When I was younger and just starting to get my feet wet as a writer, I struggled in understanding and articulating my value. It took a long journey of self-discovery to develop the kind of confidence I needed to vouch for myself in a professional setting. I was constantly doubting myself and making excuses, looking at other people I admired and wishing desperately I could interact with the world like they did, instead of simply learning from them and applying that knowledge to make myself more admirable. There was a curious Catch-22 I discovered as I went along developing my craft - I found that the more I believed in myself and the more confident I was in my endeavors, the more likely those endeavors were to succeed. Of course, when I expected those endeavors to fail, they inevitably would. Likewise, the more successes I found, the more I was capable of believing in myself. Eventually, It evolved into a viscous cycle where I became dependent on outside successes to justify my faith in myself, and any failures I met had the power to bring me all the way back to square one again. It took me a while to develop the mental fortitude to learn to believe in myself in spite of whether or not I found immediate success. Everything on this website can be understood then as extension of that growth - the result of an independent philosophy I developed as I started to pay attention to what it was that seemed to make certain endeavors succeed while other similar endeavors were falling flat on their face. It is a philosophy of always being honest with yourself, of accurately assessing both your flaws AND your value, and using that honest analysis to push forward and make yourself better than you were yesterday. It is a philosophy of altering your reality by the sheer tenacity of your Will – in short, it is a philosophy of Magic.

                 When I founded Magic Pen, I did so out of a genuine and fervently held belief that Writing is a literal form of Magic. It sounds cute, a nice little theme to bundle up my website to make it more memorable, but it is much more serious to me than a simple theme - it is a cohesive philosophy that expressly defines both who I am as a writer and as an individual. To delve deeper into what I mean, we must first establish the definition of “Magic,” as it is such an open-ended word that can have so many different meanings depending on the context. In this case, I would define Magic as “The art of creating new realities with the power of your intentions,” and I think that is a pretty satisfactory explanation that most of us can agree upon. It is a universal phenomenon that continuously expresses itself in different names throughout time and space. Some understand this power as “Faith,” while others refer it by more formal names like “The Law of Attraction.” Whatever your name for it, there is a clear precedent that your thoughts and intentions have a tremendous power over the quality of your every day life. Writing, the process of rendering a thoughtform into physical matter, can therefore be seen as an extension of this principal – perhaps the most important extension. Every day of our lives we take this messy, primordial ooze that is “thought” and use the power of our Will to sort it into a coherent order that then defines who we are and the world we inhabit. Writing is the art of making the Unreal Real, and as an extension of this my entire philosophy of writing can be summed up in a single word: Abracadabra

                Don’t laugh, I know! It sounds silly, more theming to help me stick in your head like an annoying advert for a used car dealership. It makes it seem like I belong on stage sawing rabbits with the help of a buxom assistant instead of right here trying to sell you copywriting services, but in my opinion Abracadabra is the living, breathing heart of copywriting. To understand what I’m talking about then we must again consult the dictionary and define just what exactly it is that I mean. “Abracadabra” is actually a slight mistranslation of the Hebrew word “Abrahadabra” and what it literally translates to is “I create what I speak.” I create what I speak. So simple, so elegant, and yet so profound that many of us don’t even understand what it means or the power that those words can have. To me, it encapsulates everything about writing and sales that I find precious; it fits so snugly with my ideology of self-actualization and faith in one’s own endeavors. It is so important to me because I truly do believe that we create what we speak. Every day we are defining ourselves through language and we fail to realize how powerful that language is in its capacity to either motivate us or to keep us limited and suppressed.

There are so many small intricacies of language that can have far-reaching consequences way beyond what we might think, and through examining these small moments we can discover the Magic of language and its ability to control our destinies. Take for example the word “Am,” as in “I am an artist.” It seems very simple on first observation, it just defines what a person is. If a person is an artist, then we call them an artist! Simple! Only, what is an “artist?” And who or what is responsible for deciding who is or is not an “artist” according to whatever definition you’ve chosen? What even is “art?” It becomes clear that if you spend enough time breaking down the literal “what” of language than you will inevitably be met with an arbitrary sequence of useless definitions and rhetorical dead-ends. So much of what we call “definitions” are really more of a “consensus” then an objective truth. Language is a self-defining concept by its nature. So, what is the difference between someone who is an artist and someone who is not an artist? It’s very simple, the artist says “I am an artist,” and that’s the only thing that matters. Whether or not that person truly behaves like an artist is a matter of rhetorical debate, but simply by defining himself as one then that person has become an artist. We create what we speak every day of our lives, the Magic of language is all around us if we only open our eyes to it.

                Abracadabra is the very heart of entrepreneurship. It is easy to see business as a formulaic science that calculates the relationship between supply and demand, and to a certain extent it is, but when you pay attention to how easily something like “demand” can be fabricated, business starts to more closely resemble art than science. Nobody “needed” (or even wanted) a Pet Rock, perhaps the greatest example of Abracadabra Marketing in business history, and yet that simple, cheap endeavor was able to generate such an intense buzz and profit, almost because of its absurdity. There’s a fascinating little bit of Magic that happens between the realm of the Theoretical and the realm of the Real, and that’s the Magic that we try so hard to capture here. If you were to ask a random person from the 70’s, “If someone put eyes on a rock and sold it to you as a pet, would you want it?” almost every single person in the world would say no if they were being honest. What most people fail to understand though, is that we don’t live in the Theoretical Realm - we live in Reality. Whether or not it was “logical”, Gary Dahl’s Pet Rock campaign was a massive success and remains one of the most illuminating stories  in the history of successful branding. It shouldn’t work! Nobody wanted one, there wasn’t a “demand” for a lifeless rock with eyes, but that was what made it so great! People loved the joy of buying something so absurd and useless, they loved having a joke to be “in” on while having a physical token (rock) to prove their casual sense of humor to guests and friends. Pet Rock demonstrates very clearly the property of Magic that fascinates me so deeply, the well-established notion that “If you build it, they will come.” It’s that simple. Gary Dahl created a worldwide phenomenon out of something that was intended to be stupid and easy, simply by speaking it and turning his idea into a reality. He built it, and they came. This is what all entrepreneurs must do if they want to succeed – not look at the competition and copy their business model, but to look at their audience instead and adapt and invent their own business model based on what they know will sell to people. We want to help you with that.

                What Magic Pen promises above all is a knowledge of people. Anyone can tell you who your demographic is and how to target them, but not everyone can tell you why an individual reacts to certain ads and not others. We take the radical stance that people aren’t logical, that there’s more to life than whether or not you’re married or in the 18-25 demographic. Labels like these help us to sort and organize our business, but they don’t help us in creating an authentic relationship with our audience. People are waking up and becoming self-conscious about these demographics and they’re getting sick and tired of being marketed to en-masse. If there’s a surefire way to guarantee a person WON’T buy your service it’s to make them feel pandered to. We are not interested in what people “say” they want, we are interested in what people feel below the surface, what they really want out of life but are too afraid to ask. We want to explore the unconscious mind that actually motivates a person’s behavior, not the conscious mind that justifies it. At Magic Pen we create what we speak, and we want to use our well-trained powers of speech to create new opportunities that grow your business and foster genuine personal relationships with your audience. As a very wise man once said, “Sell a customer your product and you’ll eat for a day. Sell a customer your values and you’ll eat for a lifetime.” Something along those lines, at least!

~Jake Rogers, founder of Magic Pen.