How to turn back on your “wonder switch”
Jordan Raynor sits down with Harris III, professional illusionist, to talk about why wonder is essential for mastery at work, why he (and many of the shows other guests) refuse to wear the mastery label, and how Harris and Jordan geek out over circadian rhythms while sleeping and working.
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[00:00:04] JR: Hey, everybody! Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I host a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits and routines, and how their faith influences their work.
Today's guest is Harris III. He is a world-class illusionist and public speaker. You might have heard of him. He has performed live from more than two million people in more than 40 countries and five continents and 49 US states, as we talked about. Vermont is really holding out on Harris III. Harris and I recently sat down.
We talked about why wonder is essential for mastery at work. I wasn't convinced of this before the conversation. I think I am now. We talked about why he and many of our guests refused to wear the mastery label, and we talked about how Harrison and I can geek out over our circadian rhythms while sleeping and working and how that makes us more productive each day. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Harris III.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:28] JR: Harris III, thanks for being here.
[00:01:30] H: My pleasure, Jordan. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:32] JR: An illusionist, not a magician. I'm curious if you make that distinction as strongly as Gob Bluth does.
[00:01:41] H: Nowhere near as with as much passion as he does. That's for sure, and it depends on who I’m talking to too. Some people just have weird issues with the word magician, so illusionist seems a little bit safer these days.
[00:01:54] JR: But seriously, what is the deal? What is the distinction between a magician and an illusionist?
[00:01:59] H: It depends on who you’re talking to. To the average person on the street who doesn't know anything about magic tricks or how they are performed or my industry and weird world in general, there’s really not much of a difference. You watch a trick. It's an illusion. It’s a sleight-of-hand. It’s all the same. If you were to go to a magic conference which is another whole conversation entirely –
[00:02:19] JR: [inaudible 00:02:19]. Yeah.
[00:02:21] H: It’s probably exactly what a lot of you are picturing in your heads right now. It’s like, “Hey, what do you do?” It’s like, “Oh, I’m an illusionist.” That would actually come with a certain meaning, so the easiest way to explain it, David Copperfield is in illusionist. He does very large illusions on stage. So if you're a stage performer in the magic industry that in a traditional sense cuts a lady in half and puts her back together again or makes a car appear or disappear on stage, those are allusions. If you walk up to someone who say, “Hey, pick a card, any card,” do a card trick, make a coin disappear, those are magic tricks.
[00:02:53] JR: Just kind of a scale in a way.
[00:02:57] H: Yes. But outside of the world of magic, there is [inaudible 00:02:59].
[00:02:59] JR: Who cares?
[00:03:00] H: Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:01] JR: By the way, I was reading your bio that you’ve done gigs in 49 US states. Is there an arrest warrant for you in the 50th state? What’s the deal there? What is it?
[00:03:12] H: I am just beginning to be convinced that people in Vermont do not like magic shows. I don't know what the deal is. I've never been to Vermont. I'm sure they love magic. I have yet to be invited to perform there.
[00:03:23] JR: If you’re listening all the way up in snowy Vermont, Harris III is calling. That sounds like the right holdout. I expected that. I mean, you have a pretty wild personal story, so let's just start here. What was it in your story that led you to making magic a profession? What was it? As a kid, as a teenager, what was it?
[00:03:45] H: Yeah. I started when I was a kid. I grew up in Southeast Tennessee on a farm, a pretty poor family, lower part of the middle class. My mom was a housekeeper and my dad worked at a factory, so minimum wage jobs. Long story short, I ended up getting this magic kit for Christmas from my grandmother when I was nine, not at all what I'd asked for Christmas that year. I was pretty obsessed with baseball at the time and asked for a baseball glove. Ended up with this box of magic tricks and wasn't really excited when I opened it, to be honest. It was more disappointment that I didn't get anything that I wanted. But I kind of tossed it aside. A few days go by. It’s the holidays. School hadn’t started back yet. I'm totally bored. I perform my first trick.
I guess to start, an important part of the story is I actually practiced the first trick in my room and thought, “This is super dumb. No one is going to be impressed by this.” It’s kind of like when a lot of people learn the secret to a trick. They’re kind of like, “Oh, that’s it?” It's a little bit disheartening and you think surely no one would be fooled by this.
So to prove that I was right, I march into the living room. My mom and dad are watching TV, and I’m like, Mom and Dad, gather around. Here is what grandma got me for Christmas.” I put the ball inside the vase, this little ball vase trick, and I made the ball disappear. Their chins dropped. Their eyes got super wide. It was the first time that I remember someone else looking at me with this sort of look of awe and wonder in response to something that I had done. Dude, I was hooked. I thought from that moment, “I’m going to do magic for the rest of my life,” which has kind of ended up being true so far. So that's how it all began.
