A magician's most elementary job description is to take the impossible to make it possible. If you need to learn how to do magic, you have to first know exactly what's impossible. Or in other words, what ordinary people think doesn't seem possible.

In every of magic, you can find only seven basic effects. Obviously there are many than seven tricks out there, but every single one of them is just a variation of those seven basic effects. These are:

Appearance: The law of conservation of matter says that you can’t make something from nothing. However, a magician says, “BOOM…flowers.”

Vanish: This is exactly the contrary of the appearance. A vanish is when you take something and change it into nothing. This should be impossible, but magicians do it all time. In fact, it’s our most requested trick. People always ask me to produce their mother-in-law disappear, but I don’t do that sort of thing. Instead, I send them to my Fat Uncle Tony. He’s a “magician” who focuses on making people “disappear”.

Transportation: Science lets us know that nothing inside the universe will go faster compared to the speed of sunshine. Magicians just roll their eyes and shake their heads. A transportation effect can be a combination of both a vanish and an appearance. This is the time you are making something disappear from place and INSTANTLY reappear in another place. Take that, science.

Transformation: An alchemist’s dream is always to turn lead into gold, but alas. Science says it’s a no-no. Fortunately, magicians say it’s a yes-yes. I suppose this might be considered another mix of a vanish as well as an appearance Body object disappears plus a different object instantly appears in its place. For example, some magicians turn a red scarf in to a blue scarf. I don’t bother with that crap; I simply turn everything into beer and rigatoni.

Levitation: Gravity is relentless. However, magicians are relentless-er. We’ve found methods to give the illusion that an object is floating without any visible means of support. Defying gravity is wicked. Under this category fall variations like “suspension” (making an item do an impossible balanced exercise) and “animation” (making an inanimate object move on it's own). If you wish to learn how to do magic, then you’ve got to make stuff float. (Please, no jokes about how precisely you can make a root beer float.)

Penetration: This is just described as solid passing through solid. Normally, at the atomic level, the force of electromagnetism will make this impossible. Obviously, magicians know ways for this. The favourite penetration I can think about happens when David Copperfield walked with the Great Wall of China. Oh, that and enough time I put one fourth via a glass table.

Restoration: The last effect is when an item is destroyed then put together again. Magicians are notorious for smashing someone’s watch and then magically repairing it (usually). David Blaine has been known to restore a dead fly back to life. Me? I haven’t quite got this down yet. I just break stuff. Y’know…rules, molds, banks, ladies’ hearts…

To see a good example of these seven magic effects doing his thing, check out this YouTube video called “How To Do Magic"