On Magicians

2025.06.08

CIII

[Poison Guzzlers, Casting Spells, The Magician’s Secret, How I Learned English Without Understanding a Single Word, Beware of Unearned Wisdom]

Thesis: Magicians can do something you thought was impossible but is really just hidden behind time & focused effort.

[Poison Guzzlers]

Magic exists when you are unable to see the path from what you think is possible to what is actually possible.

In other words, it is more or less a product of your perception.

Imagine that you thought it would take you a full day to travel 20 miles from your village to a city. Then, a man in a robe and a pointy hat shows you a giant hunk of metal and goes on to explain that if you feed it one gallon of liquid poison & perform a ritual of pressing buttons and turning knobs while sitting inside of it, you could get from your village to the city in under an hour.

You would think that man a wizard, a magician, or maybe a devil. How could you not?

After all, you thought your best case was traveling by horse and maybe getting there in 6 hours. Now, he tells you that this innate hunk of sculpted ore will be 6 times faster than a horse, if you only give it a gallon of this repugnant liquid. It doesn't even need to eat?

For us, there is no shock there. We know that such devices exist - cars.

Now, if we saw a metal ship the length of a football field suspended, unmoving, ten thousand feet above earth with no obvious jets or wings… well, we’d have a similar reaction to an 18th century villager hearing of cars. We would think that this floating ship would most certainly have to be the product of aliens (one of the modern equivalencies for magicians & devils).

But, if such a ship existed, it would, by definition, be possible that it existed. Meaning there would be some way that it worked, if we could only comprehend it.

There is no magic, but there are “magical” things that we just don’t understand or aren’t used to.

This is good news, because anything that we do see as magic can also be wielded by us, too.

[Casting Spells]

Scaling down from vehicles, there are plenty of tame examples of perceived “magic” that you can see an individual do. I'm sure you've had those moments of shock where you see someone achieve something that you’d think impossible under the constraints (time, resources, information) that they had.

Some examples that I’ve seen:

• A “hacker”, taking 30 minutes to build a pipeline that extracted people data from unstructured text using a local model

• A seller, who with limited context, told me the exact objection a prospect would have and exactly how to solve it (he was right in both regards)

• A purple belt flipping me from the dominant position to a submission in under 5 seconds

• A designer making a beautiful logo right in front of my eyes - in 30 minutes, I was convinced it was exactly what I wanted

• My sales coach coming up with absolute bars on the spot ("How about... turning signals into sales?")

• A friend freestyle rapping (unlike me, he didn't just keep rhyming 'fuck' with 'fuck')

• A landscaper evenly spreading dirt directly from a bag over a few square feet without using a single tool (doesn't sound impressive unless you've tried it)

The cool thing about the first three examples is that while those were utter magic to me 12 & 16 & 24 months ago, now they're much less shocking and more obvious to me.

In other words, everything that we see someone else do and think, "wow, that is magic!" is just something that we didn't realize was possible to do under the constraints they did it with.

But, since we saw the magician do it, it is, by definition, possible. And, it is probably simpler to cast that same spell than we realize...

[The Magician's Secret]

The only thing between you and someone else who is really good at something is time & focused effort. As long as it doesn’t break the laws of physics, that’s also the difference between our species and football field sized spaceships that can efficiently hover in place.

Yes, there are natural dispositions & advantages & disadvantages - good luck playing basketball at the level of an NBA star if you are 5' 3".

Most things are not like that, though.

I have certain predispositions that make me very uncoordinated—when I was 16, I literally could not throw a discus far enough to get it on the part of the field that they cared to put distance markers on. And it certainly was not because I wasn't strong enough. My coordination was so poor that by the standards of Michigan HS track & field, I was unmeasurably bad.

While I haven't thrown a discus since then, after 2 years of improving hand eye coordination via jiu jitsu, when I was 23, I caught a falling pen I saw out of the corner of my eye fast enough that the woman next to me called me spider man.

I did something that might be very simple for you, but for me many years prior, it was magic—literally the domain of fictional movie characters or people who were “just coordinated.”

All it took for me to “naturally” do what I once thought was impossible was hundreds of hours of intense combat sports.

The distance between you seeing something as magic and you being able to do that thing is nothing more than time and focused effort.

[How I Learned English Without Understanding a Single Word]

The magician's secret is time AND focused effort, not just time. Going through the motions for many years helps, but focusing on understanding the principles behind what you are learning is critical.

I am learning Vim right now. I’ve seen people do “magic” with it, so I am making an effort to learn it’s secrets.

Vim motions are a language of keyboard shortcuts for letting you navigate and edit text efficiently. If you memorize maybe 16 basic commands, you can do pretty much anything faster than you could do with a mouse and arrow keys. And, if you learn some more, you can even do some things that are very hard to do with a mouse and arrow keys.*

Already, I’ve had some more tame moments that feel like magic and know there is more to come.

There is a misconception that the learning curve is impossible steep & there are only questionable gains that you don’t unlock until you’re a “pro.” I think this is only true if you try to memorize the complete “sentences” made by the shortcuts rather than the atomic shortcuts themselves.

Naturally, when such a misconception is strong enough, people ignore the challenging thing altogether or try to find an easy way out. So, I had the misfortune of being suggested a youtube video, titled "How to MASTER vim quickly".

The hook of the video is “Here’s how I became a vim expert without memorizing any keyboard shortcuts.” The lady recommends that you download a terminal that has ai built into it** so that if you ever have to do a vim command, you just ask the ai how to do it.

Vim is literally a language of keyboard shortcuts. This is as inane as saying, “Here’s how I became an english expert without knowing a single word.”

No matter how much time you spend on something, if you’re not actually applying a focused effort to understanding the thing, you will not close the gap between you and the magician.

In a worst case scenario, you will be like this lady, and actually spend more time checking a resource about how to do something in Vim that it would take you to just do the thing without Vim—in other words, you add the complexity of a tool like Vim while getting no gains.

In the best case scenario, you are getting closer to the output of the magician you admire, but you’ve just replaced the magician’s “magic” with an api key to a third party tool that, to you, is still magic.

*Think copying only the text in parentheses from 4 different lines and pasting it into exactly the quotes in another 4 lines

**This should be unsurprising, as the video was made by a company that sells one such terminal

[Beware of Unearned Wisdom]

If you see magic, and you want to become the magician that can wield it, it’s not so hard to figure it out—you just need time and effort. That’s all it takes to close the gap between what you can do now and what you want to be able to do.

Just don’t give up.

There are ways to learn more efficiently, but there is no true shortcut.

Trying to get to the magic without effort is sort of like what they say about psychedelic drugs—acid can help enlighten you, but if you need to take another tab every 3 days to maintain your new found “wisdom,” you’re not enlightened, you’re just high.

Live Deeply,