[00:05:20] JR: I love it, and it all started with you being bored.
[00:05:23] H: It all started with me being bored, yeah. That’s where a lot of magic begins.
[00:05:26] JR: Yeah. It’s so underrated, right? I was thinking about – So people who listen to my podcast know I'm obsessed with Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing and writer of The Social Network.
I heard this story for the first time a few months ago. Sorkin's career as a writer started because of boredom, and he was talking about this in the context of like we’re never bored. We pay thousands of dollars to have devices in our pockets to ensure that we’re never bored. But, yeah, he was in his apartment in Manhattan, and there was nothing to do that night. I don’t know. This is in the ‘80s or something like that. But there's a typewriter, and he just started typing. He literally just started typing away dialogue, and that was the start of A Few Good Men, [inaudible 00:06:05].
[00:06:05] H: So crazy.
[00:06:06] JR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it all was born out of boredom.
[00:06:09] H: Yeah. You’re going to have to definitely change your subject. Boredom is not a relevant topic right now in the time of COVID.
[00:06:14] JR: Yes. Seriously, right? Yeah. Bad timing, bad timing. We’re recording this in August, a horrible timing. We’re – I read in your story and this, but you’re a millionaire by the time you're 21. Then you’re bankrupt by the time you're 22. What's the story here?
[00:06:31] H: Yeah. Well, from the time I was nine, I started becoming obsessed with those magic tricks. It took a couple of years. But by the time I was 11, I finally got paid to do my first official booking. I made $25. I was on top of the world. But to an 11-year-old kid living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, it’s like, “I just got paid $25 to do a magic show. That was insane.”
So probably by the time I was about 14, 15 years old, I had dropped out of public school. I was doing this homeschooling program. I was on the road full-time touring kind of all across the Southeast and Midwest. I started making six figures, and by 21 I made a million bucks, and by 22 I was practically bankrupt. I never officially filed for bankruptcy, but we racked up a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of just really bad consumer debt. I couldn’t keep up with the minimum payments. Everything came crashing down, and it was really the beginning of me trying to take a step back and ask what life was all about.
Clearly, when you have that kind of experience, it sort of humbles you if you allow it to, and it forces you to step back and go, “Okay, maybe I don't know everything there is to know about how life works and I’ve got to figure some things out.” Yeah, I started the journey of just asking questions like how did I end up here and how do people change and how does transformation work and how come this happened to me but it hasn't happened to so many other entrepreneurs. What did they do differently that I didn't do or what kind of mistakes did I make that they had avoided or learned from or whatever? So I just began the process of trying to figure out how transformation works.
[00:08:02] JR: What’s your faith story in general? I'm also curious how this particular incident played a role in shaping your faith.
[00:08:09] H: Yeah, yeah. It was interesting. I grew up in a small rural southern Baptist church. I was pretty legalistic and I think I grew up in a really religious home that was pretty focused on making sure that you don't do the wrong things, so kind of avoidance of the stereotypical list of sins but not really about what it really looks like to obediently follow Jesus. I think probably when I was around 17, 18 years old, it’s not that I had this moment where I'd denounced my faith. I think I just – Everything grew sort of lukewarm, and I started becoming pretty cynical about the church in general.
At the time, I was also being booked by a lot of churches. Because I was a good communicator, I had somewhere along the way been taught by the companies that booked me, the schools that booked me, the churches that booked me if I could combine a strong, clear communication with a magic trick as an illustration, that was a very marketable product, and there wasn't really much of a difference between the companies and schools and the churches. So I thought, “Man, if I can package this really articulate clear presentation of the gospel, that can be my product. The church can be this really lucrative market.” Churches functioned in a way that never really showed me anything different from that, and it sort of led me to some pretty dark seasons of life. I think that's why by the time I was 21, I had sort of insulated myself from the truth, and it made all the lies that I had been tricked into believing much easier to hold onto if that makes sense.
So coming out of that at 21 is not – I wouldn't say I was – I still would've claimed the label Christian. I still would’ve said, “Yeah, I'm a believer and I do what I do for the glory of God,” etc. etc. But in no way was I being obedient to the calling of Christ. I wasn’t actually following Jesus. I certainly was not walking by faith. I was completely living my life based on what my senses perceived to be true, which is pretty ironic considering I was making a living doing something that is rooted in our ability to fool people’s senses, magic tricks.
