Expansion

One of the most reliable ways to increase the impact of a trick is to “expand” the trick by bringing in elements from beyond the room you’re in and the time you’re performing.

I’ll give you a theoretical example.

Imagine a magic show where the magician requests four people to help him. Each person secretly places an item they have on them into a separate small cloth bag. Let’s say they put in a Chapstick, a quarter, a pair of earbuds, and a lighter. Without opening the bags, the magician is able to tell them what’s inside and after that he reveals to whom each item belongs.

Now imagine the trick performed a different way. This time, people are reached out to before the performance and asked to bring a small item of personal importance with them to the show. In this version of the trick, the items placed in the bags are a small teddy bear, a bookmark someone’s first boyfriend made them, a ticket stub to the first movie and man went to with his future wife, and a baby’s pacifier.

Beyond that, the trick is the same.

The trick would probably not be particularly more fooling this way, but you can see how it would likely be significantly stronger. It would be stronger because the process of identifying and bringing with them a personal item is just more interesting than tossing whatever random item they have in their pockets in a bag. And it’s stronger because it’s playing off a connection they have with that object that goes back potentially years or decades. And you’re pulling some of that vitality into the trick itself.

Here’s a different type of example of expanding a trick beyond the boundaries of the performing situation…

In this post, I wrote about a particularly strong reaction I got from the Trick that Fooled Einstein—a version where the prediction was on a fortune from a fortune cookie. After I got such a strong reaction that one time, I tried out the trick a bunch more. It always got a good reaction, and sometimes a great reaction.

I noticed one element that seemed to correlate with the strength of the reaction.

If you don’t know the trick, it’s essentially a prediction of the freely chosen amount of change a spectator has in their hand.

If I had a little bowl of change on the table and asked someone to take a small group of coins, and then I revealed my prediction, it tended to get a good reaction.

But if I called the person earlier in the day and asked them to go to where they keep their loose change, and to grab a few coins for something I wanted to try later, then it tended to get a much stronger response.

Why? Because the trick was no longer about what happened in just these two minutes sitting around the table together.

Unlike the first example, a handful of change has no emotional meaning to it. But having them bring their own change from home still led to a stronger reaction. Probably for two reasons.

First, there is a sense of anticipation created. Why am I asking her to grab some change and bring it with her? This is an unusual request. What’s going to happen later?

Second, it blurs the lines of when the trick starts. “Did the trick start when we sat down together? Or did it somehow start hours ago when I grabbed those coins from my dresser? Or—considering he went straight into the trick when I got here—did something happen between the time I got the coins and now that allowed for the trick to work? Maybe… who knows…maybe he hired someone who followed me into the gas station and he saw the outline of the coins in my pocket? And that’s how he could have this printed prediction? No, no, no. That’s a crazy idea.”

Yes. It’s a crazy idea. But by expanding the boundaries of the effect, you give the person’s mind a chance to consider more crazy ideas. And that’s a good thing.

This isn’t just something you can do with physical objects. You can also do a similar thing with thoughts.

It’s one thing if I read your mind and tell you the “random” word you’re thinking of.

But imagine you’re visiting your parents for Christmas. I send you a text asking you to do me a favor. Go find a book that meant something to you as a kid. Open the book and find any word that jumps out at you and remember that word until the next time I see you. I reach out to you a couple of times in the ensuing weeks to make sure you still remember the word. And then when we meet up, I’m able to tell you the word you’ve been carrying with you from this beloved book from your youth.

Yes. That moment’s going to carry a much different weight than just naming some meaningless word that just came to your mind 6 seconds earlier.

This is why, whenever possible, I try to bring in elements from outside of the current space and time.

The greatest strength of magic is its ability to make everything else fall away and pull the people watching solidly into the present moment. So it may seem antithetical to that idea to be reaching for outside elements during your performance. But when you can give more weight to the props and premises, and more resonance to the concepts used when you perform, you give your magic more impact. And that greater impact is precisely what’s going to jolt them so intensely into the here and now.