Interaction Mathematics

I’ve always felt about magic the way that George Michael felt about sex in his 1987 hit, “I Want Your Sex.” (I’ve substituted “magic” for “sex” in the lyrics below.)

There's things that you guess
And things that you know
There's boys you can trust
And girls that you don't
There's little things you hide
And little things that you show
Sometimes you think you're gonna get it
But you don't and that's just the way it goes

Okay, well not all the lyrics from the song apply…

It's natural
It's chemical (let's do it)
It's logical
Habitual (can we do it?)
It's sensual
But most of all
Magic is something that we should do
Magic is something for me and you

Again, I should have clarified at the start that it’s really just one part of the song that’s applicable.

Magic is natural, magic is good
Not everybody does it
But everybody should
Magic is natural, magic is fun
Magic is best when it's one on one

Okay, there you go. That’s the spot. I guess it’s really just that one line, now that I think about it.

Magic is best when it’s one-on-one.

Let me qualify that some.

I perform one-on-one probably about 50% of the time I perform.

However, if you asked me to make a list of the 100 strongest reactions I’ve ever received from magic, I would estimate that probably 95 of them would come from a one-on-one performance.

I think there are three primary reasons for this.

First, as I’ve mentioned before, you can really craft an effect/experience to a particular person when you’re performing one-on-one. There are a number of ways this can manifest itself.

• You can work with their own interests to create a more immediately intriguing presentation.

• You can capitalize on their particular blindspots to use methods you know they’d never conceive of.

• Logistically you only have one set of eyes to concern yourself with in regards to angles.

• 100% of the audience (One person) get’s the complete experience.  If you’re doing some mind-reading, for example, nobody is watching you read someone’s mind (which is almost always going to be a “lesser” experience than having their own mind read).

Second, when you’re a lone spectator, you don’t have to worry about what anyone else thinks of your reaction.  You don’t have to think, “Should I play it cool? Will these other people think I’m dumb if I’m fooled by this?” I find that as long as someone trusts you, they’re more willing to become vulnerable to the experience when no one else is around.

The third reason I think you get powerful reactions in one-on-one situations is in regards to the math of social/amateur interactions.

If you agree that social magic is more powerful when it feels like an interaction rather than a performance or a show, then here’s how to think about the math of it all. If we sit down and have a conversation, we might have something like a 50/50 split in regards to our input into the interaction.

With a magic trick, you’re unlikely to get a real 50/50 split. You might be able to get close. For example, if you’re my spectator and I sit down with you and I’m like, “Check out this interesting [whatever] that I found.” We may be able to explore this object or game or fortune telling protocol or whatever in a way that feels close to 50/50.

But you don’t have to get to 50/50. Even if you have a trick that requires you to contribute 80% to the interaction and the spectator to contribute just 20%, that’s still pretty good. You’ve been involved in many legitimate interactions in your life where someone else is doing 80% of the work and you’ve still felt involved and like an important element to the interaction.

So any 80/20 split of involvement in the interaction is still fine for social magic, in a one-on-one situation.

But when the audience grows, your 80% doesn’t diminish. Instead, their 20% gets split up between all of them.  If you’re performing for 10 people, and they’re all equally involved in the interaction, then they’re contributing 2% each, compared to your 80%. So what felt like a 4:1 split to a spectator in a one-on-one performance, feels like a 40:1 split to that spectator in an an audience of ten.

And that’s how you take something that could be seen as an interaction, a conversation, or a shared experience between two people and turn it into a “performance” or a “demonstration” for a group. A performance or demonstration may still be very impressive and amazing, but it’s very difficult for it to capture people in the same way as an experience that makes them feel like they’re a critical element of the proceedings.

I occasionally get emails from professional magicians who are very complimentary about the site and they ask if I think there’s a way to incorporate the ideas from this site into a professional show. While I certainly think some of the tricks and concepts I talk about here would work fine in a proper show (and I know of people who do use them professionally), the “audience-centric” approach that works so well in amateur/social magic, is probably just not possible in a professional situation. You can have elements of it, but you can’t have it completely. Why not? Well, because the notion of magic as “an interaction, a conversation, or a shared experience” is accomplished, in part, by emphasizing your actual relationship with the person. “I’m your [friend/brother/lover/co-worker/seat partner on this bus trip] do you want to see something interesting?” That can feel like a real interaction, even if they know it’s a set-up for a trick. But if your only relationship to your spectators is a magician-to-audience relationship, you can’t really make that feel like anything other than a performance because “performance” is how the magician/audience relationship is defined.

