So, if you are serious about continuing with magic, you adapt by shifting 180 degrees until your natural inclination is to think from the perspective of the audience’s reality.
This takes practice. You know where the card is hiding, so the challenge becomes erasing all guilt about this, trimming away any blinks or tics or other tells that are signs of something else at work, anything that signals to the audience that, no, perception is not reality. You need to practice until all your tells are purged. The thing is, the audience, like Agent Mulder in TV’s The X-Files, wants to believe. Operating inside their own reality, they want to believe it is reality, period. It is the job of the magician—and the marketer—to oblige them by fulfilling, not fighting, their desire to believe. This is not deception, because perception is reality—or might as well be.
As an aspiring magician, how do you know when you have practiced enough? Our sense of the “fragility” of the perception-reality equivalence often lands in the very mirror before which we magicians begin to practice. We start fooling even ourselves, because our minds simply cannot follow our own tools of deception and sleight of hand, and, in this, we fully assume the role of the audience member or the consumer. We become the audience. At this point, practice has nearly made perfect. The next step is to stop using a mirror altogether and instead perform in front of a video recorder. Watch yourself onscreen in recorded time—unreal time, rather than mirrored time, real time—and you will see the magic happen. Never mind that you are the magician, you will begin to wonder how you did that. When you cannot honestly answer how the magic happened, you have practiced enough.
In magic, the great effects go far beyond “fooling” people. They rise high above simple deception. Here is the secret of the world’s greatest magicians: their magic does not trick the mind, it transforms perceptions—disrupting our preconditions, assumptions, and prejudices. The magic of the great magicians is like the physics of the great physicists. When Einstein showed us that space and time were equivalent, he felt no guilt—though he was obliged to remind us that “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” and that “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” When the marketers of Vitalis transformed Brylcreem into greasy kid stuff, they did not repent but rejoiced. Great marketers, like great physicists and great magicians, do not deceive. They transform perceptions—of their marketplace, their product, their service, their brand, and the very future of their industry, sometimes even of their culture and their world.
“A computer on every desk and in every home.”
—Bill Gates
Scene: This really happened. It’s the early 1920s, and Harry Houdini is the world’s most celebrated magician. Right now,
he’s sitting behind a closed curtain, having just escaped from one of his signature magical props, the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Moments ago, onstage before a live audience, his feet were locked into stocks fixed into a restraint brace, and he was hoisted upside down, suspended in midair by his ankles. The brace fits on top of the Torture Cell proper, which is a sinister-looking device, a phone booth size glass box reinforced with a steel framework and filled with water.
Head-first, ankles locked, Houdini is lowered into the water, which sloshes over the top of the Cell as his body enters. Once the brace that holds his ankles is fitted securely atop the Cell, assistants lock it into place. The audience glimpses the writhing struggles of the fully immersed magician just before a curtain is drawn across the Cell.
The audience knows it’s a show. They know Houdini has escaped from the Torture Cell before. Yet they somehow feel certain that this time he will drown and die.
Unseen, Houdini quickly escapes. He kills time behind the curtain, swimsuit-clad, dripping, passing the minutes, waiting, his ears attuned to the buzz, groan, gasp, and suppressed screams of the unseen audience. When their collective crescendo of suspenseful anxiety just begins to fade, Houdini knows the audience has just begun to lose hope. That is when he bursts out from behind the curtain, smiling, dripping, taking his bow before a theater full of witnesses giddy with the combination of awe, relief, and joy that comes from an aspiration realized.
“The American Academy of Achievement”—there actually is such a thing13—was founded in 1961 by a photographic journalist named Brian Blaine Reynolds “to bring aspiring young people together with real-life heroes—the kind of achievers [photographer Reynolds] met every week on assignment.” On March 17, 2010, the Academy published an interview with Bill Gates, a 1992 inductee into the Academy and a former client of David Morey. As anyone who has followed Gates and Microsoft knows, he issued in 1980 a most memorable statement of the Microsoft mission. It was an aspiration of boundless ambition: A computer on every desk and in every home.
“When did you first have the vision of a computer on every desk at work and in every home?” the Academy interviewer asked Gates.
“Paul Allen and I had used that phrase even before we wrote the BASIC (programming language) for Microsoft.” This would have been 1975, when Gates, Allen, and Monte Davidoff were hired by the makers of the now-legendary Altair computer to create the first high-level programming language for their machine. Released before Micro-Soft shed its hyphen, Altair BASIC was Microsoft’s very first product. “We actually talked about it in an article in—I think 1977 was the first time it appears in print—where we say, ‘a computer on every desk and in every home…’” 14
Talk about an aspiration!
Consider… The famous phrase became a formal mission statement in 1980, at a time when Microsoft, a software maker, did not even make computers. Three years earlier, in 1977, it was just beginning to make software. Two years before that, in 1975, three guys who were among a small group of “hobbyists” tinkering with the Altair 8800 were paid to write a version of BASIC that could squeeze some degree of practical functionality out of 256 bytes to 64 kilobytes of RAM with a processor chugging along at 2.0 MHz in a computer programmed via toggle switches and lights rather than with a keyboard and monitor. Altair BASIC, Microsoft’s foundational piece of software, was itself
an aspiration.
“It’s very hard to recall how crazy and wild that was, you know,” Gates told the Academy interviewer, “‘on every desk and in every home.’ At the time, you [had] people who are very smart saying, ‘Why would somebody need a computer?’ Even Ken Olsen, who had run this company Digital Equipment, who made the computer I grew up with, and that we admired both him and his company immensely, was saying that this seemed kind of a silly idea that people would want to have a computer.”15
Dream Bigger Dreams
In 1975, 1977, and 1980, when typewriter repair was a job you could count on, Bill Gates was writing, thinking, imagining, and dreaming the way Harry Houdini had done some fifty years before. Magic, you see, is at its very best all about dreaming bigger dreams. Dream bigger dreams could have been the mission statement of Harry Houdini, the very archetype of a modern magician. It was he who redefined magic for modern audiences by making it relevant to their innermost and yet most universal dreams. Houdini’s astounding escapes were also great escapes, because they were intensely relevant to an audience who dreamed of magically freeing themselves from the myriad chains of everyday life.
Arguably, Harry Houdini’s appeal would only have increased had he lived beyond the Roaring Twenties and continued to perform during the 1930s. The twenties were an era of relative prosperity—or at least of its glittering
