Tag: essays

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Menlo Park Serendipity

Two Kinds of Efficiency

The fog hadn’t lifted yet over Sharon Park, the kind of gray that Menlo Park wears many June mornings like it’s embarrassed to admit the sun is up there somewhere, and I was on my usual loop around the pond when I noticed in the distance that the goats were back. And one more thing too. I stopped.

On one side: forty, maybe fifty goats, heads down, working a hillside of dry summer grass like a crew that had done this job a thousand times, because they had. The city brings them in every year around now, before fire season, to eat down the fuel load that nobody wants to mow. White ones, brown ones, a few with horns curling back like something out of a hieroglyph. They don’t look up much. A goat eating is a goat with one job and no curiosity about yours.

On the other side, maybe forty yards past them, through the wire: a Waymo. White, sensor pod spinning slow on the roof like a lighthouse that had wandered inland and gotten confused about its purpose, parked at the curb with nobody in it. Just sitting there. Idling, if a thing with no engine can idle. Waiting on a fare, or waiting on nothing, the way these cars do now, patient in a way that doesn’t read as patience because there’s no face attached to it.

I stood looking for longer than the moment deserved, the way you do when something hands you a thought before you’ve earned it. I remembered I should take a photograph.

Here is what struck me, eventually: both of them were efficient. That’s the word that kept showing up, uninvited. The goats are efficient in the oldest way there is — they convert a problem (too much dry brush, a fire waiting to happen) into a solved problem, using nothing but appetite and stomachs and several thousand years of being bred for exactly this. Nobody programmed a goat. A goat doesn’t have a model. A goat has a memory that goes back to whatever the last hillside tasted like, and an instinct that says eat that one next, and that’s the whole operating system.

The Waymo is efficient in the newest way there is. Lidar instead of appetite. A map instead of memory. It doesn’t get bred for the job, it gets trained for it, mile after simulated mile, until eventually you can park it at a curb in a quiet park and trust it not to do anything stupid. It was, in its way, doing the same thing the goats were doing — converting a hard, slightly dangerous task that used to require a person’s full attention into something that just sort of happens now, off to the side, while everyone gets on with their morning.

I’ve spent a fair amount of my working life around payments systems and fraud models, which is its own quiet machinery — systems built to notice the thing before the thing becomes a problem, the same job the goats were doing on that hillside, eating the grass before it becomes a fire. So maybe that’s why I stood looking longer than I meant to. I recognized the shape of it, even though one side of the fence had hooves and the other side had a sensor array worth more than my first house.

What I didn’t expect was how unbothered each side seemed by the other. The goats did not care that there was an expensive autonomous vehicle parked within sight of their breakfast. The Waymo, for its part, did not care about anything, which I suppose is the whole point of it — it isn’t built to care, only to notice, and the goats had registered exactly zero on whatever sensor suite decides what’s worth noticing. Two systems, separated by maybe forty yards and several thousand years of technological distance, each one going about its business with total indifference to the other’s existence.

I used to think the line between old world and new world would announce itself — some clean morning where you’d wake up and the future would have visibly arrived, banners out, the old thing retired with a gold watch. It doesn’t work that way, it turns out. It works like this: a fence, some goats, a car with nobody driving it, and a guy on his usual walk who happens to notice that both of them are quietly, competently doing a job that fire season requires somebody — or something — to do.

I kept walking. The goats kept eating. The Waymo, as far as I know, was dispatched somewhere, picked up whoever needs a ride, sensor pod turning over the same hill the goats had already half cleared. Two kinds of efficiency, on either side of an electrified wire fence, neither one impressed by the other, both of them right.

I don’t know what to do with that, exactly, except to write it down and remember it. Some mornings my walk gives me exercise. Some mornings it gives me a simple memory I didn’t ask for, standing there looking.

Categories
Writing

The Grain Bin and the Ghost

Richard Rhodes published How to Write in 1995. In it, he offers practical advice about a writer’s reference shelf: keep a dictionary at home, own a one-volume encyclopedia. He mentions, almost in passing, that he just received the OED on CD-ROM as a birthday gift.

That sentence stops you cold in 2026.

Not because it’s quaint — though it is — but because of what it reveals about how a writing life was organized. Rhodes wasn’t describing luxury. He was describing infrastructure. The reference shelf was load-bearing. You kept facts at home the way you kept food in a pantry: because access wasn’t guaranteed, because the library closed, because the gap between not-knowing and knowing could be measured in trips and hours. A writer’s bookshelf was a personal hedge against scarcity.