This is another reason why performing one-on-one can be so powerful: you get to maintain the nature of your relationship with your spectator. If I’m showing a trick to my girlfriend, then she is experiencing me (her boyfriend) showing her a trick. If I’m showing a trick to ten people, one of whom is my girlfriend, then she is experiencing me as I would relate to ten people at a time. It’s just not the same level of connection.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy performing for groups of friends. I do. I’m just pointing out that the mathematics of the interaction allow for some very intimate and powerful performances in one-on-one situations.

I’ve had some people tell me they’re uncomfortable performing one-on-one. Perhaps part of the reason they got into magic was to hide themselves a little behind the role of the “performer.” That’s understandable. But if you can push past that, I recommend it, because the majority of the truly profound reactions I’ve had to my magic have been with one other person.

If you don’t know how to approach someone as an individual to see some magic, I recommend just saying this:

What's your definition of dirty baby?
What do you consider pornography?
Don't you know I love you till it hurts me baby?
Don't you think it's time you took part in a magic trick with me?

Dirty Laundry

You bring a bag of your laundry to a friend’s house. The laundry is a mix of whites and colors. You reassure her that nothing in there is too gross.

You have her go into the laundry room without you. Following a random procedure, you direct her to place some of the clothes into the washing machine and some of the clothes into the dryer. You legitimately have no idea what clothes are where.

She starts up the dryer.

You enter the room and conclude the effect in one of two ways:

If the dryer has a glass door, you are able to take a half-second glance at the spinning laundry and tell her the breakdown between whites and colors in the dryer.

If the dryer has no glass door, then you push yourself up and sit on top of it and—via the vibrations to your anus—you are able to tell the breakdown between whites and colors.

Method

Miraskill with laundry.

(If you don’t know Miraskill, look it up. There are plenty of places to learn it.)

Instead of predicting red/black, you’re predicting whites/colors. You’ll want a variety of different types of clothing in each group. (In other words, don’t just have all white socks, and then shirts and pants of color.)

Your spectator will remove two items, blindly, at a time. If they’re one of each (one white/one color) she’ll throw them in the washing machine. If they match (both white or both colors), she’ll throw them in the dryer. You’ll want to walk her through the process a couple times from the other room.

Don’t use your actual disgusting dirty laundry. Wash it first and then put it back in the laundry bag.

The first time I tried this, the person suggested I had a camera in the laundry room. That’s why I recommend doing it at someone else’s house.

The only other time I did this, I did it with my friend’s clothes, instead of mine. We raided her underwear drawer and I asked her to remove a bunch of patterned underwear, and then a bunch of solid color ones, and I just kept track of the number of each that we removed from her drawer so I could figure out what the Miraskill result would be.

(I told her I wanted to improve my pervert skills by enhancing my psychic powers. “When you go to the laundromat to steal panties, you don’t want to be digging around in a bunch of different washers and dryers to find the right pair. So many times I’ve ended up pulling out some children’s underwear. I’m not that kind of creep! Or I’ll pull out some large, floppy granny-panties. What am I supposed to do with that? They’re too bulky. How am I supposed to tie that around my scrotum sack in order to get myself off?” I then introduce the Miraskill process as a procedure I’m using to develop my pervert intuition to be able to hone in on what machine holds the perfect pair for me. I’m still at the early stages, and I can just pick up on some basic traits of the garments. This is, admittedly, not a presentation suitable for many audiences (or performers)).

You can wrap this up a few different ways:

You could predict the outcome.

If the dryer has a glass door you can act like this is a feat of lightning perception.

I like the idea of sitting on the dryer and picking up something based on the way it’s spinning. If you don’t want to sit on it, then you could just place your hand on the dryer. Maybe pull out a dry erase marker and start writing down calculations on top of the machine.

Or you could have an odd number of garments in the bag. This would leave one left at the end (and whether it’s white or colored would change your final revelation). You could ask for the final item of clothing and rub and stretch the fabric between your hands as you furrow your brow and act like—based on this final item—you are able to reconstruct exactly how the other items were removed, and what the net result in the dryer will be, like a useless Sherlock Holmes.

No Post Today

No post today.

April Fools! There is a post. You’re reading it, dummy!

