B (37:52)
So I did this as a side hustle. This was not, you know, this. I never, I swear to God, I never at this point said to myself, I'm going to be a professional magician or a mentalist one day. I didn't think that was a possibility. Like On a multiple choice Scantron. That's not in my. For abcd, that's in the E other. Because I wasn't raised to think that I could be in showbiz or have like some sort of weird career. I was very much first generation immigrant of this is the path. You get a job, you go to college, you get good grades, you get a job and that's what you do, right? Is that, that's what people do. I don't watch a movie on like a big screen and say, I'm going to be that movie star one day. That's impossible for me to imagine. I just never. I didn't know anyone who had done that and then heard the steps. So I always did this as a way to win people over to achieve my other goals and aims. So for example, when I was doing interviews when I was in college, I went to school for engineering at Michigan. I feel bad for the person who was after me in a job interview. They were capital S, screwed. Because what does my resume say? It says professional magician from, you know, 1996 to present. Imagine if you're interviewing somebody for a job, for an internship. Are you not going to be like, wait a second, what? You're a professional magician. And so right there, this is where you learn how to address people. Right there. If they go, well, do a trick. You never do a trick when someone asks you. Right there. Because you flip the power dynamic. In any good relationship, in any good negotiation, you need to know where the power dynamic is. Who's in charge in this moment, and if it's not you, how do you become in charge? So in that moment, I want something from that person. I want an internship. They don't get to ask me. I would sweeten the deal. And I'd say at the end of the interview, if we have time, I'll see if I can show you one thing right away. We've just switched everything. Now they want something from me. I've also created a dynamic where I don't know that I'm going to give it to you. You now have to earn it from me. So now the way that we're talking to each other has changed a little bit. Where you are now trying to win me over rather than me win you over. Just the way I even said it. The tactic of if we have time, maybe I'll show you something. That's great. Now we've also left it to the end because if I do it at the beginning, they're not gonna remember anything I say after I Perform. They're gonna be like, how did he just do that trick? And, like, they're gonna forget all the other stuff about me that makes me a qualified candidate. But at the end, if I now do something amazing, the last thing you do for somebody is what they're gonna remember the longest. The end of a movie better not suck or else. The rest of the movie was terrible, right? Great movie, but the ending. Oh, terrible. So at the end, I would do one trick and I'd be about to leave, and then they want to see another one, Another one. So my 15 minute interview just turned into 26 minutes. The person after me, I'm getting handshakes, being like, we'll talk to you later. And this poor guy who walks in after me is like, shell shocked because they're on a high. They're like, oh, what do you do? Nothing. Screw this kid, right? We got the magic man coming to our company. So I use that. And I landed, like, internship after internship because I knew how to win people over. It didn't hurt that I had good grades, but I just knew. So I went to work on Wall Street. I graduated college, I had an internship for Merrill lynch, and I worked on Wall Street. And while I was there, again, my side hustle was always doing this. Like, I don't have. It's like the Energizer Bunny. I don't have a way of not doing this at that time. This was my way of networking, of meeting people. I, within months of getting to New York, had worked at, like, I got two restaurants, and then at the restaurants, if I saw a party, I knew that my force multiplier was meeting event planners. The event planner. You get one person at a restaurant, they give you one gig. You get the right event planner, they give you all the gigs, because they hire people every weekend to do parties. And so I was hustling all the time, and I kept building and building and building that about two and a half years after I was working there. There's obviously steps along the way. I was working four nights a week at restaurants. I get done with my gig, I'd go and then day, every, every weekend. Usually two gigs on Saturday, sometimes three, one or two on Sundays. All I did was work. But that's a good time to do it in your 20s. And so I pretty much, at that point, got to the point where I just said, I'm working so much, I'm going to take a leap of faith and go for it and see if I could do this as a professional.
