The Nature of Magic
In a 1994 talk given to a business class at the University of Southern California, Charlie Munger made an offhand observation about the nature of magic. Magicians, he said, get you to see “a lot of things happening that aren’t happening and to not see a lot of things happening that are happening.”
Things happening because of things you didn’t see happen—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
An Astonishing Work Of The Imagination
In the novel The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, there’s a scene in which the character Theo takes a cross-country bus ride from Las Vegas to New York. It’s written with such vivid, granular detail that, as one interviewer marveled, “I thought I was on that bus making that bus journey. The visceral quality—it’s just an astonishing work of the imagination.” Not exactly, Tartt replied, pulling back the curtain and revealing how she pulled off the magic trick: “I printed out a bus schedule. I found it online.” The interviewer made a stunned face—really? “Yes,” Tartt said. “I printed out a bus schedule of that exact trip, looked up the names of each stop, and used Google Earth to get a picture of all the towns, and there it was.”
It’s Not A Gift
The tennis journalist Jon Wertheim has been covering the sport throughout Novak Djokovic’s entire career. “Can I tell you what’s one of the hardest things about covering you?” Wertheim said to Djokovic twenty years after he turned pro. Djokovic nodded. “People understand big muscles and speed and grace,” Wertheim says. “Mental strength, which is what I think is your great gift, is much harder to articulate. Can you –,” “I would have to correct you,” Djokovic interrupts. “It’s not a gift…I might appear locked in on the court,” but that’s an illusion. A lot is happening that we don’t see happening: “Trust me, every single match, there’s a storm inside. The biggest battle is always within.” The ability to win that battle match after match—it’s not a gift, Djokovic says: “It’s something that comes with work.”
Making It Look Easy
At a restaurant called Coco Pazzo in New York City, Tom Hanks was eating dinner with his wife, his mother-in-law, and a few others when the maître d’ interrupted: “Excuse me Mr. Hanks. Joe DiMaggio is dining with us tonight and he wondered if you might come by so he could introduce himself.” A lifelong baseball fan, Hanks said, “I leapt up from the table and said, ‘Take me to him.’” Some years earlier, Hanks read in a review of one of his movies, “like Joe DiMaggio in centerfield, Hanks makes it look easy.” There in Coco Pazzo, he told DiMaggio, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, “there has never been a greater compliment that I’ve received than saying that like Joe DiMaggio, I made my job look easy.” “And he said to me, ‘Yeah it looks easy, but’—then he held his hand over his heart—and he said, ‘but it never was in here.’ And I understood exactly what he was saying…Dude, I worked my freaking ass off in order to make it look easy. And this—this I understood.”
A Second And Everything That Came Before It
As the graphic designer Paula Scher has become a master of her craft, she’s experienced an interesting problem. “A lot of clients like to buy process,” she explains. “They think they’re not getting their money’s worth [if] you solve the problem too fast.” This is known as the “Labor Perception Bias”—our tendency to equate the value of something with the amount of visible time spent on it. In 1998, for example, Scher was hired to design a logo for the merger of Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company. In the first meeting, on a napkin, she drew what became the iconic Citi logo. As Scher got up to leave the room, someone from the Citi team asked, How can it be that it’s done in a second? “It’s done in a second and 34 years,” Scher replied. “It’s done in a second and every experience and everything that’s in my head.” It happens because of a lot of things we didn’t see happen. (File next to: What You Create Is A Function Of The Library In Your Head)
The Invisible Manifests The Visible
“When we look at the changes and transformations in other people’s lives,” Robert Greene has said, “we see the visible signs of opportunity and success. But we are grasping at an illusion.” What really allows for dramatic changes is the things we don’t see: “the slow accumulation of knowledge and skills, the incremental improvements in work habits, the ability to withstand criticism. Any change in people’s fortune is merely the visible manifestation of all of the internal, invisible aspects that laid the groundwork for the change in fortune.” Any seemingly magical change, transformation, gift, or work of the imagination—it happens because of a lot of things you didn’t see happen.