Yes! Another classic Jerx April Fools joke. And you totally fell for it. Hahaha. Your stupid face! “Huh, wait. what?” That’s you!

I’m actually not a big April Fools Day guy, myself. The thing where we’re like, “Okay, everyone, here’s this special day where it’s officially sanctioned and okay for us to mess with each other, got it?” feels a little corny to me. I think we should be fucking with each other all year round. In good natured ways, at least. There is an element of that in my style of performance. Except it’s kind of a sideways practical joke. With a practical joke, you want them to think something is real, up until the point where you reveal it’s fake. What I want to do is give people a premise and a situation they know is fake, but then give them a couple of moments within that fantasy that feel very real.

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If you’re concerned about someone pranking you today, here’s what i recommend…

Well, first, if it’s someone you like, then just have fun with it.

But maybe you think some asshole you work with is going to try and get you and you want to have some way to reverse the narrative. Here’s something that might work. Let’s say some guy in your office, Tad, pokes his head in your cubicle and says, “Enjoying that coffee? Heh-heh….I put a laxative in it when you weren’t looking! April fools, bitch!”

You look at your watch, “Yep… right on time.” Then, in a very lifeless, dry, monotone voice you say, “Gee… Oh no. You totally got me. Darn.”

He’ll be confused by your reaction.

“Take a look at the time” you say. He checks his phone, it’s 10:45.

You reach into your pocket and unfold a business card, read it to yourself. “Mmhmm. As I suspected,” and you toss the card on the table. It reads:

Tad’s “big” April Fool’s Day joke will come together at 10:45

“You’re such a predictable little bitch,” you say. “I didn’t even drink that coffee. I switched it for another cup, dipshit.”

Actually, you did drink the coffee. You’ll be shitting your brains out all day. But don’t tell Tad that.

Method: Just write up the card in advance, minus the time. And have a nail writer in your pocket, ready to go. This is the one I use.

April Fools! I got your ass so good.

(I use the Vernet Band Writer, btw.)

Mailbag #2

When you use the Peek Backstage, do you add another presentation on top of it? —JC

Very rarely. Here’s why. I save the “Peek Backstage” style for when I don’t have a particularly good presentation for something. Instead, my presentation is, “Hey, I have something I’m working on. Can I get your feedback on it?”

So, if I did have a good presentation, then I’d just use that instead.

To layer on a mediocre presentation on top of that is going to have them thinking about the dull presentation because I’ve asked them for feedback. But I don’t really want them concerning themselves with that. So I’ll generally perform it in a very straightforward way.

Sometimes I’ll layer in another presentation under a pretense like this:

“Hey, I’m going to show a trick at my nephew’s birthday party this weekend. Can I try it out on you first?” This is kind of a meta-meta-presentation. So it may, in fact, be a really strong trick, but I’ve dressed it up in a way that makes it seem like it’s something for children. Then I perform as I would if I was performing for a kid with, like, rhyming patter or lots of audience participation. And the person I’m performing it for will play along as the kid, but end up with their mind totally messed with because it actually wasn’t a trick intended for kids. (Sometimes they pick up on this, sometimes they don’t. It’s fun either way.)

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If someone who got kicked out of the GLOMM had created a really good trick, would you still perform it? I ask because I just watched the documentary on the Michael Jackson accusers and a lot of people say they can’t listen to his music anymore since seeing that. —GM

I would still do the trick, but that’s because I have no problem disassociating the two things.

If you look at the world as a battle between good and evil—is you listening to Michael Jackson’s music a win for good or for evil? I say it’s a win for good because you’re celebrating the good he put into the world.

But only do it if you want to. If listening to MJ’s music makes you sick, then don’t. But if you want to listen to it and you’re making yourself not do so because you feel you shouldn’t because you’re supporting a bad person, then I think you are needlessly punishing yourself.

Hell, if Hitler had recorded a banging dance-hall track, or had created a really mind-blowing card trick, I’d have no problem listening to that track or doing that trick. In fact, I’d probably lean in real close to the person I was performing and say, “I have a trick I want to show you. And do you know who created it?… Hitler!’

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Re: A Small Equivoque Revelation

So when I'm not annoying friends and family with magic I'm a bartender and when I first had the job of menu creation I did a lot of reading in that area. And one of the concepts that came up repeatedly was not giving guest too many options. Guest are less satisfied with their choice if you give them to many things to choose from. The magic number touted was seven items. This seems in line with your conclusion that anymore and it's harder for people see them as individual items and not as a group above seven items —PDB

Yeah, I researched similar things. There were two concepts I was looking at specifically.

