How to Make Your Frustration Vanish When Watching a Magic Trick?

Becoming a Better Spectator

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As a professional magician, I’ve often heard spectators say the following: “Argh, they are so infuriating!” — or: “How did you even do that? I was scrupulously looking at what you were doing!” — or: “It’s really frustrating not to know how it’s done”.

It’s even possible you have already expressed this to a magician or yourself while watching magic tricks.

Here, it is important to separate two, distinct reasons as to why you would say these things:

1. Because you are reacting to a magician who has chosen to fool you as his primary task — and is thus explicitly trying, throughout his magic tricks, to eliminate every potential method you can think of until you are oblivious to how it is done.
2. Because you explicitly or implicitly hold that magic tricks are “mere deceptions and trickery”, although the magician may not be challenging you to discover the secret behind his magic tricks and simply wants to show you something “impossible”.

In either case, whether you are reacting to the magician trying to push a conclusion that “he can get away with his secret actions without you catching him” down your throat or interacting with magic tricks and magicians as if they were meant to deceive you…