The Magic of Vinh Giang

“Magic is just a problem you couldn’t solve,” said Vinh Giang, an entrepreneur, magician and communications expert who also happened to be the keynote speaker for Monday morning’s General Session of MVP 2023.

As he talked, Giang had the distinctively whimsical air of a magician, and the confidence of someone ready to teach the audience something new. For the next hour or so, Giang did just that. Why is magic a problem yet unsolved? “Perspective,” said Giang, adding that when two perspectives come together there’s no solution beyond our reach.

Giang explained that change represents opportunity and if we’re stuck in a silo mentality, we can’t solve the problems around us. “Psychologists call it change blindness,” he said, and with a brilliant sweep of his hands around the ballroom, told the audience that if everyone collaborated, they could achieve anything.

The powerful mix of collaboration and perspective was explained with two videos showing the same trick. First, with a close-up camera angle, Giang turned a card deck from blue to red. How did he do that? Then, Giang played a second video with a wider camera angle and it became immediately clear how the trick was done: with a magical assistant helping him switch the deck.

"Perspective," Giang said. Perspective and collaboration. To seize the opportunity in front of us, he said we must collaborate with people we’ve never collaborated with before.

Giang introduced another word into the mix: Influence, shown through “choose the hand it’s in” magic tricks where attendees had the chance to participate. “If you look away when I look at you, you’re definitely getting picked,” Giang joked, though it was clear as they ran up on stage that the audience members were eager to get involved. Who doesn’t love a little magic?

Giang spoke about belief—self belief and the belief mentors can provide—and talked about believing in the impossible by giving yourself permission to dream. He quoted Steve Jobs’ famous line—“The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.”—and said, “My friends, you are the very people who will do just that.”

He described how belief will dictate the actions in your life and said that “if a magician can create something with the odds of one out of 1 million, you can achieve anything.”

Then, he performed a trick with those very odds.

Giang asked an audience member to join him onstage to select from several books in his hands. Then from the book chosen, he asked the participant to pick out a single word he’d have to guess. And of all the books, and all the pages and all the words that could've been selected, Giang guessed the word correctly on the very first try, proving that when you think a problem is impossible to solve, it is. But when you believe in the impossible, the world becomes magic.