 OH NO NOT ANOTHER DAMNED BORING PICK A CARD TRICK!
Before I say anything else I’d like to stress that since I performed my first paid magic show in 1975 at the age of eleven, I like most magicians have, or in my case, did employ playing cards extensively in my shows. They are quite simply one of the most versatile and portable props a magician can carry on his or her person. Since they first became popular with magicians in the nineteenth century some amazing gaffs, sleights and routines have been invented by some of the most creative minds in magic and every year the boundaries seem to be pushed further. But, and it is a big but, it seems to me that in the recent history of magic, at least in my living memory (52 years at the time of writing) the magic fraternity has become obsessed with cards and card magic. You only have to look at the websites of online dealers to realise that effects and routines with cards out number just about every other branch of magic. As a performer for well over 30 years now, it has become somewhat obvious to me that towards the end of the twentieth century and with the advance of electronic multimedia home entertainment systems, the popularity of playing cards as a source of fun and games for both adults and children, began to dwindle (in the UK at least) and cards no longer being the household objects they were during the 19th century, have instead become synonymous with magicians and sleight of hand which is of course why many mentalists refuse to use them. Unfortunately, that in my opinion, isn’t the only problem and this will probably upset a few of the card men out there, the simple fact is that the demise of the music halls which drove magicians to the close up table, has resulted in a hundred years of card wielding performers subjecting audiences around the world to the pick-a-card trick and worse than that, the strange new trend of multiple card cutting (the Cybil Cut, sometimes called the Dynamo Shuffle), a display of dexterity which has nothing to do with magic, but instead falls into the category of juggling. Of course there is nothing wrong with juggling, it is a very skillful art, but it simply isn’t magic. These of course are only my opinions, observations gleaned from thirty years of professional performances and they could be completely wrong, but assuming you agree with some of what I’ve just said, how do we lift our pick a card effects out of the realm of the juggler into the world of magic and mystery, how do we take 52 boring pieces of cardboard and use them to create a piece of emotional theatre, in simple terms how do we avoid the pick-a-card boredom factor? Answer, share the ancient mystical history surrounding playing cards in the introductory patter you use for your standard card routines, and then personalise the cards chosen by utilising a quick and easy fortune telling/mystical reading system. This is known as Cartomancy. Please let’s make an effort to put the mystery back, believe me with just a small amount of thought, any magician can add an emotional hook to his or her pick a card tricks and I guarantee your audiences will thank you for it. “WITHOUT PROPER PRESENTATION, THE BEST SLEIGHT OF HAND IS NOTHING MORE THAN A FEAT OF JUGGLING.” NATE LEIPZIG  I recently read a comment on a magic forum as part of a long thread in response to the question:
“Do people truly believe in mentalism anymore?” After a lot of interesting and constructive comments one person decided to answer with this, “Come on guys, give it a rest. Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that your cold reading techniques are real mind reading? Of course there will be some that believe you’re genuine but they’ve lost the plot just like you have.” Obviously not very constructive but then as I stated in a previous post "You Don't Believe In Magic" I feel that as a magician, you should attempt to create the illusion that you believe the magic you are performing is real, this technique is called acting. And that is why I feel Mentalism in its purist form presented as entertainment, is as close to real magic as you are going to get. When I was eight years old my favourite show on TV was the magician staring Bill Bixby and I knew by the age of ten that all I wanted out of life was for people to believe I could do real magic. I started with silk handkerchiefs and boxes, moved on to doves (when I was 13 I wanted to be Channing Pollock), then came the escapology and then cards and close up stuff and years of performing sponge balls and ambitious card routines to less than ecstatic audiences, in restaurants and pubs, on and on it went. But no matter how much I practiced, no matter how original my presentations became and no matter how much my audience enjoyed what