David Blaine: The Secret of Magic is Practice

David Blaine - Show the Impossible

David Blaine gives an inspiring speech about practice, perseverance, and the magic of achieving the impossible.

Transcript:

"When I made it to the halfway mark at eight minutes, I was 100% certain that I was not going to be able to make this. There was no way for me to do it. I kept pushing to 10 minutes. At 10 minutes, you start getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes. I knew that that was blood shunting when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs. At 11 minutes, I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs and my lips started to feel really strange. At minute 12, I started to have ringing in my ears and I started to feel my arm going numb. I'm a hypochondriac and I remember, 'arm numbing, it's a heart attack,' so I started to get really paranoid. Then at 13 minutes, maybe because of the hypochondria, I started feeling pains all over my chest. It was awful.

"At 14 minutes, I had these awful contractions, like this urge to breathe. At 15 minutes, I was suffering major O2 deprivation to the heart and I started having ischemia to the heart. And then suddenly I hear screaming, and I think that it's some weird thing that I had died or something had happened. And then I realized that I had made it to 16:32, so with the energy of everybody that was there, I decided to keep pushing. I went to 17 minutes and four seconds. As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It's practice. It's training and experimenting, while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. That's what magic is to me. So thank you."