The book
The Mindset Magician
Fifty Years on Stage and the Mindset Behind the Magic
Paperback and Kindle, December 2026.
The book
Fifty Years on Stage and the Mindset Behind the Magic
Paperback and Kindle, December 2026.
A man slams Troy Milligan against his van in a Circle K parking lot in Sacramento and puts a gun to his head. Milligan reaches into his pocket and blows four half-dollars out of his nose.
Twenty minutes later he is performing in the bushes for the rest of the crew. A year after that, one of them recognizes him at a gas pump, and Milligan does another trick for him on the spot.
That is the first story in this book. The secret, it turns out, was never the trick.
Born two months early in 1953, Milligan spent fifty years on stage. He built his first straitjacket out of his sisters' sweatshirts, left a drafting job to join a carnival, booked a blindfold motorcycle jump before he owned a motorcycle, and met Houdini's last stage assistant at an auction in Las Vegas. He also lost his retirement to a Ponzi scheme, had kidney surgery, and slept in the back seat of a Honda Civic.
The Mindset Magician is a memoir with an argument built into it. The stories come first. The last section names what they were doing all along: your mind keeps honest records, it can't be talked into things, and affirmations fail because the part of you that keeps score already knows what is true. The practice is not fooling that part of yourself. In Milligan's words, it did not need to be fooled. It needed to be shown.
The book includes a thirteen-statement creed drawn from the stories.
This book isn't just for magicians. It's for live entertainers, and for anyone whose living depends on walking into a room and being ready.
From the Creed
“I am a magician. Fifty years in, I can tell you the secret was never the trick — the secret is what I decide in the thirty seconds before my hands move.”
“Troy Milligan doesn't write about adversity from a distance; he's lived it. Despite devastating setbacks, he keeps moving forward with a determination to make others smile. In The Mindset Magician, he draws on a lifetime of hard-earned experience to show why positive thinking alone isn't enough and how we can stop hiding who we are and start living authentically.”
“For over 35 years, I've known Troy Milligan as a friend and his attorney. I've watched him face extraordinary adversity — arduous litigation after his trade show business was stolen, and retirement funds wiped out by a Ponzi scheme just before COVID-19 — all with remarkable grace and composure, never anger.”
“One thing I've admired about Troy Milligan for over 40 years is that he simply never gives up. No matter what life throws his way, he keeps trying, exploring new possibilities, and finding a way forward. Giving up just isn't in his nature.”
The code is in the back.