they saw, I never felt that what I was doing was perceived as anything more than clever tricks. Then in 1990 when I was running my two man stage show around the Midlands in the UK, I picked up my old copy of The Amateur Magicians Handbook by Henry Hay and turned to the section on Mentalism, from that moment my understanding of real magic changed. Decades later and some people will disagree with what I am about to say and that is their right, those performers who feel the need to display a disclaimer when they work will no doubt, accuse me of preying on an unsuspecting public, once again that is their right, however I believe that the closest you can get to performing pure mentalism (even as entertainment) and therefore real magic, is to learn a good classic reading system and incorporate it into your act. I have tried astrology but it seems to me that in an entertainment environment many people associate star signs with what is written weekly in the newspaper. I tried the Runes but wasn’t comfortable with them, I have tried palmistry and still do a bit now and then, and I have studied numerology but regularly encountered the following question, ‘how can adding numbers together tell me about my life?’ Finally about 25 years ago I settled on the Tarot Cards. For me they represent all that is essential for a believable demonstration of mentalism and psychic ability. An air of mystery, plenty of symbolism and more importantly eye candy for your audience. To those of you out there who say it isn’t possible to incorporate Tarot cards in a display of modern mentalism, I say you are wrong, and I say that from experience. For over ten years my one hour cabaret act started with a display of mind reading using playing cards, moved on to a blindfold routine, then a spoon bending routine, followed by my version of fourth dimensional telepathy. I closed the act by explaining what the tarot are and how they are used and then did a multiple mind reading/psychic reading effect using just the 22 major cards, 5 – 10 members of the audience and a bucket load of nerve. This last tarot routine seems to be the one which convinced my audiences that my show, which is entertaining, funny in parts and explores the possibilities of the human mind, is accomplished by psychic means and not by trickery. I am comfortable with this belief, after all belief has always been my aim whenever I have performed and has been since I was ten years old. Now of course not everybody will be convinced and I make no actual psychic claims during my performance, but I find it interesting that as a performer of magic tricks for twenty years prior to embracing what I call “Pure Mentalism”, I never got approached after a show by anybody who wanted to regale me with tales of relatives or friends who could genuinely de-materialise and re-appear in another location. On the other hand as a psychic entertainer (and the emphasis is on entertainment), I have lost count of the number of times I have performed my cabaret act only to be approached by people from all walks of life, who congratulate me on my gift and then tell me their own stories about their psychic mother, aunt, great grandfather etc. So who am I to shatter their illusions? Here’s the thing, in order to be perceived as the real deal you need to suspend your own disbelief, at least for the duration of your performance, remember you are an actor playing the part of a mentalist, and as far as I can remember at no point during his portrayal of Henry V did Laurence Olivier stop mid-speech, wink at the camera and say “I’m not really Henry”. So if you start your mentalism act with a disclaimer or drop Hippity Hoppity rabbits in the middle for the kids, that suspension of disbelief will be destroyed (for you and the majority of your audience) and you will once again be perceived as Joe Blogs doing clever puzzles. When it comes to incorporating a reading system like the Tarot into your mentalism show, here is my advice. If you are comfortable with the cards you use, understand the classic meanings of the individual images, use your common sense and trust your intuition during performance, then you don’t actually need to do any form of trickery when presenting the readings, even from the stage. Do it for long enough, gain experience and a decent level of competence and you may be surprised by the number of people you perform for who actually believe. Who knows, eventually you may too. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my all-time favourite magic authors. “WHY DO SO MANY MAGICIANS ACTUALLY HATE THE IDEA OF REAL MAGIC? I SUSPECT THAT THEY ARE AFRAID OF IT – SCARED – DOWNRIGHT TERRIFIED. THAT IS WHY THEY KEEP REPEATING, IT’S ONLY A TRICK …. IT’S ONLY A TRICK’ - TONY “DOC” SHEILS.  