The first is called “working memory” and that’s the number of distinct objects the mind can pay attention to and manipulate cognitively. That’s about four items at a time.

Then I looked at the subject of “overchoice,” which suggests that more options can lead to a sense of being overwhelmed. The actual number of options that this kicks in varies. But much of what I read suggested that it kicks in after 6-8 items.

With equivoque, we initially want to overwhelm their choice and working memory. This is what justifies the process. With just a few objects, a direct selection would make the most sense. The idea is to use equivoque in a context where it feels justified or else it sticks out too much.

It feels natural with two objects, because it’s just a single choice. It feels natural with many objects, because it makes sense to narrow down a large group. In the 3-6 range, I feel it stands out as particularly convoluted.

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Re: Monday’s Post - The Three Highlights

Thank you for the non-magic posts. They’ve also influenced the way I look at life. "Slowing Time" and the post today really resonate with me.

You’ve got an amazing system and don’t need another one, but I thought you might like to hear about mine which is similar in how it highlights the little things but also takes almost no time. Because I don’t carry a notebook everywhere I use Day One app to record one sentence about every notable activity I do during the day. Important life moments/gigs/adventures get special tags and the app automatically records GPS and time/date info to search whenever. I’ve been collecting data for the last 6 years and the app will remind me of anniversaries of experiences over that time.— JF

***

What you wrote reminded me of something I read very recently, a book called “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dicks (actual name). The whole book is about crafting stories from your day to day life, and in it he features something called “Homework for Life”. I’ll probably bastardise the recounting of it, so here’s a YouTube clip of him talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7p329Z8MD0 — DI

Thanks guys. I like hearing about this sort of stuff.

Some related thoughts on this…

Regarding the digital/physical tracking, I do both. For the “highlights” of media I consume (as described in that post), I record that digitally. For the highlights of experiences, I record that in a little notebook at the end of the day. I’ve flirted with doing it digitally, and even using that same app JF mentioned. There are a lot of benefits to that, but in the end I decided I enjoyed the aspect of having the actual pages to flip through and being able to see the expression in the handwriting and all of that.

As for the Homework for Life video, that guy’s premise is that every day you should write down one incident that would make for the best story from that day. I can understand why that works for him, but for my purposes it’s putting the emphasis in the wrong location. I don’t really care about how other people would react to my “highlights.” They’re just for my own benefit. That way they can be stupid or prurient or inconsequential and it doesn’t matter.

The idea of the Three Highlights is that you’re not capturing everything, good and bad, about whatever experience or time period you’re looking at. It’s that you’re just capturing the three things you enjoyed most about it.

You could say that it’s easy for me to look at things that way because that’s my natural mindset, and that’s fairly accurate. I’m very fortunate to not have any issues with anxiety or depression. I pretty much strolled out of my mom’s vagina like…

But I still think it’s a something that could be useful for a lot of people. It’s a technique I also use in bad or unpleasant situations to break the cycle of just stewing in the negative emotions. (“What are the three highlights of this shitty hotel room?” “What are the three highlights of this boring meeting?” “What are the three highlights of my friend’s funeral?”) So maybe it could have a small curative effect for people if they’re constantly focused on the negative because this trains you to do just the opposite.

Equivoque — Biggie Sized

A classic joke from my high school days, after a trip to Wendy’s, would be to hold your Biggie drink in one hand and grab your genitals with the other and say, “I’ve got my Biggie in one hand and my drink in the other.” Good times.

In regards to yesterday’s post, a few people wrote in asking, “How do you do equivoque with 25 items?”

Well, I don’t exactly. It’s just part of the selection procedure. I’ll explain. Let’s say I want to force one coin among many. Here’s what it might look like:

I have everyone at the table toss any change they have into a pile in the middle of the table. I ask them to mix up the change, swirl it around the table, or whatever. Then I ask one person to divide the change into a few small piles. “We’re going to eliminate three of the four piles.” I have people select piles to be eliminated and they’re pushed off to the side. The coins from the final pile are laid out in a row on the table and they are eliminated until we’re down to one coin: the force coin.

The basic idea is just to introduce the force item into the procedure after a number of free choices have been made.