That was the big aha moment for me is what I mentioned earlier by taking a step back and trying to figure out what life is all about. I asked myself how do they get tricked into believing all this stuff that I believe, and that's the big moment epiphany for me was realizing the principles of deception that I was using on stage harmlessly to entertain people as an illusionist were pretty universal, and that the same way that we trick people with a magic trick is the same we’re tricked to believe anything that isn't true. Kind of realized that I had this pretty powerful tool to help other people come to more of an understanding of how they get tricked into believing the things that they believe and how to sort of reclaim agency over that part of their story and to come face-to-face with the truth.
But even if you realize that like I did, okay, now I understand how I've been deceived. I can identify some of the ways that I have allowed the world to influence my worldview. But that doesn't mean that I knew what the truth was, and so that's another whole part of my story, which is how did I get back to learning what it really look like to follow Jesus.
[00:11:22] JR: Yeah. That’s fascinating. I’m curious how that realization impacted your work which we’ll talk about in a minute. But first, let’s talk about mastery. Let’s talk about mastery of your craft. So you’ve clearly mastered your craft as an illusionist and speaker. Throughout the years, what did you find were the keys to really mastering this particular craft?
[00:11:41] H: Yeah. To be honest, I've always just felt really uncomfortable with that word. I'm sure that happens a lot with your guests. But the idea of mastery to me is something that in my mind I have yet to attain and is probably completely unattainable by the end of my life.
[00:11:55] JR: But you know what’s funny? I think that is the common thread amongst guests here.
[00:11:59] H: Probably, yeah.
[00:12:00] JR: And it’s because mastery isn’t a destination, right?
[00:12:03] H: Totally.
[00:12:03] JR: It is a lifelong process of the humble pursuit of mastery and excellence, right?
[00:12:10] H: Yeah. I think excellence is probably a great word for that. So have I achieved excellence? I hope so because there's a part of me that doesn't want to ship any work that isn't considered excellent because I feel like that's what we’re called to, while also at the same time feeling proud of doing work with excellence with a high degree of professionalism without ever being willing to claim the word mastery. But some of it is just experience and time and being willing to put in the work. I don't know about the 10,000-hour rule that Malcolm has written about, but I've certainly put in my 10,000 hours, and so some of it is that.
But, yeah, at 21 it was less about how do I master my craft and how do I pivot to a new craft, to this new fascination that is no longer simply about using tricks to entertain people. But how can I invite people into a new story? I started studying a lot of like Marshall McLuhan around the medium is the message. I started peeling back the layers of medium is the message, then what is the medium of magic tricks.
That’s where I uncovered a lot of the principles of deception and psychology and influence that I referenced earlier. So a lot of my mastery was now about how do I become a better communicator, a better storyteller. How do I come into a greater understanding of how people transform their lives and how change takes place? Of course, that like anything, when you discover a new body of work or a new journey that you want to take, it’s almost like the clock gets reset on the mastery of those ten thousand hours, right?
[00:13:44] JR: Yeah, that’s true.
[00:13:45] H: Now, you’re starting all over again. I think that’s probably an accurate picture into my career is this constant reinvention of yourself and feeling like you're going back to zero on the mastery scale and having to learn new things.
[00:13:57] JR: Yeah, that's exactly right. You just released this book, The Wonder Switch. We’re releasing this episode the day after the book drops. I'm really curious. How do you define wonder?
[00:14:07] H: Man, that’s a – I mean, I had to explain that –
[00:14:09] JR: You know it when you see it.
[00:14:09] H: I spent a whole book on it. Yeah. The easiest way to define it I think is wonder is what gives you permission to believe in something that you have yet to see, and I think for a long time wonder has been sort of viewed as this feel-good, would be nice if I had it but probably isn’t essential, especially in the corporate space. Or the workplace might feel a little bit soft to a lot of leaders.
But this is certainly not what the neuroscience from the last few years of studies are showing us that wonder is absolutely essential. I define change and transformation now that I understand that human beings are what I would just simply call storytelling creatures like God wired us to think in narrative. The narratives that we adopt as true, regardless of whether they are actually true or riddled with lies or not is what drives all human behavior.
So the stories that I tell myself would drive my choices, how I spend my time, how I spend my money, how I see myself in the mirror, how I see God. If you want to change any facet of your life, that means you have to move from the story you’re in to a new story. But no one is willing to do that because of cognitive dissonance or a whole other variety of factors. We are unwilling to step into a new story if we don't believe that new story is possible. It’s just the way that God created and wired our brains.