SURREALCHEMY IS A TERM THAT WAS COINED BY TONY ‘DOC’ SHEILS IN HIS 1989 PUBLICATION ‘THE CANTRIP CODEX’ AND IT IS A WORD THAT HAS STUCK WITH ME SINCE I FIRST READ IT. Doc Shiels has over the years been heralded as the father of Bizarre magick by such well-known names in the field as Tony Andruzzi (Masklyn ye Mage) and whether you are into bizarre magic or not I suggest you read some of the Doc’s work and see what Sheils had to say about the state of magic and mentalism nearly forty years ago, he was a talented wordsmith and his books are some of my favourites. I have been performing magic since I was eight years old and those of you who know me will be aware I have performed stage magic, close-up magic, escapology and for the past fifteen years or so have made my living from mentalism and demonstrations of psychic phenomena. Many years ago I started to dabble with Bizarre magic but to be honest as someone who grew up watching the Hammer House of Horror Friday night shockers; I found many of the ideas presented by bizarre magicians a bit hammy. Daggers, blood, chalices, skulls, hooded cloaks and strange incantations simply left me with a smile on my face. Interestingly enough some years after I gave up on bizarre presentations, T.A. Waters in his massive book ‘Mind Myth & Magic’ echoed my thoughts when he suggest that a bizarre magick effect staged in a quite normal everyday environment (like a laundrette), would dispel the clichéd notion of magick as one where skeletons and haunted houses abound, and the strength of the actual magick presentation would therefore be much more profound and unsettling. AND I COULDN’T AGREE MORE, IT IS THIS NOTION THAT TRANSFORMS THE BIZARRE INTO THE SURREAL. Recently I became somewhat bored with the mentalism routines I have been making a living with for the past fifteen years, even though I designed them all myself. I think the main reason is because I have seen so many new mentalists hit the market all basing their presentations on the same themes, NLP, body language, subliminal control etc, and so after re-reading all of Tony ‘Doc’ Sheils work I decided to shake up my presentations by adding a touch of surrealism, I mean think about it: “ALL MAGIC BY ITS VERY NATURE IS SURREAL”. I posted this comment on Twitter a while back and it was re-tweeted more than anything I have ever posted before, which to be honest surprised me, because most of my followers (on that account at least) are magicians and there seems to be a huge amount of boring repetitive magic and mentaism on the market these days being pumped out as the latest and greatest miracle of our time. IT IS TIME THAT MAGICIANS AND MENTALISTS STARTED TO EMBRACE THE SURREAL AND DROP THE TRIED AND TESTED THAT EVERYBODY SEEMS TO BE DOING. And finally if you don’t feel it is possible to bring a touch of surreal into the main stays of magic then you need to watch Yann Frisch as he takes the classic cups and balls/chop cup and turns it on its head. True surrealism and classical magic combined to create something totally unique. Yann Frisch (Chop Cup) Till next time.  How can you be a magician and not believe in magic?
I have been performing magic and mentalism since I was eight years old. I did my first paid performance when I was eleven and no it wasn’t a kid’s show it was for adults. I have performed on stage, in cabaret and close up all over the world. I’ve busked, I’ve jumped handcuffed and chained into rivers and been suspended from burning ropes in a strait jacket, I’ve run my own two man tent show and learned to fire eat when I was nine. I have performed with coins, cards, ropes, sponge balls and even livestock, I’ve done gigs at weddings, in restaurants, on boats, in casino’s and even in my swimming shorts at pool side barbeques. But no matter where, when, what or how I have performed, I have always wanted my audience to perceive what I do, as the real thing, yes real magic. The problem is most modern audiences are aware that what the magician is doing isn’t real, people these days know that you cannot cause a solid object like a coin, to dematerialise in one hand and rematerialize in the other. In fact I’d go as far as to say even if you could do it for real they’d still assume it was a trick. Many years ago at a Lecture for Leicester Magic Circle, Pat Page said, “The problem these days is that many up and coming magicians seem to trivialise the magic. They seem to forget the ancient magicians of the past held great power and were often revered and feared by the man in the street and kings alike.” Talking to Pat after the lecture he said to me, “How can anybody be a magician and not believe in magic?” Now of course I don’t think for one moment Pat was suggesting that you convince yourself you truly possess