Dear Friends:
In this month’s Museletter, guest contributor David Morey explores the power of cross-disciplinary learning. Just as Einstein turned to music, Steve Jobs to calligraphy, and da Vinci to anatomy, we too can find inspiration for our magic in unexpected places. Drawing lessons from Bruce Springsteen and other great performers, David shows how insights from outside our art can help us grow as magicians.
“O great creator of being, grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.” – Jim Morrison
Cross-disciplining our learning is a powerful tool. Consider that when the great Albert Einstein was stuck on a physics problem, he picked up his violin to play Mozart. Or note Steve Jobs often returned to his experiences in calligraphy and Japanese culture. Or remember the greatest cross-discipliner of all, Leonardo DaVinci, who spent 14 years studying medical anatomy and the dissection of lips to produce history’s most memorable smile.
Eugene Burger, John McLaughlin, and my book, Creating Business Magic, argues just this: there are powerful crossover lessons business leaders can learn from magicians, from how magicians think, and from how to think differently.
And today, we magicians and non-magicians can all cross-discipline valuable lessons from other fields. Watching two recent and amazing documentaries, “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” and “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” I was struck by how much we can all learn from across the waters of our own profession and into the hearts, minds, and secrets of another. A great place to begin is Rock and Roll, and perhaps history’s greatest live performer, Bruce Springsteen.
Picture this: Springsteen the Magician, delivering in his mid-70s three-hour shows before over 70,000 people. And ask yourself: What can I learn and apply to my own magic, performance, and career? Below are five cross-disciplinary answers.
Constantly Get More Flight Time/Show Time
This is Malcom Gladwell’s proverbial 10,000 hours of experience that takes you to mastery, as the years in Hamburg took the Beatles to greatness. To paraphrase Lance Burton, “The best magician performs the most shows.” And so, young performers must just go perform the most shows, and more seasoned magicians should just go do more volunteer shows or other shows to test and retest new material and get better and better.
This “Flight Time” allows you to land a plane under any conditions, and to recover from any moment or mistake. For example, I once watched Springsteen in concert point to his own 80-something-year-old mother in the New Jersey audience, who he’d previously introduced, to beckon her onstage to go “Dancing in the Dark.” Instead, an overly excited teenage girl could not believe her luck, believing that Springsteen must be pointing at her.
Instinctively, she jumped on stage to dance with the Boss. But then, drawing on his 10,000 hours of live performance, and instead of ruining this teenage girl’s life, he danced for a bit, and then literally picked her up in his arms and “gifted” her back into the accepting audience. Then – and only then – Springsteen pointed to his own mom – his next dance, as if it was all planned. And the crowd erupted!
Feed Your Own Artist
If you’re reading this, you are an artist. But, like Springsteen, you need to build an entire team to feed this role. Just like Springsteen needs Thom Zimny or manager John Landaum, you need a director, because as the old Broadway saying goes: “Talent needs direction.” You need a money person. You probably need some kind of manager, and you need a “cross-seller,” think social media publicist. In fact, whether you’re starting out in magic or you’re a seasoned pro, you need a 360-degree support team. Even if they begin as “volunteers” or whether, along the way, you need to fill gaps and hire new energies, find talent, nurture it, and build your own E Street Band.
Rock Your Set List
We magicians can learn from books about the great magician’s set lists and from the writings of Jeff McBride, Larry Hass, Denny Haney, and others. But we can also learn from Springsteen. Study his decades of set lists, the killer opening, boom, boom, boom! “Oh my God, where are we tonight?” The rests, the texture changes, the in-the-moment interactions, the gripping story, the funny adlib, the calling of a kid on stage to help sing “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” and the quiet songs that allow you to perhaps end with a moving call-back, as Springsteen now does with a chilling performance of “I’ll See You In My Dreams” (that I watched completely hush 40,000 people at Wrigley Field). So, study Jeff McBride’s “The Seven Stages of Show Flow,” but study, too, the Boss’s set lists.
Remember Every Detail Matters
I’m a believer in “Everything Communicates.” Even the smallest details must be managed and herded and aimed in the same direction as your intended persona and brand. So work the tiniest details. Watch Springsteen in the documentary walk the entire arena for four hours with his engineer to check the sound from virtually every seat. Video and watch your own public performances, and pay attention to every single detail to leverage, or fix, and/or make it better.
Follow Your Conviction
This one is simple, even if it’s very, very hard. Follow your inner passion. Like Springsteen, lean into what brought you to be a magician in the first place, or to this moment of performance and magic. Let your passion show your true self. Show your audiences who you are, and they will love you and your magic more and more.
David Morey is Chairman and CEO of DMG Global, a best-selling author, and has advised twenty-three winning global presidential campaigns, five Nobel Peace Prize winners, and a who’s who of Fortune 500 CEOs and companies. As a magician, he’s performed at the Inaugural Ball for the 44th President of the United States, and on stages around the world.