Invitations
/There are certain sentences no one wants to hear:
“Have you heard the good news about our Lord and Savior…”
“I’m looking for a few motivated individuals to join my team. If you’re tired of your 9-to-5 and ready to be your own boss, this could be exactly what you’ve been waiting for.”
“Nice to meet you, ma’am. Has anyone ever told you that you look like a female Craig Petty?”
Right up there with those, I’d put the sentence: “Do you want to see a magic trick?”
Sure, there are people who light up when they hear that—but in my experience, they’re usually the exact people I’d least want to perform for.
For everyone else, that phrase can carry some baggage. Most peoples’ only experience of live magic is bad magic: tricks that bored them, tricks so obvious they had to fake surprise to protect the ego of the child (or man-child) showing it, or tricks that genuinely fooled them but felt so hollow the only takeaway was, “Well, I guess I’m stupid.”
Very few people are ever actually charmed by a trick.
Which is why dropping that question—“Want to see a trick?”—was one of the best decisions I ever made when it came to getting people on board to watch a trick.
The words you use at that moment matter. They’re the Invitation into the experience.
Instead of “Want to see a trick?” Consider Invitations like these:
“This has been bugging me all day. Can you make any sense of it?”
“I learned this thing the other day and I’m wondering if it works on everyone. Will you be my guinea pig?”
“Okay, this is going to sound dumb, but I swear it’s true…”
“I read this article that had a little exercise to test intuition, want to try it?”
“Someone showed me this thing at a party last week, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.”
“Want to see a weird little glitch in the way your brain processes stuff?”
“This was our road-trip game growing up. I got kind of good at it.”
“I picked this up from a friend who claimed it was a way to tell if someone was lying.”
“Supposedly this says a lot about how your brain is wired, let’s try it.”
“Do you mind holding onto this for a second? You’ll see why.”
“I never paid for a drink in college doing this. Want to see?”
Not all of these Invitations are perfect for every audience, trick, or situation, but almost any one of them is better than, “Let’s play make-believe that I have magic powers.”
If you only remember a couple, remember the ones I’ve used most often in my writing (and in my real life):
“Can I show you something weird?”
“Can I get your help with something?”
These play directly to two instincts people almost always say yes to: curiosity, and the desire to be helpful.
You’re not aiming for something clever, just something intriguing and human. And “Want to see a magic trick?”—the same line you used when you were nine—is neither.