magical powers which you should use to instil fear and respect in your fellow man, but instead I feel he meant that as a magician, you should attempt to create the illusion that you believe the magic you are performing is real. This technique is called acting. Imagine this. You perform a simple coin vanish for a five year old child. The usual response is “Where did it go?” To which you reply it’s behind your ear, an answer which normally prompts the child to search behind their own ear for the coin. The child believes the magic is real. Perform the same effect for an adult and the usual response is “how did you do that?” But it gets worse because that response these days is often followed with “you won’t tell me your secrets so I‘ll Google the answer on my phone”. This I think is the point Pat was trying to make all those years ago. The magic has become trivialised and therefore many audiences these days view magic acts as a series of puzzles to be cracked, rather than moments of wonder. This isn’t of course a new concept as you’ll see by the quotes at the end of his post, but unfortunately today the tricks of the trade have become so accessible and open to exposure online, that I believe the only way to convert modern audiences from “how did you do that” into “where did it go” is though creativity, originality and acting as though you believe the magic you are performing is real, comes from you and not the prop you bought from an ebay magic shop. I’ll leave you with three quotes by George Anderson from his book “It Must Be Mind Reading” printed in 1949 and a little formula of my own. “Imitation is common in Magic. In writing, the plagiarist is an outcast. In magic the copyist is encouraged.” “When a dealer sells you a trick, he’ selling you the props with which to build yourself an addition to your program. Remember he’s sold the same props to many other magicians, what you do with those props determines your rating.” “Style and imagination made Blackstones’s dancing handkerchief a thing of beauty, worth thousands of dollars. Assuming that Harry long ago paid a dealer a dollar for the trick, he got a dollar trick and invested creative thought and art in it to bring it to its present value.” Here’s a simple formula I try to use myself. Be creative, be original and don’t copy others for you are unique. Invest time and effort into the presentation of every effect you perform and most importantly try to suspend your own disbelief and convince your audience, that just maybe what you are doing is real by believing it yourself.  AS A MAGICIAN DO YOU FEEL THE TRICKS YOU PERFORM ARE ENOUGH TO ENDEAR YOU TO YOUR AUDIENCE?
I have spent the best part of the last thirty years working on and off as a part time and full time mystery performer. I use the term mystery performer because although in the past I have worked as a close up magician, stand up magician and even as an escape artist, my real love is mentalism and psychic entertainment. So for the past decade or so I have concentrated solely on mentalism and haven’t picked up a sponge ball, done a torn and restored card to wallet, or linked a Chinese anything in all that time. What I did do during seven years as a performer and Tarot reader in Spain, is ask my audiences, both one to one during readings and as a whole during my cabaret show: “What do you think of magicians and the art of magic?” I have to tell you that in all that time the overwhelming response was negative. So as an exercise to ensure my performances don’t (wherever possible) fall into that negative category, I decided to analyse, organise, collate and catalogue the negatives, in an attempt to identify the most common public gripes and eliminate them from my performances. Guess what, I managed to narrow the list down to the top four. So here are the top four public gripes in no particular order.
Let’s take them one at a time. Magicians are just show offs– Well of course many are, to be honest in ability to stand up on stage in front of a live audience, does require a decent dose of ego. The problem however occurs when the magician confuses confidence and arrogance which are not the same things. If you do confuse the two you will most definitely end up with very few friends in your audience. The, “look what I can do” attitude which some magicians I have worked with in the past seem to possess, alienates the spectators and sets up a ‘let’s catch him out’ mind set. Most Magicians are Boring – Well I am afraid I have seen my fair share of performers who simply had me cringing. The problem isn’t usually the trick but more often than not the execution and presentation. I have seen some guys performing outstanding routines using the latest pieces of technical wizardry that made their