhaps most important of all, the more you wow them, the larger you will loom for them as a superstar.

HOUDINI AND ROOSEVELT

No one managed the wow factor like Harry Houdini. After his first big break in 1899, when theater manager Martin Beck was mesmerized by his handcuff act, Houdini became known the world over as the ultimate escape artist. He could free himself from locked milk cans, buckled straitjackets while hanging from cranes, even submerged upside down in the “Chinese Water Torture Cell.” Many of his admirers were convinced he must have superhuman powers to emerge alive from these traps.

One of those admirers was President Theodore Roosevelt, who was in the audience in June 1914, aboard the SS Imperator, which was making its way to New York from Southampton, England. It was not a great escape that impressed the president, however, but Houdini’s other “superhuman” ability: to mimic spiritualism.

During an evening show for the ship’s passengers, Houdini asked his audience to submit questions to the “spirit slates” (miniature blackboards on which chalk writing would eerily appear). Roosevelt wrote on his slip of paper: “Where was I last Christmas?”

Houdini placed the president’s challenge between the two blank slates. When he separated them, chalk images had appeared: on one slate a colored drawing of the map of Brazil; on the other, the words Near the Andes. Roosevelt was dumbfounded. Having been out of office for five years, he considered himself a private citizen now, and the details of this expedition had not been publicized.

The next day Roosevelt cornered the magician, asking “man to man” if spirits had really written on the slates.

“No, Colonel,” Houdini replied. “It was just hocus-pocus.”

Knowing that Roosevelt would be a fellow passenger, Houdini had prepared for this act before even boarding the ship. He’d turned to contacts at the London Telegraph to learn every secret he could about the ex-president, which is how he found out about the precise details of the South American expedition. Houdini had planned to have another audience member pose the question of Roosevelt’s recent whereabouts, but the “Colonel’s” own question instead played directly into his hands, allowing Houdini to pull one over on the Rough Rider himself.

“MIND CONTROL” AND MAJOR CONS

Unfortunately, some masters of illusion are also dangerous operators. The power that supposed sorcerers have wielded throughout history and around the globe is a testament to magic’s dark side. According to semiotician Dawn Perlmutter, who analyzes the role of symbols in religious terrorism and ritualistic crimes, belief in witchcraft, ghosts, and demons still holds considerable global sway today. In the Muslim world, for example, this widespread belief is rooted in the concept of spirits known as jinn. “Jinn provide Islamic explanations for evil, illness, health, wealth, and position in society as well as all mundane and inexplicable phenomena in between. The word jinn (also written as jinnee, djinn, djinni, genii or genie) itself derives from the Arabic root j-n-n meaning to hide or be hidden, similar to the Latin origins of the word ‘occult’ (hidden).”10 In other words, the power of jinn is intrinsically linked to these spirits’ illusory nature.

While Islamic clerics typically denounce or prohibit magical practices that threaten their own religious authority, many secular leaders in Muslim countries exploit mysticism for their own political ends. Mullah Omar, the Pashtun founder of the Taliban, claimed to be magically protected by a cloak taken from a chest that supposedly could only be opened by a true leader. When Omar’s forces took Kabul, credulous Afghans believed that his strength was supernatural. (They also believed that he was still alive two years after he’d died, in 2013, from tuberculosis.) Likewise, then–Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in 2005 that he “was surrounded by a halo of light during a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, in which the foreign leaders in the hall were transfixed, unable to blink for a half hour.”11 In a Wall Street Journal interview, Iranian sorcerer Seyed Sadigh claimed that he routinely advises Iran’s top government officials after consulting “jinn who can help out on matters of national security and the regime’s political stability. His regular roll call includes jinn who work for … the Mossad, and for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”12

Closer to home, for more than seven years while Nancy Reagan was first lady, astrologer Joan Quigley guided her in scheduling the president’s press conferences, speeches, flights of Air Force One, medical procedures, and even political debates.13 And politicians of all stripes, according to political scientist Michael Curtis, exploit the fact that “people believe what they want to believe.”14

“Success in politics,” Curtis writes, “is like success at performing card tricks, with false shuffling of cards, but making sure the right one is always on top. If magicians skillfully deceive the viewer, politicians similarly engage in spin, misinformation or outright deception.” Or, as Richard Nixon put it, “concern for image must rank with concern for substance.”15

Magicians, politicians, and shysters alike play to explanations and impressions that the public wants to believe. Ahmadinejad, Sadigh, and Mullah Omar were well versed in the jinn that their audiences feared and revered. Quigley knew just how much Nancy Reagan wanted to trust in astrology. And American politicians of all political stripes know how badly voters want to trust in quick and simple solutions. That’s why, Curtis says, “[c]omplex and countless controversial issues, such as cap and trade, the flat tax, migration, Medicaid, budget deficit, Obamacare, tax limits and cuts, deductions for home mortgages, and U.S. policy in Syria, are reduced to a simple prescription.”