Wonder is this idea of sort of an openness and openness to the possibility of what could be. So when our wonder gets crushed or as I talk about the book, when our wonder switch gets turned off, it sort of leaves us sort of stuck in cynicism and complacency, and we’re unwilling to explore new territory.
[00:15:52] JR: How do you turn it back on? I’m really curious about this in the context vocationally, right? Yeah, I just think about your career. You’re doing the same show over and over again for years and, of course, you’re iterating the act over time, right?
But I got to imagine that it’s pretty easy to lose your sense of wonder and joy in your work, even when your work is to make other people inspired and wonder. So did you experience that? if so, how did you combat that and how can we cultivate wonder of our own vocations as we’re spending tens of thousands of hours practicing them?
[00:16:26] H: Yeah, a great questions. It’s really two questions. The first part of that I would speak to has a lot to do with cynicism. Even people who aren’t classified as highly cynical, they still live with this sort of perspective that seeing is believing, right? There’s a lot of like, “Oh, I’ll believe it when I see it,” sort of mentality. Even if they don't say that out loud with that blatant, cynical attitude, you can still see that what's driving most of their choices is they feel like they need to see evidence before they are willing to believe.
Well, with the absence of that belief permits, again, an unwillingness to step into exploring new things and an unwillingness to embrace curiosity, creativity, innovative thinking. It changes our mindset. So there's kind of this journey that we have to move on from seeing is believing to living as if believing is seeing.
Sometimes, when I say that, especially around people of faith, we sort of throw up a red flag because it can sound really New Age. We've all heard like The Secret stuff or like the attraction stuff where it’s like, “Oh, if I just believe in it, I can manifest it.” When I say that believing is seeing and when neuroscientists say that believing is seeing, that’s not really what they're talking about. It's often more similar to we all have an example of a friend or a family member that we have known, and you kind of get together as a group and you’re just like, “Why can't he see it? Why can't she see it? The truth is right there in front of their face.” Well, it’s not that that truth isn't there. It’s that their belief systems are literally blinding them to see it, and so sometimes you have to believe in something before you can see it because what we believe has the power to change what we see.
Again, that works in both positive and negative ways. Roald Dahl famously said that those who don't believe in magic will never find it, so you could kind of embrace that mindset of like, “Well, magic, that's for kids,” or, “We’re serious in this workplace. We don't believe in childish things like magic.” But that's because you're going, “Well, show me magic and then I'll believe it.” But those who don't believe in it will never find it because you have to believe in it first. So the first part of the question, I would respond by saying we have to move out of this cynical mindset of thinking that seeing is believing to realizing that what we believe changes what we see. Then as we move beyond that to going, “Okay. Well, how? If that’s the goal, then how do we do that?”
What I’ve discovered through tons of research and through my own personal experience and interviewing and researching with others is that to discover or reawaken wonder, to turn the wonder switch back on is less about going and trying to find something that we have never had or that is out of reach and more about removing all of the things that are in the way of getting back to something that we already have, right?
[00:19:09] JR: What's an example?
[00:19:10] H: So much about wonder is understanding that it's the state that we came into this world, and we were all born and came into this world with the wonder switch on, and so it's more about identifying what turned it off. Whether it's a voice, an experience, trauma that we haven't dealt with or healed from, a story that we’re stuck in, something in our environment that's crushing our wonder, we can be anything from economic noise to a bully to the wrong boss at work.
There’s all these different indicators or things that can lead to sort of stripping and taking our wonder away. So to reawaken that sense of childlike wonder is simply to remove those things because wonder is our natural state. So if you wander as a natural state, it means that you’ve got to get all the stuff that's keeping you from being your authentic self, so you can get back to who you really are and the state that you are meant to live in. Does that make sense?
[00:20:06] JR: Yup, it does. Do you see this topic of wonder, this idea of wonder in your pursuit of mastery of your craft or pursuing excellence in your work? Why do you deem wonder essential to the pursuit of excellence vocationally?
[00:20:23] H: For sure, yeah. I think it was – Who wrote Atomic Habits? James Clear. In the book, he talked about how mastery or excellence essentially requires – I think the way he framed it was both patients and in patients because you have to be geared towards action so that you don't sit around all the time and get lazy. You have to approach each day with a sense of urgency.
But then it also requires this patience because you have to trust and praise the process, not perfection. You have to delay gratification or you have to wait for your actions to accumulate, he talked about. To be patient requires wonder. To trust the process requires a wonder mindset because otherwise you have to survive the dip of liminal space that a lot of people don't survive. Liminal space is a foreign concept to many people, but it’s simply that space between no longer and not yet. When God is calling you out of something old and into something new, but the old thing isn’t really gone yet, the new thing hasn't really fully been realized or come to fruition, and so you sort of feel trapped in the in between.