audiences yawn, while other times I have seen a performer like my late friend Scotty Thomson, who was registered as blind, amaze and entertain a crowd of fifty people with nothing more than a pair of children’s plastic safety scissors. I get the feeling that many magicians perform effects based on the method rather than what the audience sees. As magicians of course we are attracted to the secret and the gimmicks, but performing a trick because you like the way it works, doesn’t mean it will entertain a paying audience. They Waffle Too Much – Well too much of course is a relative judgement and I suppose takes us back to the previous point. If the performer is boring you stiff with what he is doing, then two sentences could be too much. And of course I am a mentalist and mentalism is damn near all talk, which is why scripting is so important. Script an effect, record it then pair the script down to its bare minimum. Some years ago I watched a very good friend of mine Gary Hack, a school teacher and amateur actor, perform a rendition of “A Chip In The Sugar” a monologue written by Alan Bennett as part of his BBC talking heads series. For just over an hour Gary sat on chair on stage and talked, but rather than being bored stiff, the whole audience was instead entranced. It doesn’t matter how much you say as long as what you say matters. They All Do The Same Tricks – What can I say, there simply is no excuse for this – absolutely none! I personally don’t perform other people’s material and steer clear of using commercially manufactured props, but that is just me. However if I did, I feel there is still no reason why any two magicians or mentalists should ever have to perform the same routines. The fact that Jamie Raven performed Cardtoon on Britain’s Got Talent and floored the judges, really shouldn’t prompt every other magician in the country to add it to their working repertoire, but it did and sales of the trick went through the roof!! Put it this way, if we throw out ninety percent of all the magic in print, on the internet, or for sale from the dealers as being totally crap, and divide up the remaining ten percent by all the those performers who ever perform in front of an audience, each would still have more material than he could possibly use in a lifetime. So there we go, years of audience research condensed down to the top four gripes about magicians and magic. HOW DO YOUR PERFORMANCES SHAPE UP?  AS A MENTALIST I AM ALWAYS RESEARCHING SCIENTIFIC TEXTS FOR PATTER IDEAS TO SUPPORT MY PERFORMANCES.
Because I often play the subliminal-influence card during my performances, I thought you may be interested in some subliminal facts that over the years have become permanently intertwined with many of my subliminal themed routines. SUBLIMINAL-INFLUENCE IN ADVERTISING. In the 1950’s American psychologists assisted by James Vicary a market researcher at the time carried out an experiment in Subliminal-influence in advertising on US cinema goers. They took a franchise of approximately twenty cinemas spread across various states that were all showing the same feature movie. In the movie shown in half the cinemas, they spliced two still frames of a cold glass of Coca Cola and another two stills of a box of popcorn. The two frames of Coke and popcorn flashed past so quickly that they remained imperceptible to the conscious mind and nobody in the audience recalled seeing anything out of the ordinary as they watched the film. However the results were astounding. The sales of Coca Cola and Popcorn during the intervals were 26% higher in the cinemas with the subliminal advertising than those without. The experiment was deemed a huge success so much so that it led to fears that governments and cults would use the technique to their advantage and the use of subliminal-influence in advertising was banned in many countries including the UK. Vicary of course went on to lecture and write books on the subject including “How Psychiatric Methods Can be Applied to Market Research”, “Seasonal Psychology” and “The Circular Test of Bias in Personal Interview Surveys.” BUT HERE’S THE THING, JAMES VICARY WAS NEVER ABLE TO REPRODUCE THE OUTCOME OF HIS EXPERIMENTS AND LATER ADMITTED HE HAD FABRICATED THE RESULTS. You may think therefore that subliminal-influence in advertising doesn’t work, but how do you know, how can you be sure that every minute of the day you are not being bombarded by unscrupulous advertisers using hidden messages to influence your buying decisions. Recent research carried out by a team from University College London, confirmed the findings from an earlier Harvard study carried out in 1999, both employed a similar method to Vicary’s and both found it was possible to instil emotional thoughts using subliminal messaging, although it seems the system is better at instilling negative thought patterns than positive. It is true that subliminal advertising is not permitted on TV in the UK, according to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom. However they admit there have been a number of cases over the years where the rules may have been stretched somewhat and I have to ask myself, if they can’t see them, then how do they know? Remember this, subliminal-influence is generally said to be below the threshold of conscious perception, quite simply if you can consciously perceive it, then it isn’t subliminal influence. SO THERE YOU GO, NOW ALL YOU NEED IS A ROUTINE TO FIT THE PATTER.  