Based on Oz Pearlman's conversation on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett. Pearlman is a mentalist and the author of Read Your Mind: Proven Habits for Success from the World's Greatest Mentalist. The card tricks are his. The habits underneath them are yours to take.

Oz Pearlman opens with a confession that undercuts his entire act: he cannot read minds. "I wish I could. That's impossible." What he does is read people — misdirection, suggestion, and a relentless attention to the smallest details of how someone moves and thinks. He spent three decades reverse-engineering the human mind, and his real claim on The Diary of a CEO isn't that he can guess your card. It's that the skills wrapped around the tricks — walking into a room, reading people, winning them over — are the ones that make anyone successful, in any field. "If I had done this same playbook and not been a mentalist," he says, "I'd be successful at any field." Here's the playbook.

1. Make it about them

The single sentence Pearlman credits for his success: "It's not about you. It's always about them." He calls it channeling your inner mentalist, and it explains everything from how he books work to how he holds a room.

Open a positive curiosity gap. At fourteen, he talked his way into doing magic at restaurant tables, and he learned to read the wall of anxious thoughts that hit a stranger the second he approached — Is this kid going to be here long? Do I have to tip him? So he engineered around them. He'd approach at an angle (one eye reads as less threatening than two — a predator instinct we've carried for millennia), signal he wasn't staying ("one foot in, one foot out"), and open with a line that left no room for no: "Did you hear what's going on tonight? It's your lucky day." An open-ended, inherently positive question the other person has to lean into — the same dopamine hit as a buzzing phone. Ask "do you want to see a magic trick?" and you've handed them a "no." Ask what makes tonight special, and they're already curious. It's the hook Mr. Beast puts at the start of every video, and it works because attention is the currency of our age.

Sell to their objections, not your features. When most people pitch, Pearlman notes, they lead with how great am I, how great is my product — me, me, me. The mentalist's move is the reverse: figure out what the other person is thinking and get there first. Before a meeting he writes down every likely objection — you want no downtime, you're worried about migration — and walks in ready to check each one off before it's raised. You're not guessing cards anymore; you're guessing the thoughts that keep someone from saying yes.

Become the most interested person in the room. He performed at Steven Spielberg's father's 99th birthday and got to ask Spielberg zero questions — the director spent the whole time asking about him. That, Pearlman realized, is a greater power than talking: "the most interesting person in a room tends to be the most interested person." The genuinely magnetic people lock eyes, give undivided attention, and ask questions no one else has asked. His challenge: when you meet someone, skip the autopilot "so what do you do?" and ask something that throws them out of the script — something that makes them think huh, I've never been asked that before.

2. Remember the small things

Pearlman insists he doesn't have a supernatural memory. He has a habit: he writes everything down. After every show, every meeting — sometimes furiously, in the back of an Uber before it fades — he records who he met, what they told him, the offhand details. "Information is power," he says. A detail you hold isn't a Snapchat that vanished; it's "a coupon with no expiration date," and the longer you hold it the more it's worth.

Small things are secretly big things. He calls it the paradox of small things. When one person remembers a tiny detail about you — your kid's name, your favorite color, a story you told once — it lands like winning the lottery, precisely because it's so rare. Most people assume such details are too petty to matter, so almost no one bothers, which is exactly why doing it is so disarming. Remember someone's ATM pin from three years ago (he does) and it isn't a trick — it's proof you paid attention, and they'll tell the story for years.

The name trick: Listen, Repeat, Reply. The most common failure — forgetting a name three seconds after hearing it — isn't a memory problem, Pearlman says. You never actually heard it. Your brain can't read and write at once, and while they were saying their name you were rehearsing what you'd say back. So he repurposes the shampoo bottle: Listen, Repeat, Reply. First, actually listen — quiet your mind. Then repeat it back immediately ("Steven — is it Steve or Steven?"), which alone says the name three times and tanks your odds of forgetting. Then reply with a hook: spell it ("Steven with a V?"), tie it to an image ("Jacob with the V-neck"), or connect it to someone you know. Five seconds, and you've got them for the night. And if you do blank? Just ask — "forgive me, I'd really like to know your name again." You're human; so are they.

Spot a lie by finding the baseline. How do you tell if someone's lying? The same way a polygraph does — by first learning their benchmark. You almost never lie-detect a stranger; you catch the people you know often. Watch how someone behaves when they're plainly telling the truth — their cadence, how many details they add — and you'll feel it when they deviate. We were far better at this as kids, before words and self-absorption dulled the instinct. Pearlman's advice is mostly to trust it again.

3. Kill the fear of rejection

"The fear of rejection," Pearlman says, "is the number one factor between failure and success." Most people never chase their goals because they're afraid of how it'll feel to fail — so they quietly set themselves up to fail instead. He's built two tricks for defusing that fear, and he's blunt that beating it is "a superpower."

Fast-forward your feelings. There's a call you're dreading, a piece of bad news you keep sliding to tomorrow in your calendar. Try this: rate the dread now (it's an 8), do the thing, then set an alarm for 24 hours later and rate it again. Almost always it's a 2 or 3 — out of sight, out of mind. Once you've felt how quickly the dread evaporates, you can trick your own brain the way he tricks yours: I'll feel nothing about this by tomorrow, so I'll just do it now. Beating procrastination that way, he says, builds a startling amount of confidence.

Put the rejection on someone else. When tables kicked him out as a kid, it stung — so he split himself in two. There's Oz the mentalist, the performer, and there's the real Oz they've never met. When the performer got rejected, "that's a different guy — that's not me," and the pain went somewhere else. His image: pour salt into a bowl of water and it's all saltwater; drop a divider down the middle first and one side stays fresh. Build that divider in your own mind and rejection loses its bite — which frees you to keep going, which is the whole game. Confidence, he adds, isn't something you were born with (his parents divorced when he was fourteen; he was not a swaggering kid). It's built, and the fastest way to build it is to stop being afraid of the answer.

And ask the better question. Everyone told him a Wall Street analyst becoming a working mentalist was insane — the odds were, statistically, terrible. His reframe: why not me? "The voice in your head, that loop, determines things." Set yourself up for success rather than failure, and start from why not you.

One last thing: action, not inspiration

Pearlman is almost allergic to motivational fluff. "Inspiration, motivation is garbage. I could care less if I've inspired you — I want action." His prescription is unglamorous and concrete: pick one quantifiable goal, make tomorrow day one, and build accountability levers around it (he tells ten people he's signed up for a 10K so he'll have to eat humble pie if he flakes). Notice that the hard part of any habit is the beginning — which is why the gym empties by February — and that the reward comes after, once running stops being a chore and becomes your flow state.

Underneath all of it is a warning about where you hang your self-worth. Tie it to things others give you — fame, money, followers — and it's fleeting, because every career has a peak and a slide. Tie it to what can only be earned — your own drive, a marathon, competing against yourself — and it holds. His job, he says, was never to fool you; it was to create something memorable, because an amazing moment you forget is a failure. The same is true of a life. Pay real attention, remember what matters to people, act before the fear talks you out of it — and you become, in the only sense that lasts, unforgettable.

Long story short: Pearlman's whole career rests on a confession — he can't read minds, he reads people. And the skills that carried him from Wall Street to the world's biggest stages aren't magic: pay ferocious attention to other people, remember the small things everyone else forgets, and stop letting the fear of rejection make your decisions for you. Do those three and, as he puts it, you'd be successful at almost anything.

Further reading

• Read Your Mind: Proven Habits for Success from the World's Greatest Mentalist — Oz Pearlman
• How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
• Atomic Habits — James Clear

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