There’s a lot of people that would say that space is holy because that's where all your spiritual formation takes place. That's your becoming. But what cultural anthropologist would say is there's an old story and a new story. When you're moving between an old story and a new story, you have to travel through that space between, that liminal space, and that space has no story.
Well, if we’re storytelling creatures who make sense of the world, if we find meaning through narrative and stories and we have no story, well, how uncomfortable is that? We feel untethered. We feel like we’re floating through space. We don't know who we are. Our identity isn’t anchored in anything that we can attach meaning to, and so that's a really uncomfortable. Wonder is sort of required. Not sort of. It is required. It’s essential to the process of bridging that gap between the old story and the new story without giving up.
[00:22:16] JR: I love that. That’s a great answer. We’re going to talk about the intersection of your faith and your work in a minute. But real quick, we talk a little bit about routines in the podcast. I'm really curious what your day looks like typically. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, what is a typical day maybe in the midst of COVID [inaudible 00:22:33]?
[00:22:33] H: Oh, man. What was I going to say? Yeah, the old story or the new story?
[00:22:38] JR: New story. New Normal.
[00:22:40] H: Man, I used to fly 150,000 miles a year. Honestly, I'm loving this pace of life because it is absent of 5:00 AM, 4:00 AM, sometimes 3:00 AM wake-up calls to catch early morning flights to get home to see my family or to go serve clients, to do a keynote.
So it’s been really awesome because what we’re coming up on now that it’s school season, I wake up early and take my kids to school, which is something that I enjoy once I’ve off the road. I wake up, I try to squeeze in a quick workout, and then I take my kids to school. I come home. I eat breakfast. I shower. I chat with my wife. I sit down and fill out my daily pages, whatever that looks like for that season, whether that's like daily pages from Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, or daily pages in the planner that I use, which I'm currently using Michael Hyatt's planner, the Full Focus Planner, which I'm really enjoying. Then I begin my day.
So, yeah, pre-COVID, it was I had a lot of variety of work in a lot of different places. But now, it's working from a home office. More of a traditional 9 to 5, which can include everything from podcast interviews like I'm doing now, hosting webinars, lots of emails, phone calls, and then trying to do what Cal Newport calls deep work, where I just calendar block some time to make sure that I'm working on the important things and get out of the weeds of –
[00:24:00] JR: So we talk a lot about deep work. When are you getting deep work done typically in your schedule right now?
[00:24:05] H: Well, actually I'm really enjoying a new app that I use called Rise, and it's a sleep app and it basically tracks your dips throughout the day based on your circadian rhythm. I'm trying to calendar block my time based on my peaks throughout the day. Ironically, I'm actually scheduling phone calls and meetings and Zooms and interviews, emails, phone calls, all the stuff during my dips and trying to calendar block my peak time around what we would call deep work.
[00:24:33] JR: Yeah, brilliant. I love it. There's a lot of science to back this up. Have you read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker?
[00:24:39] H: I have not.
[00:24:41] JR: He talked about this in the circadian rhythms and how they're different for different people, right? So you got to figure out what yours is, but I’ve never heard of Rise as a tool for this. I got to check this out.
[00:24:50] H: Yeah. It’s a pretty new app. It’s pretty inexpensive. I just went ahead and paid for the premium version. I'm a pretty big proponent of the Apple Watch because I love data. I love everything from food and nutrients to sleep, tracking, to – I mean, I do a long 60-minute bike ride every Sunday on my Peloton. Sunday afternoons now since I'm no longer traveling on the weekends. So I track that. I jump in a steam shower. I do heart rate while I'm in the steam shower because I'm curious what my heart rate is doing. I just love all the metrics. But this particular app doesn't require Apple Watch. It's all built into the iPhone. I'm not sure if through another platform, but it's been really cool.
[00:25:29] JR: I can be a little obsessive about these things. It sounds like you can too.
[00:25:32] H: Me too.
[00:25:33] JR: Right now, after Why We Sleep, I built a spreadsheet where I'm tracking the variables in my sleep, and so I’m like, “Did I have a beer that afternoon? When was my last cup of tea,” and map it out against Fitbit sleep data, so yeah.
[00:25:47] H: That is absolutely. Yeah, I keep a food journal. I no longer track like every single calorie that I put in my body or every nutrient or whatever, and I pay very close attention to how what I eat and what I drink makes me feel, and I journal that and track it so that I can go back and try to figure it out. It’s all about optimization.