Think about what it meant that someone’s birthday present was a reference tool. Not a novel. Not a bottle of wine. Twenty volumes of the most authoritative dictionary in the English language, compressed to a disc, given because a writer needed it and couldn’t otherwise have it on their desk. That’s what a writing life cost. That’s what it demanded of the people around you.

That scarcity is gone so completely it’s hard to reconstruct the phenomenology of it.

The bottleneck in Rhodes’s world was access. You either had the fact or you didn’t. Getting it required physical movement — to the shelf, to the library, to someone who knew. The reference book’s value was proximity: it collapsed the distance between the question and the answer. The OED on CD-ROM was remarkable precisely because it put those twenty volumes on your desk. No trip. No waiting. That was the gift.

The bottleneck now is entirely different. Access is solved, trivially, for anyone with a phone. The question isn’t where the facts are. The question is which facts to trust, how they were assembled, whether the source has an agenda, whether the model that synthesized them has introduced drift. We moved from a scarcity problem to a judgment problem, and most of our inherited intellectual habits were built for the former.

But something else happened too, something Rhodes couldn’t have framed because it didn’t exist: the infrastructure became generative. The reference shelf held facts. It didn’t think with you. It didn’t draft alongside you, or push back on your argument, or notice that the claim you just made contradicts something three paragraphs earlier. The CD-ROM OED was static; it waited to be consulted. The tools a writer reaches for now don’t wait. They participate.

This is the structural shift that the grain bin metaphor can’t contain. Rhodes was describing a writer’s relationship to stored knowledge — how you accumulate it, how you keep it close, how you move through it when you need it. That relationship was essentially curatorial. You built a collection. You maintained it. You drew from it.

What’s emerging now is something more like a collaboration with an infrastructure that has opinions. Not always right ones. Not always trustworthy ones. But opinions nonetheless — which means the writer’s job has changed in kind, not just in degree. You’re no longer managing a pantry. You’re managing a working relationship.

Where does it end up? Probably somewhere Rhodes would recognize at the level of the goal — clarity, the right word, the true sentence — and find almost unrecognizable at the level of method. The shelf is still there. But it talks back now. And figuring out what that means — whether to trust it, when to push against it, how to stay the one doing the writing — is the work no one has finished yet. Maybe no one can, while it’s still changing this fast.

Categories
Writing

Still Learning

I never thought about rhythm in my writing. Not once.

A lifetime of writing. More essays than I can count. One book. And the sonic quality of my sentences — the way they moved, or failed to move, through a reader’s mind — simply wasn’t something I considered. I was too busy trying to say something true. I thought that was enough.

What changed was reading differently. Not for pleasure anymore, or not only for pleasure. David Perell conducts long interviews with writers about how they actually work — not what they believe about writing, but what they do, physically, at the desk, in the dark, before anyone sees it. He asks the same structural questions of very different writers and the patterns emerge slowly, the way patterns always emerge: first you see it once and think nothing of it, then you see it again, then you can’t stop seeing it. Rhythm came up constantly. Always in different language. Pacing. Breath. Music. Momentum. Always pointing at the same thing.

Then I found this from Susan Orlean:

My new preoccupation was on the sonic quality of my writing — the rhythm and tone of the sentences. I began reading all my work out loud, listening for places that lagged and dragged, that didn’t sparkle. I knew it was unlikely that anyone else was reading my stories out loud, but I was convinced that you do “hear” writing in your head as you read, and this pushes you (or stalls you) through the piece. I wanted the music — that is, this subconscious tonal effect — to match the subject.

I stopped. Read it again.

Because she was describing something real — something I had been doing wrong for twenty-five years without knowing it was wrong. You don’t know what you can’t hear. That’s the whole problem. The silence where the knowledge should be is itself silent.

I don’t read my work out loud. There’s something strange about it, something that breaks the spell — you stop being a writer and become an actor, hearing your own sentences hanging in the air, too exposed. But I do read and read again, more carefully now, looking for the wobble. Orlean’s point holds regardless of method: you hear writing in your head as you read it, and that hearing either carries you forward or it doesn’t. The ear that matters is the one inside.

George Saunders has a practice he describes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: he reads from the beginning of a piece over and over, and the moment something feels off — a word, a rhythm, a single syllable landing wrong — he stops and fixes it before moving forward. Never skips the trouble spot. Never tells himself he’ll come back. His opening pages accumulate dozens of passes before he ever reaches the end. What he’s really doing, underneath the technique, is training himself to feel the exact microsecond when a reader’s attention would start to drift. To catch the loss before it happens.

