http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX9adPALLzA

This is a video of famed card magician Ricky Jay performing an amazing feat of mentalism. Supplementing the magic to be found is one of Jay's trademarks: stage patter. Jay complements the effect with a compelling story from classic Japanese cinema. Having studied and performed card magic for quite some time myself, this performance turned out to be not only an entertaining magic trick, but also a valuable learning experience.

When I first got into magic about five years ago (I was a freshman in high school at the time), I fell into the same "trap" that many novice magicians were susceptible to: I thought the magic tricks themselves were the only thing that mattered in a performance. When learning a new trick, I would focus exclusively on figuring out the secret of the trick. In performance, I would just go through the motions without really putting any life or energy into the magic and was content with merely getting "Wow!" reactions from my audience. In my defense, my audiences probably weren't lying; my shows were certainly enjoyable. But I wasn't really putting any life into the magic. It took me quite some time to understand that knowing how a feat of magic was done was only half the battle. The mark of a true magician is their ability to present their magic in unique, engaging ways. An excellent quote from the legendary Mark Wilson sums it up best: "A trick is only as good as you make it look!"

Today, I continue to astound people with my feats of magic, and I enjoy it just as much as I ever did. Only now, though, I understand what it truly means to perform magic. A magic trick is, at its core, a story. It all fits; there's an introduction, a rising sense of suspense, a climax, and an ending, just like any story. Every great magician, like Ricky Jay, knows this all too well. You can get all the "Wow!" reactions you want just by going through the motions the easy way, but the catch is that people forget that. They forget the things you do. What they never forget, however, is how you make them feel. Thus, that is the challenge of any magician, a challenge that extends to all artists and designers as a whole. People who see your work won't remember what you did years later. What they will remember is how it made them feel. If you can't touch people emotionally somehow, you'll be like vapor. You'll never leave any sort of impression on people. Instead, you'll just become old news.