From time to time, I enjoy pulling a rabbit out of my hat.

Nobody ever asks for a magic show. Maybe kids do, but most likely it’s because they were introduced to magic or reminded of magic just five minutes prior. They’re never like “I’m bored, do a magic trick”. Likewise, your boss will never ask, even if a magician just left their office.

A customer might ask. Your customer might be like, “hey, I see that magician as your competitor, how come your business doesn’t provide us magic of equal quality?”. This is where you have to explain to them that plumbing or whatever you sell them, has no magic tricks included in the sale.

This is probably starting to read like a Seth Godin book so I’ll stop with this metaphor business and get to the point.

I have a vast catalog of skills that have nothing to do with the work or products I sell. I developed these skills for the sake of doing the thing, not because anybody ever offered to pay me. Even then, I have occasionally been paid directly for them incidentally. Chances are, I delivered the work for free, to get better at doing the work. If I was paid, somebody insisted.

When you happen to have a skill that nobody knows you have, and you deploy it when nobody requests that specific solution because they didn’t even know it was an option, yet it turns out to be the exact thing needed.

That is a magic trick.

Magic tricks are fun with friends too. Knowing how to gain access to a restricted or unique place, participate in secret events, share a new hobby or talent. Even people who think they know you don’t know everything about you. Surprise them from time to time.

What I really want to get at is this. There is no point to me writing in this blog. Nobody is paying me, nobody is reading it. Nobody is commenting. Why am I here doing this?

I’m doing it for the same reason I’m learning guitar, or learned improvisational comedy and stand up comedy, or learned to kayak or sail a boat. The same reason I know how to work spreadsheets and make films and audio production and pyrotechnics and electrical mechanical troubleshooting. Ok that last one is strictly work related.

The thing I’ve learned about learning random things is this. It rounds itself out. Every skill you learn reinforces the other skills. It gives you perspective. Disciplines transfer in unique ways, processes cross contaminate each other. You get good at knowing the path and process for tackling a new challenge you have never encountered.

You reduce complacency because you can look at anything with a dozen or more lenses than other observers.

You quickly solve a problem that people didn’t know they had, with a resolution nobody expected, with skills nobody knew you had. It’s fucking magic.

The older I get, the more tools I have, the more I experience this feeling and I deeply enjoy it.

Will writing a blog allow me to crush a canary without actually crushing a canary? I have no idea, but it could. I guarantee much more of my success has been from the random things I’ve needlessly learned, than from any knowledge I intentionally set out to benefit from.

Conversely, things I’ve learned from working a job, have transferred beneficial skills to my personal life. I worked the line at Taco Bell at 16, and I can still tightly wrap a burrito at home whenever the need arises.  The key is, those skills are expected at your job, at home when you deploy work skills, you’re a magician.

The skills you learn elsewhere in life are what you can bring to the table at work or school which will allow you to crush your competition and your competitors. The more random the skills, the more surprise they will deliver.

Do you recall Arthur C Clarke’s three laws? (Adages if you’re modest than he was)

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Here they are as lifted from Wikipedia. All three are worth pondering. Like most people, I only think about the third regularly.

I am a human being, a machine of flesh and blood, with an evolved technology with malleable software in the form of a brain. Learning new things upgrades the software which expands the functions of my body’s technology.

Since it is unlikely, and also because I don’t have the confidence to learn things better than everyone else, (I’m no genius after all). I follow a strategy of learning the things that most other people just can’t be bothered to learn. The obscurity of the skill, highlights the value, even if infrequently useful.

So I’m not going to be able to develop “advanced technology” but because I’m focusing on skills most people don’t have, I can fake it with basic skills in obscure knowledge.

I couldn’t think of a skill more obscure than actual magic. I personally have been highly interested in it all my life. I even have half a dozen books on magic tricks and deception yet I’ve never read them. I simply can’t be bothered. I’m too busy or whatever.

Someday, I’ll likely pick up those books and learn some deception along with an actual magic trick or two, and really satisfy this craving to amaze and bewilder crowds.

In the meantime, I’m going to focus on what’s “indistinguishable” since it’s the lighter lift.