That’s not craft instruction. That’s building a new sensitivity where there wasn’t one before.

John McPhee works from the other direction entirely. His famous boxes — index cards, sorted into piles, piles arranged into sequences, nothing drafted until the structure is known — are about architecture before a single word is written. He’s deciding which rooms exist, and in what order, before he furnishes any of them. Where Saunders builds outward from one true sentence, McPhee builds downward from a blueprint.

But they’re asking the same question. McPhee: is this section in the right place? Saunders: is this word in the right place? Both listening for the moment the piece loses its hold on the reader. Both doing triage on something most writers never even examine.

What I’m still learning — slowly, and late — is that rhythm isn’t decoration. It isn’t the thing you tend to after the real work is done. It’s structural. A sentence moving at the wrong speed for what it’s carrying fails the thought itself, not just the ear.

There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. If rhythm is the thing that’s hardest to hear in your own work — if the ear takes years to develop — then maybe the most useful writing tool isn’t a grammar checker. Those are solved. What isn’t solved is the rhythm problem. An editor who listens for the wobble, explains what’s failing and why, and works through the fix with you rather than just patching it. Not a red pen. A teacher.

I’ve been experimenting with exactly that. An AI editor I call Clark. His job isn’t correctness. It’s the sonic quality of prose — the rhythm — the same thing Orlean was describing, the same sensitivity Saunders spent years training. Clark finds what’s working as hard as what isn’t. And when something fails, he explains what the reader’s inner ear is hitting and why. Helpful.

I didn’t know much about rhythm in writing when I was fifty. Didn’t know it at sixty.

I’m not entirely sure I know it now. But I know it more than I did, which might be the only kind of knowing that’s real.

A lifetime of writing. Still learning how to listen.

Categories
Business Storytelling

The Closed Laptop

The conference rooms all look the same after a while. Same long table. Same chairs that cost more than they should. Same window with the same view of the same parking lot baking in the same California sun. You stop seeing them. You develop a kind of practiced receptivity, a professional openness that is also, if you are honest, a professional distance. You have heard the story before. You know where you are in the presentation without looking at the slide number.

Until the day someone sits down across from you and closes their laptop and says: can I just tell you our story?

Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has spent forty years learning to tell the difference between founders who can build and founders who can make you believe. The skill he overweights now, he’ll tell you plainly, isn’t technical. It’s selling. Recruiting, fundraising, convincing customers, inspiring teams. “Actually being able to write code,” he said recently, “is probably not a big deal anymore.” What matters is whether you can cross the distance between your vision and someone else’s imagination and deposit something true and alive on the other side.

Most founders never figure this out. They build the deck instead. They pull the projector cable from the drawer — there is always a drawer, there is always a cable — and the room fills with blue light and bullet points and the comfortable geometry of a prepared presentation, and what never happens is the thing that needed to happen.

But there was this one morning.

He came in with his cofounder in the flat gray light that Silicon Valley gets in February, when the rain has stopped but the sky hasn’t decided what it wants to be. They were early. He set his bag down and sat directly across from me — not at the presenter’s angle, not with one eye already calculating the distance to the screen — directly across, the way you sit with someone you already know, or intend to. Neither of them reached for the cable in the drawer.

He looked at me with the particular steadiness of a person who has decided not to manage the moment.

Can I just tell you our story?

I want to be honest about what happened next, which is that I felt something shift before he said another word. Not a decision exactly. More like the precondition for a decision, the ground tilting slightly in a direction I hadn’t chosen. I was, in some way I couldn’t have defended rationally at the time, already with him. And I knew it, and I knew it was not an entirely reasonable response to a man who had been in the room for less than a minute, and I felt it anyway.

The laptop stayed closed for the next twenty minutes. No transitions. No bullet points. No hockey stick arcing toward a number reverse-engineered from a desired outcome. Just his voice and what he believed and the quality of attention you give a person when there is nothing else in the room to look at.

The deck came later. It was beautiful. By then it didn’t need to be anything except true.

Storytelling is not a skill in the way that financial modeling is a skill. It is older than that by such a margin that the comparison almost doesn’t make sense. What we are really talking about is the oldest technology human beings possess — a person in a room, a voice, an image made of nothing but words and the willingness to believe in them. It was doing its work around fires forty thousand years before the first conference room was built, and it has never once required a projector.