[00:26:04] JR: I just gave up variety in my diet like two years ago. I eat the exact same thing every single day once I optimized the workflow. It’s just locking in. We talk a lot in this podcast about how the faith of our guest influences their particular vocation. At the highest level to ask you the broadest question possible, how does your faith influence your work as an illusionist, as a performer, as a communicator? What does that look like, man?
[00:26:32] H: Man, great question. I mean, the simplest answer is accuse me from being a conman.
[00:26:38] JR: [inaudible 00:26:38].
[00:26:39] H: Yeah. Especially now, as my intersection of my work as an illusionist and my work as an entrepreneur, there's this very clearly like, “Gosh.” I think some of the greatest evidence of God's presence and reality in work in my life and the Holy Spirit's present in my life is the fact that I'm not a conman because if there was no moral law and there was no moral compass and it is just survival of the fittest, I mean, there's a reason why there's so much crossover in the world between the magic community. I mean, all of our trainings and books and conferences and trade shows and like the psychics and spirit mediums and witch doctors and shamans and conmen and pickpockets of the world because the skill sets are all the same.
At the end of day, like it's just the motive, right? We sell cars and makeup and jeans using the same principles of persuasion that I would use to trick someone in a magic trick. We talked a little bit about that earlier which means that what determines the label that you put on me is just my motive. If I use a principle of deception, that means that you would call me a conman. If I use a principle of persuasion, you would say, “Oh, he’s a great salesperson or he's a really good leader.” It’s the same principle of psychology. It’s just we call it deception if it's bad. Then we call it persuasion or influence if it’s good. So I think the first thing that comes to mind when you ask me that, I know it's a goofy answer but –
[00:28:05] JR: Now it’s a good answer.
[00:28:06] H: Yeah. I think it's a picture of redemption. It's like how do you redeem my work for the glory of God is to use these powers of deception for good instead of for evil.
[00:28:17] JR: Yeah, that's exactly right. I love that. You mentioned before that you grew up basically doing these gigs at churches. I'm curious, have you always been overt about your faith in your performances, yes, no? Has it kind of been all over the map? I’m curious about that journey for you.
[00:28:34] H: Yeah. Honestly, I follow the camp that I feel like it's my job to be respectful to serving the client well, and so a lot of times I get to partner with some really amazing churches, who obviously the reason they're bringing me in is to share my story, and I kind of take a more invitation-centric approach. By that, I mean like I feel like there's a greater story that I have the opportunity to invite people into as opposed to selling the gospel to someone.
I think in the American church, we’ve gotten better at it. But with the whole seeker-sensitive thing that started a couple decades ago, there's been this rise in us pitching the gospel with a presentation and expecting people to make a commitment to follow Jesus for the rest of their lives. Then they’re expecting people to respond to that based on a presentation that lasts –
[00:29:23] JR: Based on the magic trick.
[00:29:24] H: Yeah, or a presentation that is shorter than the presentation that we listen to on what kind of car we should drive, right? We spend more time choosing a car that we’re going to drive for 1 to 5 years or 10 years than we do taking the decision seriously of like should I be following Jesus or not.
[00:29:41] JR: We don't count the cost.
[00:29:43] H: Exactly, exactly, which leads to, surprise, the current state of the American church which is a lot of people who haven’t been discipled because we’re not fulfilling the great commission and a lot of lukewarm people that are filling church pews when the doors of church buildings are open but aren’t actually being obedient to the call of Christ on their lives and vocation. So there's that. But then outside of that, one of the things that I love about my work is that I love the word magic. Magic is not something that you see a magician do on stage.
I’ve had a friend a few years ago. His car got broken into at the cruise port. He was getting on a cruise ship and his car was parked and his gear was in there in the back of his SUV, and he’s like, “Yeah, man. Someone busted the window and stole all my magic.” I know it’s not what he meant but we had a conversation about like, “Dude, they didn’t steal your magic. They stole your boxes and your gimmicks and your special devices that you use to create these experiences that people look at that they refer to as magic.”
But it’s pretty ironic that people like you call people like me magicians, and you refer to the tricks you see as magic, even though they're not magic. They're just illusions. They’re just tricks. But, yeah, there are these truly magical things all around us, often in the mundane experiences every single day right in front of our face. But we roll our eyes in cynicism, and we miss all of that stuff because we don't think it’s meaningful.
