Attention is what steers your perceptions and, hence, controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind.

The pickpocketers/magicians tap into the fact that your attention is a limited resource. They control how you spend your attention through creating distractions. Both, internal and external distraction. Example of an internal distraction would be to ask what’s the last thing you did before leaving home today. When the mind is figuring that out, its capacity to process any new stimulus reduces drastically. 

Now we can use these techniques to our advantage. E.g. a doctor managing to inject a syringe into a young kid, or even an adult ;-)

And this one as well...

Your business and life do the same to you. It pickpockets things mean the most to you (your happiness), while your mind gets hooked on to the less important things.

Mindfulness is about training your mind to focus on right things and reduce the distractions.