One of my pet peeves with a lot of psychology research is that when you read the results, you think, wow, that's pretty obvious. No surprises are there, which is why nearly fifteen years ago when I read a book called Quirkology, I devoured it. It's written by psychology professor Richard Wiseman, and as the name suggests, it's full of studies, many of which Richard conducted himself, that are very quirky and
very surprising. Scientific American has described Richard as one of the most interesting and innovative experimental psychologists in the world. Richard has researched everything from how we can train ourselves to be luckier, through to how to spot a liar and the psychology of magic and illusion. So how does one of the most creative psychologists in the world make decisions, make himself luckier and use magic to improve his work
as a psychologist. My name is doctor amanthe Impact. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of Behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work A show about how to help you do your best work. So Richard has learned a myriad of different strategies through his research and quite famous experiments. I wanted to know which ones have had the biggest impact on him.
I think with the luck work, it's probably more about being open to opportunities and being flexible. And I think that's easy to say and quite hard to do in practice. So I worked with about five hundred very lucky people, and they were very, very flexible thinkers. They had an end goal, they knew where they were going, but they also knew that the world changed and you needed to sort of set your sale to make the most of the wind, as it were. And I think in my
own life I've done something very similar. So you've got an end point and then you think, well, how I'm going to get there. It's not quite clear to me. And sometimes you have a chance conversation with somebody and you go, actually, that's where I can gallop off on that project or something like that. And so I think there's no such thing as a bad idea. There's just
an idea whose time hasn't come. Who If an idea feels too hard, then I'll stop trying to pursue it, and I'll just try something else that feels easier at this moment. Knowing that I might go back to that other idea, that other project at some point. And I think it's that inherent flexibility I find very helpful. The other thing which my team will scream at me for and have done for twenty five years, is that often I'll say, Okay, this is the experiment we're going to do.
This is how we're going to do it, and we all start to plan for that, and it might take a month or two months to get it ready, and then week seven or indeed ten minutes before we start, I might go, you know what, there's a better way of doing this, And at that point there's no point in arguing with me. We're all switching and it doesn't matter how much resources you put into to what you've done to get to that point. If there's a better plan,
a better idea, it wins. So I always think parking your ego, parking your plans, parking your preparation, and just going best idea wins. It is quite a successful strategy. But it's the thing that always feels, you know, I've set so many of those emails where I kind of go,
I know we're all geared up. I know we're all geared up to do this, but last night, I realized that it's better to do this now, so let's all change, and thank goodness, I work with a group of people that are very happy to change overnight, and sometimes we do live shows. It can be ten minutes before we start. Is that we'll all go. You know what, for this audience, there's a better way. I've just spoken to somebody, it's better to do this, and off we'll go. And I
think that's what makes it interesting. So I think that flexibility, to get back to your question, is key to what I do.
How do you make those decisions, because I imagine in the moment they're quite hard decisions to make, where you're directing a team to go in a completely different direction and probably causing a bit of stress, like is it a gut feel or is it something else?
No, I think it's so I don't tend to make decisions on my own. I think I'm quite a poor decision maker in that sense. What I'm quite good at is coming up with options and talking to people and they make the decisions for me. So I think making the decision is fairly straightforward. What's hard is implementing it, And you mustn't cause people stress that's not my job. That's not my role. So my role is always to
keep the team buoyant. And if people are not having a good time, quite frankly, they're not going to work with me, and they certainly won't work with me again. And we all live in very small worlds, and so reputation is the number one thing. If you can't go back to somebody, if the last time they worked with you as an absolute disaster and they had a terrible time, they're not want to work with you again. So reputation
really matters. I always want to have people to have fun with those changes and with those switches, and if it stresses somebody out, then I simply wouldn't go with it. Under those circumstances. Sometimes you have to manage disappointment, but that's a different thing. If somebody's put a great deal of time into something, then you might go, look, I really appreciate that, and we will use all of that at some point, just not today. So but the decisions
are very easy because you just know it. You know when it's a better idea, you can feel it in bones, and everyone sort of has to agree with you. Otherwise you can't carry the team along. It would just be me of being a bit odd at the helm throwing the ship from one side to the other, and you don't want that. You need to be able to say to people, this is why it's a better idea. What do you think if they agree, then how can we make this happen next week, tomorrow or whatever.
