If you want to follow their lead, allow me to present five things you must do if you want to use your cheap magician skills to convince the world you have real psychic powers.

Somehow these people had been able to turn the sentence "Here's a neat trick that will amuse your family and friends" into "Here's a way to pretend you have God-like powers and convince crowds of credulous and needy people to give you their money." For them, that three dollar book certainly paid for itself.

I got into magic at the age of five. I stopped thinking psychics were real at the age of five-and-a-half. Mainly because most of them were doing tricks I had just read in the colorful magic book I had bought for three dollars the week before.

5 Much, Much Less, is Much, Much More

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There's an old adage that goes, "If it goes up, it's a trick. If it goes across, it's real." Basically it means the more impressive a trick looks, the less convinced most people will be that it's real.

For example, if a magician makes a crumpled ball of paper float up a meter into the air, do somersaults and then float back down, the audience knows there is obviously invisible thread or some other nefarious gimmick in use. If however, a psychic stares at the crumpled up paper ball for two minutes, straining to summon all of their psychic powers and then finally it moves three inches across the table, they figure it must be the real deal.

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Of course, according to the laws of physics, making a ball of paper move one inch with the power of thought is exactly as impossible as making the entire Statue of Liberty disappear. This is based on a principal of magic called "the too perfect theory." It means deliberately weakening a trick to make it more believable. For example, if a magician is going to pretend to be psychic and predict three headlines that will appear in the next day's newspaper, then seal the predictions in an envelope to be revealed after the events, they will almost always deliberately get one wrong.

Predicting only two of the three correctly makes them seem suitably psychic and amazing, while not crossing the boundary that will make people suspicious. Kind of like when a kid cheats on a test, he'll always get a couple of answers intentionally wrong to throw the teacher off the scent.