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Creating Magic for Jeff Bezos

Creating Magic for Jeff Bezos

April 29, 2021 • Reading Time: 8 minutes

The biggest hurdle for people to get over to become creative is to learn to love the process. Get used to spewing tricks out of your head, even the terrible ones.

Luke Oseland reminded me that consultants will sometimes play a game called ping pong.

The game involves two players taking it in turns to throw up an idea for a trick. You can imagine you need to say your idea every time you hit an imaginary ping pong ball back across the table.

The game creates urgency, reduces the pressure for every idea to be good, and rewards concise ideas. To play the game, you usually need some structure to what you are trying to create, like tricks for a location or with certain objects.

I’ll give some examples of these “thrown-up” magic ideas today.

I asked Instagram followers to suggest locations…

Hockey Puck Catch*

Perform the classic bullet catch with a hockey puck.

Hockey Stick Tensegrity*

Balance hockey sticks in a gravity-defying fashion on the ice.

Real Shoes to Ice Skates

Blades appear on the bottom of a pair of borrowed sneakers.

Linking Ice Skates*

Magician impossibly links to ice hockey shoes by their blades.

Hot and Cold

The magician causes a section of ice to melt rapidly.

Under-Ice Prediction*

Magician smashes ice to retrieve their prediction that matches the game outcome.

Linking them wouldn’t be as hard as you might think

Paper Plane Drop

Magician throws paper plane from the tower, and it lands at a named location.

Coin Catch*

Coins drop from the top, Magician on the ground catches a specific coin.

Meet Me There

The Magician vanishes from the ground and appears at the top of the tower.

Bend The Eiffel Tower

The Magician bends the Eiffel tower like a spoon.

“Focus, you can see it bending. Focus!”

Find Nemo

Nemo isn’t that hard to find. Magician dunks bag in water and retrieves Nemo.

Shark Appearance*

The magician makes a shark appear underwater.

Torn and Restored Oxygen Tube*

Scuba diving magician cuts and restores his oxygen tuber underwater.

Shark Cage Escape*

Cage lowers with magician inside. Lots of bubbles and blood, then the magician appears atop a nearby ship.

Then I asked Instagram followers to suggest objects…

Self-Folding Yoga Mat*

The magician commands the yoga mat to perform downward dog then roll itself.

Clay Powder Predictions*

The magician covers the yoga mat with the powder used to prevent slipping and shakes it off to reveal an image stuck to the mat.

Bottle Appearances*

Two rolled-up yoga mats make water bottles appear, teleport and vanish.

Yoga Matt Penetration

The spectator places the mat down, and then the magician makes it seep into the concrete floor. (Could also make the mat solid and unrollable).

Grass to Weed

A handful of plucked grass gets rolled to become cannabis magically.

Playing Grass

You can hold a piece of grass in a certain way and blow to make a sound. The magician does this inside their hand without blowing. Then suddenly, the entire field of the grass plays the sound.

Lawnmower Magic*

The magician and spectator ride a heavy-duty lawn mower during this trick, and when the routine ends, they find they mowed a perfect image of a celebrity face across the garden.

Blindfold Lawnmower Ride*

Dangerous objects are all across the lawn. The magician drives blindfolded with a spectator on a lawnmower for this death-defying stunt…

Finally, I asked Instagram followers to suggest celebrities…

Broken and Restored Tesla Truck Window*

The magician magically causes the broken window to become brand new.

Self-Driving Tesla Escape*

A magician must escape from a tesla that’s self-driving at impossible speeds.

DogeCoin Appearance*

The magician makes a real dog appear for Mr Musk.

Space Magic

The magician sends an empty bottle up to space with weather balloons, then makes an object disappear and appear inside the bottle at the edge of the atmosphere. Musk sees it appear on the live feed and retrieves the bottle when it returns to the ground.

“What’s that behind your ear, Mr. Musk?”

Any Product Called For*

The magician makes any product appear inside an amazon box.

Water to Pee*

The magician turns a bottle of water into a bottle of amazon factory worker urine.

Amazon Book Test*

Amazon started with books; let’s do a book test with an amazon spin.

Hey, Alexa - read my mind*

A mind-reading routine with amazon’s Alexa reading the Besoz’s mind.

Building (drawing) Duplication*

The magician and Jeb build the same thing in Minecraft.

Minecraft IRL

The magician makes elements of Minecraft appear in real life.

Finders Keepers*

The magician can find an object hidden in the game by Jeb simply by holding their arm.

Colour-match with Minecraft theme*

The designer colours in a physical drawing based on Minecraft, and the magician predicts it perfectly.

*Nothing New

Most of these ideas are versions of existing tricks. Plots might be torn and restorn routines, predictions, drawing duplications, blindfold drives and escapes. The secret to fast, creative output is to make small changes to existing ideas, don’t start from scratch.

Take the pressure off yourself. Not every idea needs to be great. Keep it concise, and enjoy the process. Power through those silly ideas to get to the great ones.