The Great Sex Principle
/A couple of months ago I got a mailbag question that asked if I was going to perform three tricks for someone, in what order would I perform them. Start with the strongest to grab their attention? End with the strongest? Build in impossibility? Or the “traditionally” recommended structure of starting with your second strongest effect, going to your weakest, and putting your strongest at the end?
After giving it some more thought, I came up with a good rule of thumb for the amateur. Although this is the first time I’ve crystallized the rule in my head, I can look back and see that when I followed this rule in the past, it always worked out well. And I can remember many times in the past when I didn’t follow this rule and it was definitely a mistake.
There are two parts to this.
Part 1: If you’re going to perform multiple effects for someone on the same day, then each successive trick should be more powerful than the one that came before.
That’s not to say every trick you ever do for someone must be stronger than the last, only that tricks that are performed on the same day should build in intensity.
Of course, you never really know how a given trick will be received, but if you’ve been performing for a while, you should have some idea of the relative strength of the tricks in your repertoire.
It probably would help to categorize the tricks you do (at least in your head) in categories along these lines:
Level 1 - Amusing Trifles - Tricks you enjoy performing and get a nice response, but that aren’t really designed to blow people away. Pleasurable oddities or quick visual effects.
Level 2 - Foolers - Tricks that fool people but don’t do much more beyond that. Most decent card tricks will fall into this category. Think “Twisting the Aces” or something like that.
Level 3 - Strong Magic - Tricks that not only fool people but also engage them on some level emotionally via the presentation. Telling someone the playing card they’re thinking of might be a “Fooler,” but telling them the name of a childhood friend they lost touch with would likely elevate the same basic effect (mind reading) to the level of Strong Magic.
Level 4 - Immersive Magic - Your most inexplicable tricks, paired with your strongest presentations, in a way that pulls people into the effect so it feels not just like a demonstration of magic, but a true experience of something “magical” unfolding around them.
Part 1 of the Great Sex Principle suggests that when showing someone more than one trick on the same day, you should always level up. You shouldn’t stay at the same level or go down.
Part 2: If you get a reaction that you would rate a 9 or 10 out of 10, then you shouldn’t perform anymore for that person that day.
You know the types of reactions I’m talking about. The type of reaction where they weren’t just fooled. Or even really fooled. But the type of reaction where they were strongly affected by the trick they just saw.
You never know exactly what trick might cause such a reaction. For example, one night, maybe eight years ago, my friend Gemma was over at my apartment. I had a few ideas for tricks I might show her that night. One of those tricks was something that Real Secrets had released. It was a variation on The Trick That Fooled Einstein where the prediction was written on the fortune from a fortune cookie. If I had categorized that effect in my head beforehand, I would have thought it was a sort of minor effect. A level one “trifle” using the categories from the previous section. It’s a prediction of pocket change. The prediction is anything but straightforward. It’s a little novelty. I wasn’t expecting a huge reaction.
Yet the reaction I got was about a 9 out of 10.
And I should have let that be the only trick I showed her that evening. Even though I knew the other tricks I intended to show her were technically stronger, I should have just let her reaction be the thing that signaled we’d reach the finish line.
Instead, I tried to chase that reaction with more tricks. And while they went over well, they only ended up diluting the impact of that initial magic moment.
The idea behind these two rules is to let the magic experience for your spectator get more and more potent throughout your time together. That’s why you only raise the level of effect as you go on. But also, once you reach that very high “potency” (a 9 or 10-level reaction) you’re done for the day. Let them stew in that for the rest of the night.
Then, the next time you see them, they will have “sobered up” a little from that previous experience. So you can start back in with something of a lower “potency.”
I call this the Great Sex Principle because it mirrors what I’ve learned from really amazing sexual encounters. Generally, you want to build the encounters in intimacy and intensity. But, once you experience a truly transformative moment of connection with that person, you shouldn’t push for more during the same encounter. Instead, give that moment time to reverberate and breathe.
When I was younger, and dumber (and fuller-of-cum’er), I would make the mistake of chasing those types of experiences one after another. If I was with someone and we had a sexual experience that was not just really good, but transcendent in some way, my attitude was always like, “Well, fuck, let’s do that again!” And it was almost always the wrong instinct. We didn’t give ourselves enough time to live in that moment. And trying to re-capture it so soon afterward usually brought us back down from “transcendent” to just “really good” again. And “really good” is, of course, still great. But it’s not that peak level of passion and connection we were at.
And I’m not just talking about some crazy, tantric, simultaneous orgasm shit. You can have earthshaking experiences with just a crazy make-out session, or fooling around in the backseat at a drive-in movie.
Regardless of how you reach that peak, it’s not a great idea to immediately try and match or top it.
Don’t snuff the afterglow.
Instead, enjoy that post-sex (post-trick) hazy electric energy. And let the momentum of that experience build anticipation for the next time together.