So they make the pile of change and mix it up. They make a number of small piles from that change and I tell them they’re going to eliminate all but one of the piles. The choose piles one-by-one for elimination. There is nothing unusual or suspicious about this, because it’s legitimately fair.

Once we get down to one pile, that’s when I introduce the force object. So if it’s a coin, then the coin is in palm and I’ll either push the pile towards them and drop off the palmed coin OR I’ll introduce the coin in the process of transition the coins from a pile into a row. No one ever notices the added coin.

At this point I’m down to 6-8 coins and I’ll use a combination of 2nd and 3rd wave equivoque to narrow it down to one coin. (The exact wording will depend on the objects I’m using. My “generic” equivoque script is likely to be in TOY, the next book for supporters of the site.)

When I first started doing this procedure, it was with folded pieces of paper with something drawn or written inside, and during the procedure I would introduce the force piece of paper that was folded in a slightly off-kilter manner which I could recognize easily. At first I didn’t know how it would be received. There were two ways this could play out.

1. Because of the free choices at the start, the spectator’s guard would be down for the less free equivoque choices later on.

2. Because of the free choices at the start, the equivoque portion would—in comparison—feel even more awkward or unfair than it might otherwise.

In my experience, it’s definitely been option #1.

There is something so casual and uncontrolled about this procedure that it seems to quell their suspicion. Think of it in terms of a card force (another way I’ve used it). I ask you to shuffle the deck and cut it into a bunch of different piles. How many? However many you want. It doesn’t really matter. 7 or 10 or whatever feels right. Then you have a totally free choice to discard the packets one by one until we’re down to a lone packet.

This feels so free and easy. I’m barely paying attention. Clearly I’m not trying to force a card on you. We’re just going through a process to narrow down the full deck to one card. .

Once we get to one pile, I spread them in front of you (adding in a palmed card). You then narrow down those cards to one (via equivoque). And yes, it’s not as free from then on, but I think good-will you generate during the clearly fair opening choices helps camouflage the equivoque later. At least that’s been my experience.

A Small Equivoque Realization

I have a new trick I’ve been workshopping over the past couple months and in the course of that I’ve come to a realization about equivoque that I haven’t thought of before. (Although it’s certainly possible others have come to this conclusion as well.)

In the trick, I use some fairly standard “second wave” equivoque over the course of forcing one of 25 items. For the sake of this post, we’ll say they’re coins. They weren’t coins in reality, but it’s easier to just say that than give the full explanation for what I was using.

So I performed the trick and then broke it down with a couple magician friends and a half-dozen non-magician friends to get their feedback: how did it feel? did anything ring false to you? etc.

After some initial positive feedback, I wanted to test it out with another half dozen or so more non-magicians, but I made a change to how I was presenting it. The interesting part of what I was testing was what I was doing after the selection was made. So I decided that instead of starting off with 25 coins, I’d just start off with four, and cut a couple steps off my selection procedure.

But something (mildly) interesting happened. When I broke down the trick with these people after performing it for them (individually), four out of the six of them questioned the fairness of the selection.

So, to be clear, in the first group of performances I tested the trick with a large number of coins. During the selection process, that large number was trimmed down to four coins and from there I did a standard equivoque. In the second group of performances I just started off with four coins and went with the equivoque procedure from the beginning.

Now, I was fully prepared for the second round of performances to be less impressive, given that I was just starting with a choice of one in four coins. But I wasn’t prepared for them to question the procedure any more the second time around than they did the first, given that the second selection procedure was just a truncated version of the first.

But when I asked them what they found suspicious about the selection procedure they all responded similarly. And their responses have led me to this conclusion:

Equivoque doesn’t work well with 3-6 items.

You see, when I asked people about why their selection aroused suspicion they all said something like, “It’s just a weird way to pick an item.”

That didn’t really surprise me. I’ve been involved with some larger scale testing of equivoque in the focus groups and a certain percentage will always say that. The interesting thing is that the people who saw the longer selection procedure didn’t have the same critique even though they too eventually saw the standard 4-item equivoque.

I think I know why this was. (You might say, “Well, it was just a handful of people in each set of performances, so you can’t really draw a conclusion based on that.” Fair enough. Reasonable minds may differ, but I think the theory seems viable.)

I’ve done a little research online and it seems like the maximum number of items most human brains can perceive as distinct objects is somewhere between 4 and 6. Beyond that we just kind of see a “group” and can focus on a few items within that group but not the whole thing.

