Read your mind, p.1
Read Your Mind, page 1
Viking
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Copyright © 2025 by Oz Pearlman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Names: Pearlman, Oz author
Title: Read your mind: proven habits for success from the world’s greatest mentalist / Oz Pearlman.
Description: New York, NY: Viking, [2025] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025028410 (print) | LCCN 2025028411 (ebook) | ISBN 9798217059041 hardcover | ISBN 9798217059058 ebook
Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Success
Classification: LCC BF637.S4 P424 2025 (print) | LCC BF637.S4 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/22025028410
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/22025028411
Ebook ISBN 9798217059058
Cover design: Pete Garceau
Interior design adapted for ebook
The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, https://eu-contact.penguin.ie.
ep_prh_7.3a_153567939_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
One
Channel Your Inner Mentalist
Two
Believe It to Achieve It
Three
Make Your Fear of Rejection Magically Disappear
Four
Focus on Others
Five
Forget Tomorrow, Start Today
Six
Stack the Deck in Your Favor
Seven
Don’t Be Your Own Worst Enemy
Eight
Ask for Help
Nine
Turn Your Weaknesses into Your Strengths
Ten
Make Memory Your Superpower
Eleven
Disarm with Charm
Twelve
Tie It All Together with a Story
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
_153567939_
To my children:
You’ve given me joy beyond all measure.
To my wife:
You’ve given me everything and are my everything.
One
Channel Your Inner Mentalist
Picture this.
I’m a guest on a private island in the British Virgin Islands. A band plays steel drums as the clear waters of the Caribbean Sea gently lap the pristine shoreline. Chefs tend to jerk chicken sizzling on an elaborate barbecue while a team of uniformed servers weaves in and out of the crowd. The breeze smells like spices, hibiscus, and money. It’s magic hour, the last golden light of day washing over us. All the beautiful people are enjoying bespoke cocktails. The other guests and I can’t help stealing glances skyward; our host on Necker Island has just returned from the edge of space on his Virgin Galactic rocket.
Sir Richard Branson’s people could have hired anyone to celebrate the occasion. I mean, this is a man who has Mick Jagger on speed dial, right between Paul McCartney and the King. To my surprise and delight, his team chose me. I’m working the crowd, going from group to group, building up excitement and momentum as we all wait for the guest of honor. Suddenly, his friends and family part like the Red Sea. The barefoot billionaire appears, sporting a deep tan that contrasts with his iconic white-blond hair and open linen shirt, flashing that unforgettable smile. Everything about the scene feels surreal.
A moment such as this demands nothing less than the best, and I’m ready with one of my strongest reputation-making tricks. I lock eyes with the man, the myth, the legend, and it is go time.
“Imagine someone’s face, anyone at all, and see them in your mind’s eye,” I say. Then, using a small pair of scissors, I start slicing and dicing one of my business cards, like a child carving out a meticulous snowflake. Everyone around me whispers as they start to anticipate where this might be going.
When I ask him who he is thinking of, he casually says, “Barack.” Then he adds, “Obama,” in case I wasn’t sure which Barack he has in mind.
I unfold the paper and hold it up against my dark gray suit, revealing the freshly cut silhouette of the former president. The audience gasps in astonishment, but Branson, who does billion-dollar deals before breakfast, isn’t so outwardly effusive. Instead, he gives me a sly little smile. The best way I can describe his reaction is that it’s like having the Godfather reach over and pinch you on the cheek as an understated sign of respect and affection.
Sir Richard tucks the piece of paper into his breast pocket. He looks over his shoulder to make sure no one else hears him, leans in close, and whispers, “I’ll give this to him tomorrow when he arrives.”
What If You Could Read Minds?
Who hasn’t wished they could read someone else’s mind? How much easier would everything be if we could just figure out what other people were thinking, right? I mean, you’d probably never fight with your spouse again because you’d understand that should he or she say, “It’s nothing,” it would definitely be something, and you could act preemptively.
What if reading minds gave you practical skills, enabling you to predict the right time to ask your boss for a raise, to cease self-sabotage, or to stop procrastinating and start doing? You’d be more confidently persuasive, able to influence those around you in an effortless manner. How great would that be?
Of course, mind reading would be nice to have if you found yourself in a position of weakness, because you’d have the formula to flip that power dynamic to your benefit. By knowing what’s in another person’s head, you could get a gatekeeper to give you what you want, whether it’s an extension on an assignment or a waiver from your homeowners’ association. Reading minds would make you better at understanding human nature, which makes it the ultimate cheat code in life.
