Understand this magic trick and you'll be more effective

The Daily Drip

"Pick a card, any card.

Now remember that card and don't tell me what it is.

You can show your friends so they can remember it, too.

Okay, now put that card back into the deck. Anywhere in the deck.

Great, now I'm going to ask you to tap the top of the deck of cards three times. When you do, your card will magically surface to the top of the deck and you and your friends will be amazed.

Go ahead, tap the deck three times.

Fantastic.

Is this your card?"

Laughter and surprise ensue.

For a brief moment, magic is real and belief is suspended.

Immediately after the magic trick, we begin to wonder, what really happened? Was it a trick deck? Were there multiple cards just like mine? How did this happen?

The answer is in the other hand.

While you were placing your card anywhere in the deck, what you didn't see was that the magician cued you to place that card in a very specific location. When you did, he slipped the card out right from under your nose with one hand while he was creating a visual distraction with the other.

Your card immediately went to the top of the deck because the magician palmed your card and put it there before you could notice. And there was your card.

What's interesting about this is the real work of the "magic" is done by two different hands.

The action hand and the distraction hand.

There's the hand that gets the attention and the hand that does the dirty, unsexy work of making the trick happen.

I think this is parallel to lots of different types of work. There's the work you'll do that gets noticed and then there's the work that won't get noticed, but its still work you have to do to make the work useful or effective.

What do you feel like people notice about your work?

What do you feel is essential to your work, but that no one notices?

Perfecting the second type of work is how sleight of hand "tricks" become real-life magic.