So making a selection of one item from four (for example) should be a simple process you can fully conceptualize. I’m asking you to make a choice of one distinct item from four distinct items in your brain. That should be a straightforward procedure where you just choose one of the objects. To complicate that with things like, “Pick up two,” “Slide one towards me,” “Hand me either one,” is going to instinctually feel needlessly complicated and therefore suspicious.

But, once you get to a certain number—I believe around 7 or more—then it is somewhat reasonable to use a bit of procedure to narrow down your selection because you, as the participant, don’t have a full grasp on all the choices as distinct objects. So I think going in with an attitude of, “Let’s narrow down these choices,”—while not the most direct way of making a selection—is somewhat justified with a larger number of objects. And then, once you do get down to a smaller number, you can continue the equivoque selection procedure because at that point you’re just continuing a pattern you’ve established (rather than introducing it out-of-the-blue with a small number of items at the start).

That’s my theory, at least. I’ll explore it more and see if it pans out.

It may be confirmation bias, but since coming to this conclusion, any routine I see that involves equivoque with a small number of objects definitely jumps out at me as being sort of odd. I can see why a non-magician might instinctively feel that way about it. Whenever possible I’m going to try and avoid it.

Avoid it how? Well, one way would be to use something like multiple outs instead of equivoque. The other way would be to add a bunch more options at the beginning of the selection process so that going the route of “gradually narrowing” the number of choices makes more sense.

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I was listening to a podcast about the Black Dahlia Murder, and they were talking about the guy who likely committed it. And it turns out he was a real maniac who raped his daughter and pimped her out to his friends, and she, in turn, did the same thing with her kids. What does this have to do with equivoque? Well, in that family, they lived with this sort of dysfunction for so long that it just seemed normal. I think that happens with magic techniques a lot too. We get so used to them that we can forget how inappropriate they really are. Look, I’m not conflating the two things! I’m just saying if you saw two guys and one of them was selling nights with his teenage daughter to the highest bidder and the other was offering you a selection of four items by saying, “Pick up any two. Now set them aside. Take one of the remaining items. Hand it to me. The one that’s left is your selection,” then you should walk away thinking, Damn, I just met two psychopaths.

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Dear Future Authors of Books on Writing Technique,

You are likely here because of the buzz you heard about the world’s most perfect analogy. It’s in the paragraph above, between the flowers.

In order to make it clear the analogy was flawlessly constructed, please post the gif below next to that paragraph in your textbook to emphasize the fact the writing is, in fact, bellissima.

The Three Highlights

This isn’t a magic tip, it’s a life tip. The purpose of the technique is to make essentially anything (a night out, a vacation, your entire life) more enjoyable and memorable.

It’s a simple idea that has paid big dividends in my own life, so some of you may find it valuable as well.

Imagine you’re going to see a band you like. It’s at a small club and you walk in and see a bunch of people recording the show and watching it through their phone cameras. “Ugh,” you think. “These buffoons. Can’t they just be present and enjoy the show? Does everything have to be recorded for posterity?”

Perhaps you don’t feel that way, but that’s always been my somewhat superior attitude. But I’ve had an evolution in that thought process as well, because I realized I was missing out on something. To continue with the concert example, I would find myself a few years later thinking back on some show I saw and—while I had a generally pleasant feeling about it—I had no real concrete memories from the night. I might not even be able to name a single song that I was 100% sure they played.

So yes, I was enjoying the experience more in the moment, but a lot of the particulars of the experience were left in the moment.

On the one hand, I wanted to have more long-term memories from the experiences in my life, but on the other hand I didn’t want to be so caught up in recording and documenting those moments that I became an observer and not a participant.

Is there as a way to get the best of both worlds?

Here was the route I took for finding out how to retain more of the details of my experiences, while still being immersed in them.

My first thought was, “I should keep a journal. That way I can write down my experiences and relive them later.” My second thought was, “Fuck that noise!” Because there was no way I was going to be doing that. I write this site. I write newsletters and books. And all my “real work” is writing related to. Not only that, but I’m a pretty slow writer. I stop between every sentence and think. I don’t want to do more writing. I wince when people romanticize writing. (“Ah, the sweet sound of graphite scratching on paper as the sun comes up and I record my hopes and dreams for the day on the cream, parchment pages of my hand-sewn journal.”) Almost nothing you have to do for 60 hours a week is going to be enjoyable in your spare time as well. So yeah, I didn’t want to tie myself to the idea of coming home late after a show and then writing a couple formless paragraphs about what just happened.