We've talked about openness to opportunities. What are some other strategies that you've learned through your research that you've found really useful in applying in your own life.
I don't know through the research through own experience, so I have the worst decision making heuristic in the world, which I don't recommend to anyone, but it saved my bacon many many times. Which is so often I have to go into a room and come up with an idea for an experiment or a campaign or a research or whatever a show, and I will think quite a lot about different angles. So there's nothing as dangerous as
a person with one idea. So you have this idea and you think that's great, and then you go right forget that. Let's come up with a different angle and then you Otherwise what you get is buying on a single idea and you fall in love with this idea and you decide that's the only way forward. So I come up with an idea, jettison it, come up with another jetson. I don't really work them through very much, and I don't decide where I'm going to go with
a pitch until I walk into the room. I only decide that as I walk into that room and sit down, and you see the team you're pitching to, and at that point, because you haven't got a kind of you haven't got an approach in mind. It feels very live and very real, and what you don't try and do is sell them something that they don't really want. It's they're there in front of you can see what sort of people are they are, and they tell you so much, and that's at that point I hope to have a
good idea. And that has worked for me for about thirty years. So an example of it was a National Science a year over in this country quite a few years ago, and they wanted an experiment to run throughout the whole year to engage with families with children with adults that would have little bits the media could report on throughout the year and be nice if everyone's involved. Blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Quite a hard pitch, actually quite a hard thing, so I thought various topics,
didn't settle on anything. I walked into the room, sat down and spoke to them for a few minutes and said, we're going to search for the world's funniest joke. And that was the full extent of that pitch. It was literally one sentence and they just went perfect and that was the end of it. And the idea that framing. I thought of doing something on humor, but the framing of searching for the world's funniest joke, which sharpens it all up, came to me as I walked from the
door to the chair. And that's happened to me a lot where that where you feel it's a hard thing to do because we like to walk into pictures really prepared, and I think there's something about the liveness, maybe because someone a sort of live performer that I like that kind of let's live in the moment, so you're prepared, but you haven't quite got it all sharpened up until you're sitting there.
How did that work earlier in your career, where I imagine you you know, maybe didn't have the confidence and you certainly didn't have the experience that you have now. Because that sounds terrifying.
I don't think it is, because you think, well, the worst that can happen is I don't have a very good idea, in which case I just leave and there'll be other pictures, there'll be other opportunities. Let's just let this one go to somebody who's got a better idea than me. I don't find it terrifying. What I find terrifying is sitting in that room and sell something that
I don't believe in my heart. I find that terrifying because I think I'm going to have to go and deliver this now, and it's going to be a lot of work. I'm going to try and get people involved, and I don't feel it. I don't feel it. So if I don't feel it, let it go. Let it go, Let it go to somebody who can get it right. So I don't find it terrifying, and I've sort of always done it, but I don't I'm not recommending it
for others. It just kind of works works quite well for me of living in the moment and changing your mind when the better idea comes along. I love it.
I don't think I've had a guest talk about that approach.
To Well, I'm sure they're more successful than I have, so yeah.
Yeah, so I yes, Look, I would expect nothing less from the person that wrote Quocology, which remains one of my favorite psychology books.
I must say, oh, thank you.
What else do you do Richard? That in your own approach to work that makes people go, oh my gosh, you do that?
