THE FIFTH STRATEGY: CHEAT PREEMPTIVELY
“Losers react, leaders anticipate.”
—Tony Robbins
Scene: Recall the story of Max Malini, told in the introduction. It really happened. Back in the 1920s, Malini, a world-famous magician especially renowned for his “spontaneous” close-up magic, stunned a U.S. senator, who asked him, at a formal dinner party, to “do a trick.”
Protesting that he is completely unprepared, Malini at last gives in to the repeated entreaties of the senator and his entourage. He asks if anyone happens to have a deck of cards. No one does, of course, but—fortunately—the magician carries a deck. He withdraws it from his pocket, shuffles it, then “forces” a card on the senator’s wife. When Malini then asks her to return it to the deck, the card turns up missing. Visibly annoyed, Malini half apologizes. “This is very unusual,” he protests.
THE FOURTH STRATEGY: DISORGANIZE INNOVATION
“There’s something about the center of any bureaucracy— it’s as if the water tastes different there….”
—Robert Shapiro
Scene: This really happened. We are in the suburban Las Vegas home of Jeff McBride, one of the best magicians in the world today. Gathered here are some of the other top American magicians, taking a five-day Master Class sponsored by the world’s most famous magic school. In the desert heat, this select group comes together to hear lectures, try out new material, and endure more-or-less polite critiques. Most of all, they create new ideas in a professional magicians’ equivalent of the experimental “Skunk Works” that legendary aircraft designer Kelly Johnson led for Lockheed—where he and his crew developed the likes of WWII’s war-winning P-38 Lightning fighter, the Cold War’s U-2 spy plane, and the SR-71 Blackbird, still the fastest aircraft ever built. Or think of it as akin to Steve Jobs’ famed “Mac Group,” set up in a Cupertino, California, strip mall, physically separate from official Apple HQ and topped by a Jolly Roger pirate flag. It was the perfect place to imagine and build a computer that shifted the PC paradigm.
Today, imaginations are fired up inside an unassuming desert home, the very environment in which McBride synthesized the shamanistic roots of magic to create a totally new effect: The Water Bowl Illusion. (Ultimately, on September 7, 2017, this is the effect that will fool Penn & Teller on their Fool Us television show.)