It’s not the trick.

At a reception, a well-dressed gentleman, unknown to you, comes up to your circle and spreads a deck of cards, face down, from hand to hand in front of you. With a friendly smile, he says, “Take a card.” You are immediately intrigued.

But what if, in the same circumstances, the gentleman instead approached you and said, “Excuse me, Ms. Linden. I apologize for interrupting; my name is David Verner.” As he warmly touches your shoulder and shakes your hand, he continues, “You don’t know me, but I’ve been asked by your host to be here today, in order to demonstrate … several curious and unusual things.”

As he says this, he raises his right arm to reveal for all to see a deck of cards resting on his open right palm, which just a moment ago was shaking your hand. “Would you be interested in seeing them?”

If you were the spectator in the first scenario, you would likely leave the reception with some memories of a few neat card tricks, most of which you would forget two weeks later. Should you have been so fortunate, however, to have been in the second circumstance, you would keep for years, perhaps decades — even, possibly, for the rest of your life — a single, indelible memory: that impossible things happened right before your eyes.

It is no coincidence that when real connection is established in interpersonal relationships — be they business, friendship, or love — magic is said to have happened.

As the late advertising pioneer Bill Bernbach said, “communicators must always be more concerned with what people take away from a message than with what they themselves put into it.” It is the same with the art of magic. From the perspective of those in the audience, it is the difference between merely being told or shown something … and being made to feel a genuine part of the communication taking place; a nexus where the audience is respected, and is asked to contribute its intelligence and sensibilities to an experience, in order to complete it. In the words of the great Maya Angelou, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” It’s the difference between seeing an interesting card trick, and experiencing a truly magical encounter.

It is for this reason that, as Mr. Bernbach has also noted, beyond merely being knowledgeable about the experience they are to provide — beyond the trick itself — communicators (and magicians) must also be students of how people read, and listen.

Of how they see, and think. Of how they, and we, simply are.

When this happens — when magic takes place — curious and unusual things may be demonstrated.