I think I listen to. I think it's really easy to have a sort of mental set perspective where you go, this is what I'm trying to do, and because of that, you don't see the simple solution outside of that. And each of the books has been like that. So originally I did about ten years work on the paranormal. We try and sell a book on the paranormal, the skeptical of scientific book. No one's interested because there's no real audience for that, and it would have been easy to
have gone. When I got my thirtieth rejection letter from a publisher, well that's the end of that then, and I went to see my agent and he said, what else are you working on? And at the time it was the wedest thing. I had a conversation with somebody who said, I don't believe in all this paranormal stuff. I'm not psychic. I'll tell you what, though, I'm really lucky. Everything's it, And they're very similar when you think about it,
you know, they're actually conceptionally quite similar. But luck is an interesting word. And so I said to my agent, while I'm doing some stuff on psychology of luck, and he said, that's a very interesting topic. And it never occurred to me to have done a book on that. I wrote that book and that became the first one, and it's sold all over the world. That was lovely. Quacology happened because of the word freakonomics. That was a
huge book. Someone at an airport. I was chatting to somebody an airport and they said, all freakonomics is a bit like your stuff, and I said, no, it's not really. I'm not an economist at all. They said what do you do and I said, I do sort of quirky psychology. And they said, well, what would that be and I said that's quacology. Now, that would have been a really easy thing to just got out as a silly word and walked away, and then you go, hold on a second, that's a good word.
What is that?
I owned that word now, and so that became the second book. Fifty nine seconds was astonishing. I went to see a friend of mine who's CEO quite a big company. We've had coffee. She wasn't very happy. She said, what can I do to change my happiness? I started to talk about theories of happiness. She said, can you get on with it? I'm a bit busy, and I said, how long have you got? She said about a minute. And I suddenly thought there's quite a lot of psychology
that you can deliver in a minute. And that was the beginning of fifty nine seconds. And I was giving a talk, and the talk of the book was originally going to be called sixty seconds. I said, this is things you can learn in less than a minute. Or somebody in the audience said it should be called fifty nine seconds. Then I thought it was a better title. I think all these things are in front of us, But it'd been so easy to have gone y En. I'm interested in the paranormal and not interested in a
luck book. You know, I'm not interested in doing a thing like free ekonomics. I'm not interested in doing a short book, I think, but these opportunities are there, and it's the openness to listening, I think, and changing course. Each one of them is a better idea than the idea I was pursuing at the time.
Now, Richard, you are the second psychologist that I've had on this podcast that is also a magician.
Oh, who's the other one, Adam Grant.
So I've had Adam on a couple of times, and I'd love to know how you got into magic in the first place.
I got his magic very young, when I was about eight or nine, I think, which is when a lot of people get into magic. There's something quite special about that age through my grandfather, who showed me a very good magic trick and he wouldn't tell me how it was done. I used to go and visit him every weekend and he pretty much did the same every weekend. But he's very white. So I've had difficulties reading. In fact, it's turned out dyslexic, which I didn't realize until the
pandemic when I had assessment. Is a bit more time on my hands, so but I did have reading difficulties. So he said the answer. The solution to the trick is in a book, and the book is in the public library, and it was just his way getting me to go and read some stuff and it absolutely works. So I read all the magic books, thought that this was a wonderful, wonderful world, and then yeah, joined my local club and join then the magic Circle in London.
But that was the roots of it. It was my grandfather. He wasn't a magician. He only knew one trick which I think he picked up during the war, but it's a good trick and sent me to the library. So that was my origin story.
So how does your knowledge of magic make you better at what you do now? In terms of psychology and all the research and experiments that you do.
I think magic's quite unique because the solutions to tricks are normally brilliantly elegant and simple, and normally for any what magician would call an effect, like a levitation for example, that's an effect. Then you have method, which is how it's done. There's always another way. You learn, there's always another way, and that magic evolves. So the way magicians float people now is not the same as it was
thirty years ago. Certainly not the same as it was one hundred years ago, so you'd learn there's always another way, and that if you can find that way, then you can perform the trick in a new kind of new new way. So I think that's important obviously that most of the solutions are lateral. You know, there is a reason why audiences don't think of them is because they're a bit like those lateral thinking puzzles where you've made assumptions and trapped yourself in a in a little box.
