I work for Sebastian Thurn, he is the most inspirational leader I've ever worked with. And he asked us to create magic. Here’s what I think of magic:
The following story appears in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. One of my favorite books of all time.
The Miracle of the Candy Wrapper
There was once a man known for a singular, impossible trick. He would sit at a café or a dinner table and ask a stranger for a piece of candy, the kind that comes in a generic, factory-sealed plastic wrapper. He would hold the candy in his palm, blow on it, and ask the stranger to open it.
When the stranger tore the seal, they would find that the candy inside didn't match the wrapper. If it was a lemon candy wrapper, the candy inside was cherry. Or, even more impossibly, the candy would have a message printed on it that addressed the stranger by name.
The seal was industrial, the plastic was tight, and there were no signs of tampering. The witnesses were stunned. They looked for trapdoors, hidden sleeves, or psychological "forces." Finding none, they concluded it was magic.
The Reality
The "magician" was not a magician in the traditional sense; he was a man with an almost pathological level of patience. He hadn't used sleight of hand. Instead, the night before, he had bought three hundred bags of that specific candy.
He spent ten grueling hours under a high-powered magnifying glass with a surgical scalpel and a specialized heat-sealing tool. He meticulously:
- Steamed open the factory seals of hundreds of wrappers.
- Swapped the candies or inserted the custom-printed ones.
- Resealed the plastic using a microscopic application of industrial glue and heat so that the "crimp" of the plastic matched the factory's machine perfectly.
Magic is simply the result of someone spending more time on a detail than any sane person would find reasonable.