What the great storytellers understand, and what the best founders understand in the same unspoken way, is that a story is not a transfer of information. It is a transfer of inner states. When it works — when it really works — something that existed inside one person gets reconstructed inside another, and the listener emerges changed. Not persuaded. Not informed. Changed. These are different experiences, and only one of them makes a person willing to bet their career on something that doesn’t exist yet.

The deck puts glass between the teller and that possibility. The founder stands at the edge of the blue light pointing at things, and the room evaluates the things, and what never happens is the transfer. Everyone files out having formed opinions about the slides rather than beliefs about the person. Opinions and beliefs are not the same.

Wilson understands this even if he wouldn’t use these words. When he says the skill is selling, what he means underneath the selling is: can this person walk into a room and make other people inhabit their vision? Not convince them. Inhabit. The difference is the difference between reading about a place and being there. One of them changes how you act. The other one you forget on the drive home.

The projector cable is still in the drawer. Someone will pull it out next week, and the room will fill with blue light, and another founder will stand at the edge of it pointing at things, hoping that the right font and the right graph will do the work that only a human being, exposed and without props, can actually do.

It won’t. It never does.

The CEO who closed his laptop had been carrying a story he believed in, and he knew the story was the thing, not the packaging around it. He understood that the oldest container is also the most powerful one. His own voice. A room. Someone willing to listen.

I was ready to work with him before he said another word.

Categories
Storytelling Writing

The Craft in the Work: A Reading Guide to Ten Storytellers

There’s a kind of reading that’s really a form of listening — not to what a writer is saying but to how they’re solving a problem. Every great piece of nonfiction is an argument about structure, and most writers never explain it aloud. The argument is in the choices: where the piece starts, when it digresses, what it leaves out, how it ends. You can enjoy the work without seeing any of this. But once you start seeing it, you can’t stop — and eventually, some of it becomes yours.

This guide is for both kinds of reading. Each writer here is worth your time as a reader. Each one also has something specific and stealable for anyone who writes. I’ve tried to name both.

The ten: John McPhee, Robert Caro, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Joan Didion, David Grann, Sam Anderson, Susan Orlean, Tom Junod, and Wright Thompson. Different registers, different obsessions, different methods. What they share is a commitment to making difficult things feel inevitable — and the discipline to make that look effortless.

They fall into three loose clusters, which might help you find your entry point. Structure builders — McPhee, Caro, Grann — write pieces that feel inevitable because the architecture is invisible but load-bearing. Emotional access — Orlean, Junod, Thompson — get you inside feeling before you know you’re there. Voice and form — Didion, Sullivan, Lewis, Anderson — the sentence, the digression, the explanatory seduction, the essay as genuine inquiry. The clusters overlap, and the best writers in each group are doing all three things at once. But if you’re trying to solve a specific problem in your own writing, the clusters tell you where to look first.

Continue reading “The Craft in the Work: A Reading Guide to Ten Storytellers”
Categories
Books Curiosity Living

Working the Seams

This book highlight popped up in my morning Readwise feed recently:

“Fishermen work seams—seams between slow water and fast, between deep water and shallow, between sunlight and shadow. The eddies around rocks, the bubble lines along banks. That’s where the fish are.”

Neil King wrote it in American Ramble, his account of walking from Washington to New York. He was watching fishermen, not fishing himself, which maybe explains why it reads less like instruction and more like revelation. When you’re the observer, you have room to notice what the practitioner is too busy doing to say.

The word seams is doing something I can’t stop thinking about. A seam is a joining. It’s the place where two different things meet and, in meeting, create a third thing: the edge itself. Not slow water, not fast water, but the turbulent conversation between them. The fish aren’t in the slow water. They aren’t in the fast water. They’re in the argument.

I think most of the interesting things in life happen at seams.

The best conversations aren’t the ones where everyone agrees. They’re the ones where two people with genuinely different orientations are standing at the same edge, looking at the same water. The friction between the views creates something neither would reach alone.

The best writing isn’t the settled opinion, the fully-arrived-at conclusion. It’s the essay in the old sense — the attempt — where you can feel the writer at the seam of what they know and what they’re reaching toward. The bubble line between understanding and confusion. That’s where the reader is, too, if they’re lucky.

I notice this on my own blog sometimes. The posts that feel most alive to me aren’t the ones where I knew what I wanted to say before I started. They’re the ones where I began at a seam — between something I’d always believed and something that recently unsettled it — and wrote my way along the edge, not knowing which bank I’d end up on.