To me, it’s like when I'm in a space outside of the four walls of a church building, I get to talk about magic as this experience. It’s this thing that you can't really put your finger on. It goes beyond what you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. If you can convince someone that magic is real, again, it’s a reawakening of wonder. It opens them up to the possibility of what could be. To me, that is incredibly compelling. I have noticed in my own work people are so much more curious to pull me aside and ask questions about my faith or that my faith is more evident to people, even if I was not as blatant about it because the conference I was speaking at just wasn't appropriate.
I heard Erwin McManus probably 10 or 15 years ago say something I’ll never forget, and he was, “I grew up –” These were his words. He said, “My parents tried to make me broccoli and try to shove it in my throat, and then it made me grow up hating broccoli. Now that I'm adult, I’ve realized that broccoli is really good for me, and when it’s prepared properly I actually really enjoy it.” When he used that as analogy for the way that we try to take the gospel and sort of shove it down people's throats, instead of just living a life and showcasing an obedient walk of faith and then just loving your neighbor so well that at least people with questions go, “And this doesn't make sense to me. Your life doesn't make sense to me. Your work does make sense to me, your generosity, your commitment, your integrity. None of it makes sense to me.” So much to the point where they're asking you questions and they demand an explanation for this faith that you have. That’s sort of the walk that I’ve embraced these days in my work as an entrepreneur.
[00:32:27] JR: I love it. Isn’t there a sense in which – Let's say you're doing a gig at Southwest Airlines. I know you’ve done a gig for them for Pinterest, whoever, right? And you’re obviously not giving a gospel presentation, but isn’t there a way that magic can awaken wonder that makes us long for the kingdom? I mean, nobody would say that in those terms, but isn't there something that can awaken in us that makes us more receptive to things of God and things of His kingdom?
[00:32:55] H: Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. In the book, The Wonder Switch book you mentioned earlier, there’s something in there called the transformation map, and it’s just my attempt to lay out the process of how transformation works and how change works by moving from that old story to a new one. When you get halfway around the map, on either side of it there is an inciting incident, and so it's often an inciting incident in our childhood that turns the wonder switch off.
But on the flipside, it's also an inciting incident that can serve as our way in our path back to wonder. Then the very next step that follows a positive inciting incident is a spark, and following a spark is awe. We have these experiences sometimes that serve as a spark that leads us back to wonder. When we have the experience of the emotion and feeling of awe, what the neuroscience shows is that it opens us up to the grand scale of the universe. That opens us up to empathy and emotional connection with other people on a deep spiritual level.
There's another study that shows awe and wonder connected to a sense of smallness, and by that I don't mean a low self-esteem or being self-conscious or insecure. A sense of smallness in a sense that it allows you to look around or realize, “Man, the world is so much bigger than just me. It makes me feel compelled to search for something that goes beyond just me and my life that I'm living on this planet.”
Awe certainly has a sense to do that. It’s why we’re captivated by the stars, by sunsets, by all these things that awaken our wonder through the experience of awe, and a lot of that has to do with experiences that feel new or feel new again. It’s why a lot of my path back to wonder is connected to becoming a dad because you have the wonder of your childhood where everything is new. But then in the information age, where no matter what mystery you come in contact with, supposedly you can pull a device out of your pocket and figure out the answer and solve that mystery.
So we’ve sort of psychologically been reconditioned to feel really uncomfortable with mystery. We come in contact with it. We don't like it because we’ve been trained and conditioned to think that we can crush it whenever we find and go, “Oh, that's how that works.” As if understanding how something works means that we can't look at and go, “Wow, that was beautiful,” or, “Wow, that's amazing.”
[00:35:13] JR: Yeah. The information age has, I don’t know, kind of created this illusion of omniscience, right?
[00:35:19] H: No doubt, yeah.
[00:35:20] JR: Where magic provides this kind of all of the unknowable. I think I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Oh, yeah. When we get to heaven, we’ll have all the answers. We’ll know everything,” and exactly like no evidence of that in Scripture, right? I think we’ll probably know more than we do now but certainly not everything. I find that comforting because wonder is a gift and it also reminds us that God is God and we are not. He is omniscient. We will never be, and that is good.
[00:35:49] H: Yeah. I don’t know. I don't get why some would say that it doesn’t make sense to me because that would basically mean we get to heaven and become God.
00:35:56] JR: Yeah. [inaudible 00:35:57].
[00:35:58] H: If instead we get to heaven and worship God, like I would think that Him being the object of our worship would make Him worthy of that worship, which means that He is God. We’re not, yeah. In the book, I call an abundance of certainty. We live in what appears to be an abundance of certainty, and it’s like we want that. We crave that. We think that curiosity demands to be satisfied, but it doesn't. That’s sort of a counterfeit form of curiosity which is that's what magic tricks show people. You watch a magic trick and your first reaction is, “How did you do that? I have to understand. Will you please tell me the secret?”