AS A MENTALIST AND PSYCHIC ENTERTAINER I LIKE TO HAVE A THREAD OF SCIENTIFIC LEGITIMACY RUNNING THROUGH THE PATTER I USE, SO HERE IS A FACT FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO PERFORM ANY EFFECT THAT USES THE PERCEPTION OF COLOURS AS A THEME. WHO DECIDES ON THE COLOUR OF THE WALLS, CURTAINS, SOFA AND CUSHIONS IN YOUR HOUSE? When your wife or girlfriend tells you the trousers, shoes and shirt you are wearing don’t go together, do you care or do you just put it down to bad taste. Whenever we decorate or choose something for the house, my wife will say to me, which is your favourite, or which do you prefer. No matter what I say she will usually turn her nose up and say, “I think we’ll go with the other one”. Friends of mine tell me the same happens to them. I have often thought to myself is it social stereotyping when women are left to choose the wallpaper and furnishings for the home and clothes for their men, or is there more to it. In the 1980’s researchers began to find some very real physical differences between the eyes of men and women, differences that highlighted the fact that most men perceive colours differently to women. But why should this be the case? Scientists speculate that enhanced colour perception in women is a result of natural genetic selection. They believe that a woman’s ability to better discriminate between colours originates with our pre-historic ancestors. At that time the women were the primary gatherers during the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution. This superior colour perception allowed them to better distinguish between fruits, foliage and insects when gathering food in the forests or on the grass lands. I won’t go too deeply into the science here because it is complex, but in simple terms, the gene that allows people to perceive the colour red, is only found on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes whereas men only have one. This means that men have a reduced ability to distinguish between red and green. Amazing then that red is traditionally used to signify danger, traffic lights are red for stop and green for go, your mum always told you to eat your greens and it can be a problem when you are trying to decide if the mushroom pictured here is edible or not.  BY THE WAY IT IS THE TOXIC FLY AGARIC (Amanita muscaria) AND UNLESS YOU KNOW HOW TO RECOGNISE IT AND COOK IT PROPERLY, LEAVE IT ALONE.
Now here’s the thing, we all know that the primary colours are red, blue and yellow, but what you may not know is that our perception of colour comes from our ability to distinguish, red blue and green. The combination of these three make up all the colours within the human spectrum of colour perception. So ladies next time you nip out to your local DIY store and buy ten tester pots, that are all variations of the colour green, which you then paint in small squares all over the living room wall, or when you pick up twenty swatches of different coloured curtain material for your husband or boyfriend to flick through. Try to keep in mind it’s not that he isn’t interested, it is just that those subtle variations in hue and colour that tantalise your visual perception, are probably as invisible to him as the pile of dirty underwear on his side of the bed.  HOW MAGIC AND MAGICIANS HAVE CHANGED SINCE THE INTERNET BEGAN TO RULE OUR LIVES.
