-Robert A. Heinlein
Doing standup, writing, acting, public speaking, and building a company can be magic. Laymen watching developers use their consoles to perform basic commands can feel like magic. Magic is relative. Driving is magic to children. Understanding what is magic to your audience is key to persuasion.
Commenting on my persuasion piece, a close friend responded:
People are mesmerized by magic tricks because they seem like, well, magic. I used to do magic. I read books when I was a kid. When I see an average magician, it's extremely boring—borderline excruciating. When I see a truly great magician, I think the joy I experience is greater than the joy that others who never did magic have.
I think one of the keys to persuasion is to figure out what is "magic" to your audience. My difficulty recruiting some folks to projects in the past stems from not calibrating to my audience with more intention.
Creation is magic to people, especially outside their field. To a businessperson, what a scientist can do to identify a molecule is magic. To a scientist, a businessman's ability to utilize capital and scale partners around the molecule is a form of magic.
Appreciation
How my friend feels about magic tricks is how I feel about film because I studied story structure. Mid-films with mid-writing are excruciating, while I appreciate top films for how they cleverly hit the story points.
I watch Starcraft games where the commentator is a retired professional who gives detailed analyses. When a player does something incredibly skilled, he says he gets “nerd chills.” It could be one of hundreds of decisions and often multiple actions simultaneously—coordinating a precise attack at the perfect time, building cannons to finish exactly when the enemy army arrives, a well-placed psi-storm, having a siege tank hold fire to target a valuable unit, or microing units to escape with a low health.
Sports have this, too. With a higher level of understanding, you appreciate how difficult maneuvers are and how extreme they compare to the norm. Those moments of extreme skill are what make watching the mundane worth it. People enjoy watching professionals play sports and games to see those moments of mastery.
Rebranding
“I think one of the keys to persuasion is to figure out what is "magic" to your audience.”
This is a great framework. Video content seems magical to most people, and tech can also be magic. That’s what made the Jobs-era Apple products so unique– they “just worked.”
This framework gives credence to Nassim Taleb's renaming of existing concepts and branding them as his own: “Black swan” vs. outlier or tail risk and “anti-fragile” vs. resilient. Rebranding what you do to your audience can be extraordinarily powerful.
(Side note– let’s please rebrand capitalism, as most people don’t know what it is or means anymore. We need another word that better describes capitalism while incorporating natural rights and Judeo-Christian values.)
Magic Level
There are levels of understanding:
Imagine someone who casually plays tennis. They play against the 500th best tennis player. They then play against the 10th best tennis player. Without being told who is who, they’d have no idea who is the better tennis player. The 500th and 10th best both won every point with ease. But if the 10th best played the 500th best, the 10th best would win every game. There’s a huge valley between them. The casual player could never see the difference playing each individually. They’re too far away.
There are also magic levels. To a businessperson who has a few meetings each day, someone who does 15 meetings/day is magical. Your core competency should be next level.
Be so good they can’t ignore you. Whatever you do, make it magic.