I think that's helpful. So I think those are the the sort of obvious strategic ones. There is also with magic. If you perform a lot, you have to keep an audience with you, and I think that skill obviously for live is useful. But even writing wise, you just think how can I make how can I keep an audience with me? And certainly when I'm writing lay books of non technical books, how do you keep an audience with you?
So I always remember the first time I wrote I think it was one of the drafts of The Luck Factor. I'd written something like I don't know. One of my studies showed that lucky people miss opportunities. Sorry, lucky people spot opportunities. We brought them into the lab. We got them to do this, and my editor said, you've just given away the good too. Sotain that first line. You've told us what the experiment was all about, right, instead
of that. Right, We did an experiment to discover if lucky people tended to spot opportunities, and the results were astonishing. Now you're hooked. Now you're like, oh, what did you do? And it's a very simple thing, but you suddenly realize that often as writers or speakers, we tell people the answer and then we explain the answer, and you think it's way better to hook people, and magicians are good at that kind of thinking.
We'll be back soon with Richard talking about some other ways he uses magic to improve his work as a psychologist. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, ranging from software and gadgets that I'm loving through the interesting research findings. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot code. That's how I Work dot co.
What are some other principles that you've learned as a magician and mastered as a magician that you've found have been really useful in making your other work, your main work, more engaging.
I mean some it's tactical because I do work on the psychology of magic, so obviously you have to know magic to do that, and so they've had that. One of the most successful things, which is the Quacology YouTube channel, which started really early within two years of YouTube being out there, and we did it just because it was a fun way of sharing content, but certainly weren't doing
it for money. And that's another big driver on this is I always think you can tell passion projects from projects the person's getting paid for and doesn't really want to do it. It has a flavor and you can tell, you know with it. I don't know what it is, but within seconds of somebody starting to give a talk, you can tell where they want to be there or not.
And if they don't want to be there, you start to think, well, I'd rather it wasn't as well, so because it's hard when you're giving the same talk again and again and again and again. And so one of the tips actually actually comes from magician. I shouldn't read a very famous magician, but I won't say who that. The problem you've got as a speaker is you're going to walk out and give this talk. In fact, what I'm doing at the weekend doing the Lucky Talk, I've
been doing that talk for twenty something years. You have to walk out and it has to feel to that audience like this is the first time you've given it, and you're giving it for them. And I said to my friend, his magician, how do you cultivate that actor? You're doing your act twice a day, and they said, it's really straightforward. I stand in the wings and I tell myself the truth, and the truth is that one day I won't be doing this. I'll be too old, or the audience won't turn up, or I'll have an
accident or whatever it is, I won't want it. One day I will not be doing this. And he said, I let the sadness of that go into my bones, and then I think it's not today, though, and I walk out and that I do that now. I do it because you, and that keeps you in that moment, because you won't be anything you do with it's writing books, making videos where I will not be doing it forever. There will come a day when I'm not doing it, and we all assume these things are going to continue.
They won't. They won't. So live in the moment and enjoy at that moment and for a live event that I think carries. So I think those are all kind of magicianythinking things. Magicians tend to be quite a thoughtful lot.
I love that advice from that other magician. It's quite stoic. Yeah, are there any other things that you do? Because I feel like I can absolutely relate to that challenge. There's a particular keynote that I don't know. I've probably delivered over a hundred times in the last couple of years, and there are definitely days where I wake up and I'm like, oh gosh, I have to deliver this again and I'm not feeling it. What else do you do?