What would be even more useful than reading other people’s minds? The ability to read your own. Picture the results of tapping into your motivations and learning how to change your outcomes; of pushing past what’s kept you stuck. What if you could set yourself up for success in the long term?
You can do all of this using the skills of a mentalist.
I’ve spent almost thirty years learning how to reverse engineer the human mind. Knowing how you think reveals to me what you think. From Tom Brady to Serena Williams, Howard Stern to Shaq, I’ve convinced some of the most notable people on the planet that I can access their innermost thoughts. But guess what? My entire career is built on a lie.
Ready for a bombshell?
I can’t actually read minds.
What I can do is read people…and so can you! You already do it hundreds of times a day, every time you interact with another human being at home, at work, on the street, and everywhere in between, and I can help you be even better at it. Few skills will take you further in life than learning how to channel your inner mentalist. Reading people is a critical step to achieving what you want in this world. From getting ahead to getting what you want, the tactics I employ as a mentalist can be repurposed from entertainment to success in everyday life.
All of us have an internal BS detector that we developed from being around people, from getting social stimulus. What you may not realize is you were born being able to read minds. You can tell when someone’s not paying attention to you. You can tell when someone’s lying to you. (If you’re a parent, you’re really good at this.) You can tell when someone’s interested in you or when they’re faking it. We all have this sense. Well over two-thirds of communication is nonverbal[1], so it’s not a matter of what people say but how they say it, and even what they leave unsaid.
Mentalism is magic of the mind. Rather than using fast hands to fool your eyes, I watch the way people move. I listen to the words they choose. I study their patterns and behaviors, often without them realizing I’m doing so. Mentalism is all about psychology, observation, memory, and communication. These small signals tell a much bigger story—and once you know what to look for, you can “read” people almost instantly. When I say to channel your inner mentalist, what I mean is this skill is instinctual. When you were a baby, long before you understood spoken language, you were able to interpret your parents’ thoughts by studying their faces. The furrow of a brow, the flicker of an eyelid, the pull of the upper lip; all of it infused with meaning. The first time we smiled at our parents and they smiled back, we said to ourselves, Oh God, when I do the thing with my mouth, that makes people pay attention to me! And it’s that first bit of dopamine that gets us going. The ability to interpret other people is innate in all of us because we’re social creatures; it’s why our species has survived.
The question isn’t Do you have the skills? because the answer is You do. The question is How do you take your skills to the next level? How do you improve on your instincts and learn to trust them more?
This isn’t about tricks. It’s about transformation. I’m going to teach you the very techniques I’ve used to perform for millions of people around the world—but more important, I’m going to show you how to apply them in your own life to create real, lasting change. You don’t have to be a mentalist to think like one. You just need a shift in mindset—and a few powerful tools.
So, I’ll walk you through how I became a mentalist and start you on the path to honing your skills so you can learn to read people and apply the principles of mentalism to your everyday life. And, crucially, to develop the ability to look into the mirror and start to read that person’s mind, which seems daunting, but it’s not. In fact, it’s easier than you think!
Like Magic
When I was thirteen, my parents took me on a cruise where I saw a magician perform for the very first time. I was captivated as I watched miracle after miracle. And then the most incredible thing happened: He picked me to join him onstage. The magician performed a classic known as “the sponge balls,” where the balls appeared, disappeared, and changed in number and size in my hands. An obsession was born and, from that moment on, I spent my time stalking him because I just had to see more. (FYI, there are surprisingly few places on a ship a grown man can hide, especially from a determined kid with nothing better to do.)
When I got home, I checked out every single book on magic at the library and read them from cover to cover…twice. You could not find me at any point of the day without a deck of cards in hand, literally: I found waterproof cards to practice with in the shower. By the time I’d turned fourteen, it was apparent that magic was more than a passing fad for me. But I didn’t need to be a mentalist to understand that my mother was tired of driving me to Wunderground, the local magic store in metro Detroit where I grew up, and paying for the tricks to satisfy my obsession. Ever pragmatic, my mom told me if I was serious about pursuing magic, I needed to get a job and start supporting my own hobby. My folks were on the cusp of divorce back then, so it’s possible that my bending of spoons at the breakfast table didn’t exactly ease collective stress.