But as the internet seems to encroach further into our lives, I wonder if the traditional methods of interaction, networking and advertising are being neglected. When I was a child, I lived out in the sticks. There were three channels on the TV and one of those was BBC2 which aired limited programmes. We had no DVD’s, Videos, Games consoles or even mobile phones. The internet didn’t exist and Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen were just getting together to found Microsoft. You can understand therefore, that if you wanted to learn something, or chat with friends, you had to get off your backside to do it. Magic has consumed me since I was eight years old when my grandfather bought me a copy of "The Amateur Magicians Handbook"by Henry Hay, but after devouring the contents of that book, the only way I could obtain more of the knowledge I craved, was by visiting a part of what has become known as the Outernet, a cog in the machine called the library. The nearest library to me was six miles away and the only form of transport I had was my bike. So every Saturday morning I rode to the library and back to return and pick up the books I needed to pursue my fascination with all things magic. Nowadays of course by using the internet, I can access thousands of books at the click of a button, I can read the opinions of experts and self-proclaimed guru’s from all over the world without having to move from my armchair. But that’s not all, when I was a kid my best friends lived miles away in other villages and on farms in the middle of nowhere and believe it or not some of them didn’t have telephones. So again to interact with each other we’d get on our bikes and meet at the park or cycle to each other houses. Today our kids chat on the internet via Facebook and Twitter, their thumbs have evolved for speed texting and they freely share and expose the work of others. Rather than the physical threats that used to be all too common in the school playground, more and more teenagers (and adults) find themselves bullied and psychologically abused via mobile phones instead, and on some of the magic forums I have been known to frequent, I have noticed many once prolific writers and producers of miracles, after being verbally and commercially abused online, are pulling away from the mass magic fraternity and are no longer releasing new ideas and routines except to small underground groups of likeminded professionals. THE MAGIC OF THE OUTERNET. As the use of the internet expands and populations rely on it for their social and commercial interactions, I believe as magicians we need to be wary of losing our identities as performance artists, because magic should be performed live, it shouldn’t be relegated to various YouTube channels where, would be Spielberg’s demonstrate (and often expose) the latest move or trick they learned that morning, tricks which to be honest will never see a live audience because they simply could not be performed anywhere but in front of the single fixed eye of the camera. When I used to visit the library all those years ago, I got to know the staff; they’d help me out and point me in the right direction. I saw the same faces in the newspaper section or pouring over reference books week in week out, I’d see the same young kids enjoying the pop up books in the kids section and new faces would come and go. Years later when my interests expanded to researching the pubs in the area, I’d often see those same people from years before, having a drink, eating a meal, playing darts or just reading at a table window. Many of them would recognise me and we’d chat like friends who had known each other for years. Many of them became clients, some of them long term repeat clients who also referred me to other clients, and this interaction is the nature of the Outernet. Today when I log on to the internet and upload a book from Amazon to my kindle, I am nothing more than a username and password read by a computer generated algorithm. I have hundreds of friends on Facebook but haven’t met more than a handful of them. And if I leave my house without my smartphone, I try to avoid having a panic attack by reminding myself, that I didn’t need GPS, Google maps, email or even a bog standard phone, when I first started in this business. Please don’t get me wrong, the internet is a fantastic tool and I think we all need to move with the times if we want to succeed, I use it in all aspects of my business (and in a lot of my social interaction), I mean without it you wouldn’t be reading these words, however I do believe the internet and the outernet need to be utilised in conjunction, especially in the world of magic where face to face meetings are the only way to pull in the bigger clients. SO I LEAVE YOU WITH THIS SCENARIO. Two magicians of equal ability both send an email shot to a prospective corporate client. The First attaches a link to a YouTube video of him performing some amazing spoon bending. He follows up a few days later with a text message asking if the client liked the video and would like to book him for a show. The second magician doesn’t attach a video but states in the email he’ll call the client later. He calls and organises a meeting. During the meeting he takes the clients spoon from his coffee cup and causes it to twist, bend and finally snap in the clients own hands. WHO DO YOU THINK WINS THE CONTRACT?  HOUDINI. MAGICIAN, ESCAPE ARTIST, SHOWMAN, ATHLETE AND ENTREPRENEUR.
