Till Haunschild

After music, magic is the second oldest art form in the world. Magic is more than just ancient. It is also astonishingly universal. It seems that every known culture has had a place for magic.

Yet, even with this many thousand year old tradition, magicians still find ways to innovate and amaze people. In this speech Till will teach you how innovation is born by thinking like a magician.

In life we often feel happiness, sadness, excitement but we rarely feel amazement – we rarely feel a sense of true astonishment. But how can you create these moments of astonishment, not only in magic but also in business?

This is by far Till’s most popular talk, in which he explains the psychology behind magic and how you can use it to improve your products, sales and presentation skills.

Magic is the art of finding solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. Like a magician, an entrepreneur has to imagine a future that appears impossible, but then make it happen anyway. In this lecture Till explains how he was able to launch multiple companies.

He will share tips and tricks on building a successful startup: finding the right co-founders, choosing the right idea, presenting it to investors, and then executing efficiently to take your company to the next level.

Magicians have a unique dilemma: the magician is the only person who cannot see the magic. Because he knows how the trick works! That knowledge of the secret is a limiting perspective.

So in order to innovate and to amaze, the magician must completely take on the point of view of the audience. In this talk Till turns that principle around. He performs several magic tricks and invites the audience to offer solutions as to how they were done.

In going through this process, the audience learns quickly that perspective is the key to solving any problem.

We live in a world where everybody of us has a little “magic mirror” in their pocket. No wonder Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

It says a lot about us humans: our minds, our perception and understanding cannot keep pace with all the scientific progress. Technology dumps so much information on us; we now need a conscious process to translate that information back into the human brain’s inborn format for understanding the world: into story. Till explains  in this talk why storytelling might be the next big thing in a future driven by information and technology.