Anyway, instead of taking a paper route, babysitting, or shoveling driveways, I did what seemed the most logical thing for a kid in my position—I decided to try and get a job as a strolling magician, who does close-up magic while mingling with the crowd. I imagined all the tricks I could buy and how I could take my magic to the next level. At no point did it occur to me that my idea was (a) half-baked or (b) almost certainly destined to fail, because otherwise I’d never have tried in the first place. Ignorance can be bliss. If I’d asked someone else how to land that job, they’d have told me, “First you have to do this, then you have to do that,” and I would have psyched myself out of even trying.
Zia’s, a family-style Italian restaurant in a strip mall a half mile from home, seemed the most logical place to give my magic gig a shot because its location was cursed. Every restaurant that opened there failed after a couple years. So I figured they could use my magical touch, pun intended.
I decided to go in one day after school with my mom, which happened to be perfect timing because at 4:00 p.m. the place was mostly empty between shifts. We sat at the bar alone, ordered some beverages and appetizers, and I started performing for my mom. This caught the bartender’s eye, so I asked him if he wanted to see some magic, too—which was exactly my plan. Had I gone in during the lunch rush or at dinner, he probably would’ve ignored me. But because he and the rest of the staff weren’t busy, he said, “Let’s get a bigger crowd going.” He called over several servers and, the next thing I knew, the general manager was coming by to see what was going on.
My mom, always my number one fan and a slightly pushy Israeli, gave me the eyebrow raise that indicated this was my moment. It was time to start selling. My mother and I tag-teamed, asking when their slowest night was and if they ever had entertainment. Like any good attorney, we asked our questions already knowing what answers we wanted them to give, leading them to the conclusion that I was what their restaurant was missing.
Why were they so willing to give me that shot? Maybe they were grasping for straws and thought, We need whatever hook we can get to have this restaurant take off. Lo and behold, I landed one night per week of strolling magic, going table to table. I was too young to drive so I walked there carrying my small bag of tricks, freshly printed business cards, and a dream.
The one thing I already understood was the concept of “Fake it till you make it.” My superpower was acting like I knew what I was doing even when I didn’t. I had my pitch perfected because I’d gone over it in my head a hundred times. That’s why when I got in front of Zia’s owners, with a proud Jewish mother behind me, I projected an aura of confidence and pulled out my best tricks. They bought it; I was in.
Pick Your Moment
Performing close-up magic at Zia’s was probably the best education I could ever receive about learning to read people. I was able to iterate how to approach strangers and how to get a sense of what they thought of me even before I began performing. My mind would race trying to answer the questions: What do they think of my act? How do I win their favor? How can I get them to want more?
Through trial, error, and all kinds of rejection, I learned that my tricks were only a small part of the show as a whole. Everything counted, from my personality and my energy to the statements I’d make upon greeting them.
When I’d walk up to the table, every factor made an impression, even my smile and my body position. I learned fast that timing is everything. If people had just sat down and hadn’t yet ordered, they could be flustered or get angered by my presence. They hadn’t unpacked their day yet. They needed a minute with their drinks and a few calories from the bread basket to ease their tension. I used all these little bits of info when deciding the right moment to visit a table.
The sweet spot was just after they’d ordered, when the excitement of making their choices was over and there was a lull in the conversation as they anticipated their meals. Diners were the most relaxed and their guards were down. That’s when I could go up to them and say, “How’s everybody doing tonight?” I knew that when they saw me come over—obviously not their server or the manager—their minds would race with questions, so I would address their objections before they were even consciously aware of them. While I’d yet to study any psychology in junior high, Zia’s taught me about heuristics, meaning the mental shortcuts people take to make quick decisions. My customers’ default setting was assuming I shouldn’t be there, so I’d immediately counter that. I’d tell them, “The owners have a treat for you tonight!” indicating that not only was I welcome, but I was a value-add and management wanted me to be there.
You’ve likely been in very similar situations when wanting to get something from someone and trying to find the best moment to do so. Let’s say you want to ask your boss for a raise. It’s important to you, so you have it on your calendar to talk to him or her first thing on Monday morning, when they’re back from their annual vacation cruise. It’s a big deal, so you want to get it out of the way right now. But if you do it then, even though you’ve worked your butt off and may well deserve that raise, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. Because your raise is not necessarily as important and immediate a concern to your boss.
Put yourself in their shoes—does your boss have a million other things on their plate? Are they normally in the best mood first thing in the morning, especially after an extended break? You know this person. You’ve worked with them for years. You’ve seen when they’re at their kindest, their most receptive, their most generous, and it’s rarely at 8:30 a.m. on Monday when their phone is ringing off the hook, their inbox is full, and they haven’t even touched their coffee yet.
