Oz Pearlman

What I mean by being the observer is that when I was about to perform—way back when I put on my bar mitzvah suit and walked into Zia’s—I’d tell myself that I wasn’t Oz Pearlman. Instead, I was Oz the Entertainer, the precursor to Oz the Mentalist. And if people rejected or didn’t like Oz the Entertainer, that wasn’t Oz Pearlman’s problem. I turned myself into a character, meaning I separated myself and my psyche from the task at hand. I was no longer the actor; I was the observer. I made a conscious decision to not internalize how people would react to me because they weren’t reacting to the real me.