Michael Chaleff took a year between the Navy and law school and spent it working as a restaurant magician — walking up to strangers who had been drinking, interrupting conversations they were happy to be having, and trying to earn a tip before the food arrived. He knew going in that things would go wrong in that environment almost every night. What he didn’t do was make a plan for what to do when they did.
In his first week, at a brunch in San Diego, he opened his best card routine with “imagine you have a deck of cards in your hands.” The woman at the head of the table looked at him and said, “I don’t have hands.” He locked up — the first time in his adult life, he says, that he lost the ability to speak. More than 30 years later, he still remembers the shame, and has no memory at all of what happened next.
Michael is a former Naval officer who served during the Gulf War, a former DOJ trial attorney, and a professional magician and mentalist of more than three decades. He now coaches lawyers and executives on storytelling and influence. In this conversation he explains why the recovery matters more than the error, what cross-examination teaches about controlling information, and the four-act structure he uses to build a story that lands in under 90 seconds.
Full show notes and transcript: https://markgraban.com/mistake363