Yeah, so a few things I do. One is I never ever ever use a single note ever. I never ever ever have a single note in terms of any kind of structure or script. It's on the power I use PowerPoint slides a lot, but then they're chunked, so I've got sort of ten minute chunks of material and often I change it during the actual talk, depending on what the audience is like. Some audiences are faster, some are slower. Some you sort of think, oh okay, And
so I changed the talk a little bit. In these chunks. I never have a note because I hate the idea of looking down, so I always look looking down at electorn or a table. I am astonished how quickly ten one hundred thousand and three thousand people become one person. It's astonishing. So when I'm in the wings and maybe it's a big gig and it's a thousand people say you think, oh my good, it's a thousand people. I
don't think that. I think they're going to become one person, and it's my job to bring them together and just to talk to that one person, to find out who I'm speaking to, and then to talk to them, because that's how conversation because otherwise you got a thousand people, you couldn't possibly do it. But they gel, they become one person. But I don't know who that person is yet, and they probably don't know either until we've started that conversation.
So hopefully they're going to gel into a lovely, fun person, but sometimes they don't. But either way, it's one person for me. In my head. My other thing which I do, should I learned years ago WHI should do is slide PowerPoint slides a lot. My first three PowerPoint slides are all identical except for a tiny colored dot in the corner, which I only really I'm looking at. So as I'm doing my opening bit, I'm moving through those slides and
I can see that color dot changing. That way, I know the slides are working, because my nightmare is to set up for the talk, press the button and nothing happens. I know that's all magic thinking. It's all the secret stuff, so it's smooth. If those slides aren't changing, then at least I can talk to the audience and say to the tech people, I don't know the slides are changing. I haven't set up for the start of the thing.
Now. I've often had goals to learn magic tricks, and I remember the last time I had Adam Grant on the show, I actually tried to get some advice from him because I'd set this goal where I was going to spend eight weeks and learn a new trick every week for eight weeks, and I didn't meet that, and Adam said to me, I remember, he said, I think you've got it wrong. I think you want to maybe learn a new skill every week, and that way you can actually unlock hundreds of tricks. And I thought that
was great advice, but I didn't apply it. So I'm wondering, Richard, can you give me some advice? And also for any listeners that are listening to I guess like the power of magic and how it's really made you think differently around your work, like for someone that doesn't even know what sleight of hand is, Like, where do you start if you want to learn some magic?
Well, yeah, there's loads of beginner's books out there. Now there's loads of stuff on YouTube, so it's much easier than it was in my day. The problem you will run up against is that if let's suppose you learn a very simple card trick, which might be your easiest thing, I cannot perform for friends. I do not understand what that contract is. I like my friends. I'm honest with my friends. If I show them something and they go, that's great, how did you do it? And I go,
I can't tell you. I do not know what space I'm in, what world I'm in with my friend, so I just go, well, thanks, then great, love it, so I find it very difficult to perform for friends on stage. It's fine because the whole contract is different. I don't know those people. That's all fine. So then it comes
down to what are you giving people? Are you just giving them a puzzle they can't solve or one magician famously referred to a stone in their shoe, which is that the more they think about it, the more it annoys them because they can't figure out how it's done. Well, that's not a great gift. Or are you giving them this moment of magic where something impossible appears to happen, and why would you want them to have that experience?
And then you get into what magic is actually about, which is those experiences not I interviewed a very very experienced magician many many years ago, and he came up with this picture of him doing his first show at age about seven or eight, and I said, is this your first performance? And he went, oh, no, no, no, that's not a performance. I was just showing off. I said, what's the difference. He said, Performers show off for their
own ego. So everyone goes, you're wonderful. A performance is about the audience, and I'm a friend of mine, Richmond Dougal, has got this lovely thing about what do you want an audience to say to you after the show? And he said, most performers, magicians want people to go, you were great. And he said, that's the worst thing that someone can say. What they should what you should aim for is the person coming up to you and saying
thank you, you gave me something. And again that's magic thinking as how, And the same year, when we give talks, an audience should be not be coming up and going you were great. They should be coming up and going thank you. And in which case, how do you structure a talk so you're giving people something not all about you? And these are I think helpful things for speakers.
