Okay, do you really want to know the major, biggest, most important, and difficult Secret to become a great magician? It isn't learning as many tricks as you can, but mastering one simple skill. That skill is called misdirection. You've probably used misdirection in your life and not even noticed it. Have you ever played a practical joke, done a prank, or organized a surprise for someone? Then you used misdirection to get that done.

The correct use and control of Misdirection are what sets a professional magician apart from someone who just performs tricks. Understanding misdirection enables us to make our magic more powerful, more believable, and leave a lasting impression on the people who see it. According to the e-book - “Understanding Misdirection” - Dominic Reyes and Clint Baron break down the essentials and remind us that “Misdirection makes magic stronger. It makes you a better performer. However, it is the ‘unspoken’ art within magic, and finding good theory and resources on the topic is hard to come by.” 

So what is misdirection? 

Wikipedia defines misdirection as a form of deception in which the attention of an audience is focused on one thing in order to take the focus off from another thing. Managing the audience's attention is the aim of all theater. It is the foremost requirement of Magic. Here in Brazil, we don't have a word that defines misdirection. The closest thing in our vocabulary would translate to something like disorientation, or reorientation.

Most people associate misdirection with distraction, but in my opinion, it's more important to visualize it as the direction of attention more so than an actual distraction.

If there's one thing that you really can't learn enough, its misdirection and when to apply it. Words are a big part of misdirection.  Author of Leading with Your Head Gary Kurtz says “Misdirection has nothing to do with distraction. It has everything to do with controlling audience attention, at all times. Or as Erdnase says, “Not only shouldn’t they [the audience] see anything, they shouldn’t suspect anything”. 

So, misdirection is not about covering moves. It’s not about turning your back while you do a dodgy switch or the secret move; it’s about controlling audience attention so that when you have to execute a move, the audience is not only looking somewhere else, but they don’t even suspect you are doing anything. It is about ensuring that suspicion doesn’t even enter your audience’s mind. 

Jarle Leirpoll, author of Pocket Power says “A sleight is not perfect when the spectators are unable to tell what you’re doing. Only when they’re completely unaware that you did anything at all will they experience the magic.” And I agree completely with him. Not arousing suspicion is key to all good deception.  

So go out and engage people, because when their brain is thinking about processing words, it's difficult to see and process the other senses at the same time. Try this trick out, it gets people all the time.