When asked to name a few famous and successful entrepreneurs you’d probably name some of those I have already written about like Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You may even mention Henry Ford, Richard Branson and John Rockefeller. It is unlikely however that the first name to come to mind would be Harry Houdini. Harry Houdini however is your archetypal entrepreneur, a calculated risk taker, determined, inventive and driven. If you think Harry Houdini was nothing more than a magician, think again. Born Erik Weiss in Budapest in 1874 to Jewish parents, he moved with his Rabbi father, his mother and his brothers to the USA in 1878 at aged 4. By the age of 9 Houdini already held down a number of jobs one of which was as a trapeze artist “Ehrich, the Prince of the Air”. Houdini began his career as a magician at age 17 with little success and spent the next 8 years living from hand to mouth, working dime museums and side shows. During this period he started to experiment with handcuff escapes. His big break came in 1899 when he was spotted by Martin Beck who was a vaudeville entertainments manager. Beck advised Houdini to concentrate on the handcuff escapes and within months he went from performing in dime museums, to packed houses on the top vaudeville stages in the country. A European tour followed with performances in England (six months at the Alhambra), Scotland, Holland, Germany, France and Russia. By 1910 Harry Houdini was a household name in the USA and one of the wealthiest entertainers of his time. Constantly pushing himself physically and mentally whilst seeking to keep his name in the spotlight, Houdini became fascinated with aviation and in 1910, after buying a Voisin biplane, and while on tour, went down in the record books as the first person to fly in Australia. Still reaching beyond the boundaries and with visions of the future, Houdini embraced the up and coming era of the silent silver screen, and 1918 he signed a contract with film producer B.A. Rolfe, for a 15 part serial called “The Master Mystery”. Eventually Houdini started his own film production company called the “Houdini Picture Corporation” and produced and stared in two films, The Man From Beyond (1921) and Haldane of the Secret Service (1923). He also founded his own film laboratory called the Film Development Corporation. (FDC). Houdini was a true fighter and entrepreneur, another rags to riches story of innovation, vision, true grit and determination. Houdini challenged death, worked and performed every day of his life until the end. He died in 1926 at the age of 52 from peritonitis as a result of a ruptured appendix, although he was optimistic that he would recover, it is reported that his dying words were “I’m tired of fighting”. Houdini the entrepreneur would be pleased to know that he is still a household name and that “to do a Houdini” is a common term (especially in the USA) to describe an escape from a sticky situation. Do you have the entrepreneur mind-set?  ARE YOU AN ENTREPRENEUR?
If you like me are a mentalist and make your living as a full time performer, then the answer to that question is yes. Of course I use mentalist as an example simply because that is my chosen profession, but you could be a magician, kid’s entertainer, escapologist, juggler or clown, you get the idea. Wikipedia defines an entrepreneur as “an individual who organises and operates a business or businesses, taking on financial risk to do so”. However I don’t think this definition of an entrepreneur is completely accurate, because it could just as easily be associated with anybody who is self-employed. In my opinion a better definition would be: “An entrepreneur is defined as an individual who is motivated by innovation to grow their own business and make a profit”. If like me you are interested in successful people, you may also be interested to know, that a lot of psychological research has been done into the characteristics commonly displayed by an entrepreneur. Now before I go any further you may have gathered by now, that I am fascinated by human psychology, so I want to say something that a lot of the self-development gurus out there may disagree with. There is no blue print to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Many self-development books will tell you that if you mimic the habits of successful people you too will be successful. The problem with this theory is that each and every one of us is unique. I’m not talking about our physiology here; our bodies although different in appearance, work more or less in the same way for the whole of our species. No I’m talking about our personalities, our minds our very essence. The simple fact is that because we are all individuals, what works for one entrepreneur may not necessarily work for another. That said, although there are variances in the psychological make-up of successful entrepreneurs, there do seem to be some clear and common characteristics that can be associated with many of them. So what common characteristics identify an entrepreneur? The Need for Achievement – Most successful entrepreneurs will work hard to succeed in business because, rightly or wrongly, they often equate business success to personal achievement. However they will often choose activities which hold a moderate chance of success, and will very rarely get involved in businesses which don’t show any obvious signs of growth. Internal Control – This tends to relate to an individual’s perception of the causes of the events in their lives. The entrepreneur tends to believe that their actions control the success of their environment, in this case their business, and that there is no luck or fate involved. The only problem with this mindset is that if things take longer or cost more than they expected, the entrepreneur can often feel a sense of failure. Ambiguity – This is a strange but common characteristic in entrepreneurs. It refers to an individual’s ability to feel comfortable making decisions, without adequate research and with incomplete or ambiguous information. Many entrepreneurs find an ambiguous business situation desirable and often, when a business becomes successful, the entrepreneur may find the concept of ‘business ticking over nicely’ as boring. Risk Taking – Most entrepreneurs have what is called a risk taking propensity. In other words, the entrepreneur actively seeks out risky business ventures and often has a tendency to take risks. However these risks are normally classed as calculated, even if the calculations are based on ambiguity, and many entrepreneurs don’t see themselves as risk takers. How about you? |