When I give a talk about the role of curiosity and the value of it, sometimes people will often use that against me. They'll come up after the talk and be like, “So if curiosity is so important, why can't you tell the secret to that trick because I'm just curious how you made that table levitate,” or, “I'm just curious how you made that thing disappear.” That's actually not curiosity. What the science shows is that genuine curiosity is less equal to getting the answer to a question that we have, and it resembles more of a willingness to step into a search and a journey without having a clear destination in mind. Even if you do have a clear goal in mind of where you want to end up, not sort of having a predetermined path, it’s just a willingness to be open and explore.
[00:37:17] JR: That's really good. That’s really good. I can't wait to read that section of the book. Speaking of books, Harris, we love to end every conversation with the same three questions. First one is related to books. I'm curious which books you tend to recommend or gift most frequently to other people.
[00:37:35] H: Just obviously it depends on the person and what they're searching for? I mean, the first ones that come to mind, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Everyone should read that book.
[00:37:45] JR: One of the most frequently named books on the podcast.
[00:37:49] H: Yeah, because of the story, which is the conference that I run I can literally say that we've given away thousands of copies of that book because we've given that book away to all attendees multiple years.
When it comes to my faith journey, I often go back to The Reason for God by Tim Keller. I think in my early to mid-20s when I was coming out of losing it all after making it all and feeling like I was trying to figure out what faith was for me, that book was literally a Godsend and what helped me hold onto my faith. Mindset I think is incredibly important to life, and so the book Mindset by Carol Dweck I think is an important read. I would read everything by Seth Godin. I know he's often considered a business or marketing author, but there's nothing that he puts out that I end up not reading often multiple times.
[00:38:32] JR: He’s brilliant.
[00:38:33] H: Yeah. I think of him less as a business author and more as a futurist. He’s like someone who’s able to appear into the future and help us make sense of the world that we find ourselves in or the stories that we find ourselves in.
[00:38:44] JR: I think that's right. Well, you guys can find all these books at jordanraynor.com/bookshelf. I know the War of Art is already on our leaderboard. I think The Reason for God is going to go on there. That's been recommend a couple times and is one of my all-time favorites. Who would you most like to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith influences their work? Who are you really curious about and like, “Ah, I wonder how the gospel shapes that person's vocation?”
[00:39:07] H: I mean, there's certainly a lot of public figures that I have so much respect for that I get this little glimpse and I'm like, “Gosh, I would be shocked if you are not a person of faith,” and so I would love to know that but I have no way of knowing for sure. The first person that comes to mind is Brad Montague. He was the creator of Kid President, which is this massive YouTube sensation, and he’s gone on to do a whole bunch of just really incredible creative work. He has spoken that story for us multiple years in a row and someone who’s doing a lot of really important work outside the four walls of the church who clearly his faith is informing his work but also is doing work with excellence. I would love to hear a conversation with him on that topic.
[00:39:45] JR: That's a terrific answer. I love that answer. Last piece of advice you want to leave this audience with. People like you who you are not magicians but are committed to their craft and doing great work as a means of making our Lord famous and serving people to the ministry of excellence. What do you want to leave them with?
[00:40:01] H: Identify the problem that you're facing, and whatever the problem is I can almost promise you it's a storytelling problem which means that it's also a wonder problem, and so you've got to find a way to flip the wonder switch back on to give you permission to hold onto all the possibility that awaits that could be that God created you to experience. To me, wonder and faith go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other I don't think. To some people that feels like a bold statement, but we’ve got to find a way back to wonder.
[00:40:32] JR: I love it. Hey, Harris, I want to commend you for just the important thoughtful redemptive work you're doing in the world and for pointing out the wonder of God and for leaving us with wonder still on our souls for things that we cannot see. Thank you for loving your audiences and your clients. They’re the ministry of excellence.
Hey, guys! The book is The Wonder Switch, great title. By the way, I’m holding the book right now. It's one of the best covers I've seen in a very, very long time. You guys will – As soon as you see it, you’ll remember it for a really long time. You guys can pick it up right now wherever books are sold and, of course, we’ll have a link at jordanraynor.com/bookshelf. Harrison, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:41:14] H: Man, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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[00:41:16] JR: I thought that conversation was fascinating. I hope you guys did too. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe to The Call to Mastery, so you never miss an episode in the future. If you're already subscribed, take 30 seconds right now. Go leave you a review of the podcast. Thank you, guys, so much for tuning in to The Call to Mastery. See you next week.
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