But then I thought, What if I just kept my mind engaged with looking for three highlights of any experience?

This, as it turned out, was the key. So now, when I would go to a show, I would be on the lookout for these three highlights. And perhaps I would end up with something like this:

1. When they played [my favorite song] acoustically.

2. Dancing with the red-haired girl.

3. The way the drunk guy at the foot of the stage was playing the air drums.

Then I would go home and write down those three highlights in a small notebook with each page dedicated to a different experience.

The writing takes less than a minute. I’m just putting down those three peak moments. I don’t really elaborate on them (unless I feel the need to).

And, as time passes, I can flip through that notebook and remind myself of the highlights of each event. “Ah, yes! That song sounded incredible when performed acoustically. Who would have thought. Oh… shit. That red-haired girl!” Etc.

You might say, “Yes, but doesn’t the act of constantly being on the lookout for ‘highlights’ of an event also pull you out of being in the moment and just experiencing the event?” No. It’s the opposite. It keeps me 100% engaged. I’m fully there. I’m not thinking of anything outside of the event. If it’s a concert, I’m hearing the music, I’m taking in the crowd, I’m observing details about the venue. Every sensory experience: sound, sight, smell, taste, feeling is noted as my brain collects potential highlights. That, in my opinion, is kind of the definition of presence.

Not only that, but it keeps you focusing on the good around you. Which has to be a positive thing for your mental health.

But here’s the best part of this practice…, it’s not just a way for you to enjoy some particular event. It’s something you can apply to your entire life. It’s fractal in nature. You can pull out or zoom in as much as you want and still look for those three highlights

For example, I view my life this way. What are the three highlights of your life? Maybe it’s the family you created, some professional accomplishment, and some personal goal you reached—writing a screenplay, or visiting every continent.

Zoom In

I keep my mind open to identify the three highlights of my year. Perhaps it’s a trip I took, a person I met, and a book I wrote.

Zoom In

I keep track of the three highlights of every week. Last week it was a little party/get-together at my friend Bella’s house, going snowboarding, and visiting a new Thai restaurant.

Zoom In

I keep track of the the three highlights of any “event” in my life (that I want to remember): any show I see, any party I go to, any holiday spent with people. What were the three highlights of the gathering at Bella’s? The response to the magic trick I performed. This extended riff my friend John went on about us re-making A Christmas Carol that gave me literal stomach pains from laughing so hard. And watching/commenting on the schlocky 1986 horror movie, Chopping Mall.

Zoom In

I keep track of the three highlights of any media I consume. When I complete a series of TV I note my three favorite episodes or scenes. When I read a book I keep track of my three favorite parts. When I watch a movie I try to come away with three highlights: favorite scenes, memorable quotes, cool visuals, or whatever. This has completely changed how I consume media. I used to think, “Did I read that book or not?” “Did I see that movie?” Now I’m paying more attention in the moment and remembering more afterwards. What were the highlights of Chopping Mall? The weird sex-party in the furniture store. The dumb scene where the kids were calculating how much they’d have to pay the mall back because of the destruction the malls security robots caused tying to kill them (why would they be liable for that?). And when the girl’s head exploded.

If that sounds like a lot of work, it’s not. It’s just one minute per thing. So for me that’s one minute per year/week/event. It’s a couple minutes a day, a few times a week at most.

Now I have a bunch of small notebooks that I can peruse and see the highlights of all these experiences from the past few years. Small moments I might never have recalled otherwise. A joke someone made. Something I ate. A compliment. A kiss. A weird coincidence. Or whatever. But you don’t have to make an endless list of these things, just the three highlights on whatever scale you want to do it on.

As I said, it’s maybe two minutes a day of actual physical effort (the writing). The real “work” of this comes in giving things your rapt attention. But, honestly, after a while it just becomes like a game you play in your head where you’re collecting these “highlights.”

And what you get in return is that you’re in a constant mindset of presence, appreciation, and adventure. Presence because you’re always engaged. Appreciation because you’re focusing on the positive. And adventure because your mind is concentrated on finding new highlights. Highlights of this afternoon at an amusement park, or [Zoom Out] of this 3-day road-trip, or [Zoom Out] of this week, or [Zoom Out] of this year, or [Zoom Out] of your life.