This is the opening of a keynote I gave a few years ago to an audience of founders and CEOs.

It’s about differentiation and how to create evangelists. More precisely, it’s about how to get people to talk about your business, your product, or your service, without twisting their arm.

I focused on one tool that makes all of that possible. That tool is story. Not story as branding, and not story as mythology, but story as something people remember and repeat. Something that travels easily from one person to another.

I know a lot about how to get people talking about businesses and products and services, and much of what I know comes from my background as a magician.

I’ve been a magician since I was four years old, and I co-created Chamber Magic, a live show that has run for well over two decades and was, for a long time, the number-one ranked live show in New York City on TripAdvisor. Over the years, our audiences have included people like Warren Buffett, Stephen Sondheim, Guillermo del Toro, and Shaquille O’Neal.

When the show began, we had no money. None. Everything had to be done on the cheap, which meant we couldn’t rely on advertising or publicity to make the show famous. If the show was going to spread, it would have to spread because people talked about it.

So Steve Cohen, “The Millionaires’ Magician,” and I used a very simple procedure.

Steve would perform the show, and afterward I would walk up to people and say, “I’m with the show. What trick did you like best?” Then I would listen. I did this for months. The tricks people talked about stayed in the show, and the tricks they didn’t talk about were removed.

It was Darwinian; pure survival of the fittest. Because we didn’t have money, the tricks had to do the heavy lifting. They had to act as the show’s emissaries, even its missionaries. I knew something very specific: if people told me about a trick, they would tell their friends. And if they didn’t tell me, they wouldn’t tell anyone.

Over time, I became very knowledgeable about how to make a trick that people would talk about, and it turns out that what makes a trick talkable is almost exactly what makes a business talkable too.

Here’s the first lesson. A trick can’t be subtle.

Suppose I ask you to lend me a coin. The date on the coin reads 2020. I wave my hand mysteriously over it, and now the date reads 2021. Is that a good trick or a bad trick? It’s a bad trick, and the reason is simple. It’s too subtle.

You might think, “Maybe I misread the date. The lighting isn’t great. Maybe it said 2021 the whole time.” In other words, the trick gives your mind too many exits.

If you want to truly freak people out, the thing you do has to be bold. Instead of changing the date on the coin, it would be far better if I changed the coin into a live box turtle. And better still, if I borrowed your coin, had you sign it with a Sharpie so we could identify it, and then transformed it into a turtle with your autograph written across the shell.

That is a story you would remember and would be excited to tell. And that is a story that would move from you to someone else without any resistance.

Here’s the second lesson. The premise of a trick has to be clear. It can’t be confusing. As the great twentieth-century magician Dai Vernon once said, “Confusion is not magic.” If the audience is confused about what happened, that confusion stands between them and astonishment. They may be fooled, but they won’t be astonished.

And people don’t talk about things that fail to astonish them.

If all of this sounds like it only applies to magic, it doesn’t. It applies to businesses too, including businesses like yours.

In the keynote, when I delivered that last idea, I didn’t follow it up with advice. I didn’t show a framework or a slide. I let the founders and the CEOs in the audience do their own work. Because once you see the difference between a coin quietly changing its date and a signed coin turning into a live turtle, you don’t really need to be told what to do next.