OZ PEARLMAN reveals the secret to his telepathic abilities

While appearing on US breakfast TV show Today in 2016, the mentalist Oz Pearlman asked weather presenter Al Roker to name a celebrity who might run for president.

Roker replied: ‘George Clooney.’ This was bad news for Pearlman, who was ready to reveal a T-shirt he was wearing that bore the face of Taylor Swift.

But instead of panicking that his trick had gone wrong in front of millions of people, Pearlman simply said: ‘Anybody else? Any women?’

This time Roker switched to Swift, allowing Pearlman to unbutton his shirt and show the T-shirt underneath. The presenters were still amazed, as were (presumably) the viewers.

The episode allows Pearlman to highlight one of the life lessons he offers in this book, namely that when things go wrong, you should stay calm.

Like many of the messages it’s not exactly original or surprising – but then lots of life’s truths are pretty simple, and being reminded of them from time to time is no bad thing. Plus, Pearlman offers some clues about the world of mind-reading, making this an entertaining and engaging read.

Real mentalism, he’s canny enough to admit, is impossible. ‘I don’t read minds,’ goes his standard line, ‘I read people.’

And yes, some basic body language can get you part of the way there. But Pearlman started as a magician: look up his card tricks on YouTube – he’s seriously good. And he’s still a magician.

Mentalism is trickery, even when it’s painted as the ‘result’ of body language and the like. Derren Brown often plays the same game.

Pearlman isn’t completely dishonest about this. For example, he refers to using envelopes that ‘have to be sealed in a specific way’.

Clearly this is an indication that the reveal at the end of a trick involving such an envelope, when a prediction is taken out and shown, isn’t what it appears to be.

I run corporate team-building events in which people have to work out how magic tricks are done, including some mentalism effects.

One woman, finally solving how I knew which day of the week she’d been thinking of, said: ‘That is proper lying!’ The fact she was an ex-Cabinet minister only added to the fun.

As with all magic, a mind-reading trick is easier to solve the more you see it.

In his early career Pearlman would sometimes do three or four bar mitzvahs in close succession for people from the same social set, meaning (unfortunately for him) that people would see a trick several times, allowing them to deduce the secret behind it.

‘The whole game,’ he writes, ‘is knowing how to reveal seemingly secret information in an entertaining fashion’.

The emphasis should be on ‘seemingly’. A lot of what mentalists do is known as ‘pre-show’ work.

For instance, Victorian psychics would visit churchyards before performances, looking for the names on freshly-dug graves so they could pretend to get in touch with the recently departed.

These days a mentalist who knows he’s going to be performing for you has your Facebook and Instagram accounts to work with.

As it happens, the lessons in the book aren’t from Pearlman’s on-stage repertoire, they’re from the business side of his life – how he’s promoted himself, how he’s gone from being the Michigan teenager doing card tricks in a local restaurant to starring on America’s biggest TV shows. A fellow performer once asked how he got so much television work.

‘Well,’ replied Pearlman, ‘what have you tried doing?’ The other guy stammered for a moment, then said: ‘Well...I haven’t.’

Cue the most obvious but somehow most ignored lesson of all: keep working at it. Keep sending out those emails, making those calls, chasing up those leads.

Pearlman does all of that to this day – his fee might have gone up over the years, but his work ethic hasn’t changed.

Allied to this is the need for a thick skin. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish in life, failure and rejection will be part of your story.

For every 50 business cards Pearlman handed out at that restaurant, perhaps two would lead to more work. Some tables would tell him they weren’t interested even before he’d had a chance to start performing.

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To protect himself from this, he thought of himself as a separate character called ‘Oz the Entertainer’ rather than plain Oz Pearlman. That way, when a ‘no’ came along he wouldn’t take it personally – it was literally directed at someone else.

We all have self-doubt: the trick is not giving in to it. The book recommends a technique for dealing with any negative thoughts that might occur to you. It’s called ‘Catch It, Check It, Change It’, which I’m sure works terribly well in America, but unfortunately over here reminds us of the most annoying phrase of the 21st century (think train journeys), and so is doomed to failure.

Something that was new to me was the ‘Zeigarnik effect’. This is your brain’s tendency to remember incomplete tasks with far more clarity than those we’ve finished. What’s more, this memory will then cause you stress and unease.

So if you’ve got something to accomplish, split it into smaller tasks and do the first one immediately. The rest of them will then nag at you until you’ve got them out of the way.

Then there’s the research that found we’re unhappy if we can’t see someone’s hands. We trust them less, and even find them less physically attractive. So that thing your mum used to tell you about getting your hands out of your pockets? Seems she knew her stuff.