Now, this next question might be, you know the equivalent of who's your favorite child? But is there a favorite experiment that you've done in your career? I feel like you've done so many. And there are so many brilliant ones.
Looking through the lucky people, unlucky people looking through the newspaper and not seeing the half page ads the opportunities in there. So the lucky ones spotted and the unlucky ones didn't you know I did that in I think two thousand, that's twenty three years, twenty two years ago. I'm still talking about it. So it's hard not to think that Sir Search the World's Funniest Joke was so enjoyable because it was completely insane and got us into
so many ridiculous situations, the ghost hunting stuff. You know, we got to to stay at royal palaces and look for ghosts of why people like ghostly experiences, and that still comes up all the time, so I think, and I think it's got a memory associated with it. But what's funny about all those experiments when I talk about them so I just did, is that they become whatever that was twenty seconds where the actual experiments were, you know,
three or four months on any of them. So normally the actual doing is not that much fun, but the looking back and summarizing them is you sort of we know that what you do when you go on holiday is you, you know, have terrible delays at the airport, But actually when you look back on the holiday, you edit all that out and you just concentrate on the positive stuff. And I think I do that with the experiments. So I think those ones like ideas, I'm not that
keen actually running the experiments. I love ideas and where ideas come from. So often it's just the joy of thinking, oh, yeah, we could do that. The actual doing of it is a bit like the delay at the airport for me.
And finally, Richard, for people that want to consume more of the great work that you are putting out into the world, what is the best way for people to do that?
A lot of it's online, so the Quacology YouTube channel has got all the videos on. I'm on Twitter at Richard Wiseman. I've got a website with links to some of the work and so on. I still think fundamentally just come and listen to one of the talks. It's the liveness that I enjoy more than anything else, and that's when it can kind of get quite silly and fun and so on. But the stuff is online and people who are very kind sort of supporting that work
over twenty thirty years now, and so thank you. If you have sort of listened or watched or bought a book or anything, thank you very much. It's very very kind of you. It's very much appreciated.
Do you have any plans to come to Australia. And do a talk over here.
I've been there a couple of times and had fun. Not at the moment, but it's a great place. And when I go I went. I went all over for a book tour, and then last time I was in Sydney, which was lots of fun. And I've just teamed up with a friend of mine. We did some magic shows in Melbourne. I wasn't there, they did the shows, but we put them together. So yeah, no, I'm more than
up for it. I will. I'll probably go by boat, but just because I then arrived with a lot of stories a lot of very fed up passengers as well, which is you stop showing us magic tricks. It's been a long vote.
I would definitely want to be on that boat. Well, Richard, it's been such a delight to talk to you after reading your work for I don't know, easily over a decade. It's just been such a joy to connect and hear about how you approach your work and the quirky things that you think about. So thank you so much for your time.
My pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me on.
So you know, the thing that stuck with me most from this interview with Richard is what he was saying about his magician friend and what he thinks about when he's designing a show, and what he wants people to say to him at the end. So I've been deep in the design of a new keynote speech and that is exactly where I started. I took Richard's advice and I thought, what do I want people to come up
and say to me at the end. And that has proved so helpful in just keeping me laser focused with what needs to go in the keynote to achieve that outcome and what can be left on the cutting room floor. Thank you so much for listening to today's show. I hope that you found it helpful and got at least one strategy that you might try applying in your life, maybe today or maybe in the.
Next few weeks. And if you're.
Enjoying how I work, I would be so grateful if you could take the five or ten seconds it will probably take to leave a review wherever you're listening to this podcast from That might be a star rating or writing a few words, but I read every single one of the reviews that comes through, and I am so deeply grateful for everybody that takes the time to do so, so thank you. How I Work is produced by Inventing
with production support from Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Liam Riordan, and thank you to Matt Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.