Whenever you perform magic for someone, you always feel those nerves, hoping everything goes perfectly.

We rehearse and practice a lot to ensure nothing goes wrong.

Even so, no magician is immune to making mistakes; they'll always happen at some point, but... is it always a bad thing when things go wrong?

You're about to find out it's not.

A little bit of error can actually be quite beneficial to make your magic much more impactful for your audience.

In the case of mentalists, experts say they only need to be right 85 percent of the time.

Otherwise, if they're too good, it would just seem like a trick.

In other words, they can fail 15% of the time, and it's totally fine.

In fact, they'd get even better reactions.

In his book, Eugene Burger, Audience Involvement (1983), tells us that " Error is a very necessary element in mentalism. Without it, it's obvious you're just doing magic tricks."

Just like circus jugglers and acrobats, if they miss a trick or two, they seem even better. By increasing the sense of risk and difficulty, a successful outcome is perceived as much more valuable.

In traditional magic, you can pretend to mess up at the beginning, but in the end, the magician will always reveal the correct card.

That's not the case with mentalism.

A mentalist's psychological and telekinetic abilities should inherently be imprecise, prone to error. Introducing an occasional stumble makes the performance seem more credible.

The power of mentalism lies in that 15 percent.

Bibliography:

Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Illusionists, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind (Alex Stone, 2011).

Audience Involvement (Eugene Burger, 1983)