There’s a version of this that applies to attention itself.

I dwell on how I pay attention — when I’m reading, when I’m walking, when I’m in conversation. And I’ve noticed that my attention goes flat in the middle of things. Flat terrain. Constant depth. Unchanging light. I have to work to stay present when nothing is in transition.

But put me at a seam — a moment where the mood in a room is shifting, where a piece of music is about to resolve or refuse to resolve, where someone is on the verge of saying something they’ve been circling for an hour — and I’m completely there. Attention is predatory, maybe. It goes where the tension is.

Which is what the fish are doing, of course. The seam isn’t just a metaphor for where interesting things happen. It’s why interesting things happen there. The fast water sweeps food along; the slow water lets you hold your position; the seam between them is where you can eat without being eaten. The fish are solving a real problem. They’re just also, accidentally, living beautifully.

I wonder sometimes if this is what makes a good editor, or a good friend who reads your drafts. They find the seams — the places where you’ve unconsciously papered over a tension, smoothed the fast water into the slow, given the reader no place to be a fish. “Something’s off here,” they say, and what they mean is: you resolved this too quickly. Stay in the argument longer.

The eddies around rocks, the bubble lines along banks.

I want to be a better noticer of those. Not to resolve them. Just to work them.

Categories
Writing

The Unfinished Note

I’ve been sitting with a Susan Orlean line for a few days now, the way you sit with a splinter you can’t quite locate.

“Stories don’t need a ‘conclusion,’ a flourish of finality. It’s better to leave readers falling forward, tumbling through the piece and beyond it, finishing the tune in their heads.”

What strikes me isn’t the advice — plenty of writing teachers have said something like it — but the verb she chose. Tumbling. Not drifting. Not lingering. Tumbling. There’s a loss of control in that word, a small helpless momentum, the way you take one more step than you expected on a dark staircase and your body has to catch up to itself.

I’ve always been suspicious of endings that arrive wearing their own bow. You can feel them coming, those last paragraphs — the rhythm slows, the sentences get more declarative, the writer seems to straighten up and clear their throat. And then comes the lesson, the restatement, the turn toward uplift or hard-won wisdom. The piece explains what it was about. You close the browser tab and that’s the end of it.

But some pieces don’t end so much as they stop, at the right moment and the right angle, and something in you keeps moving. You find yourself thinking about them in the shower two days later. You’re not remembering the conclusion because there wasn’t one. You’re still inside the piece, finishing the tune, as Orlean says. The writer handed you the melody and walked off mid-phrase.

I think about this with music. Jazz, especially. The best solos don’t resolve — they suggest a resolution and then leave the air charged with it. Miles Davis understood that the note you don’t play is still a note. The silence after the phrase is part of the phrase.

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually written an ending this way. Most of my pieces come in for a landing; I can feel myself starting to circle and descend. Maybe that’s the real lesson in Orlean’s line — not a craft note about structure, but a challenge to trust the reader enough to leave the door ajar. To believe the piece was good enough that they’ll want to keep walking around inside it.

I’m still not sure I do.

Categories
Storytelling Writing

The Nerve of the Opening Line

For years I wrote first paragraphs that explained what I was about to say, which is a little like a joke that begins by describing how funny it is.

Susan Orlean has a better idea. In her book Joyride, she writes that a lede doesn’t need to preview the story or summarize what the rest of the piece will be about. What’s important is that it captivates readers and holds them fast to the page so they keep reading.

The conventional wisdom about ledes is that they exist to tell readers what they’re about to read. The billboard theory of the opening. Here is what this story is. Here is why it matters. Here is what you’ll find if you continue. The lede as table of contents, compressed.

Orlean is saying something stranger and more honest: the lede’s job is not to inform. It’s to hold the reader.

There’s a distinction there worth sitting with.

Informing a reader is a transaction — you transfer content, they receive it. Holding a reader is something else entirely. It’s closer to what a magician does in the first thirty seconds of a performance, or what a stranger does when they say something at a party that makes you turn and face them fully. You haven’t learned anything yet. You’ve just been made to stay.

The ledes that have held me longest tend to have almost nothing to do with the stories they open.

Joan Didion begins “The White Album” with a single sentence — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — that takes the entire essay to even partially fulfill.

Gay Talese opens his Frank Sinatra profile not with Sinatra’s voice or his legend but with a man going silent: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing.”

Tracy Kidder opens The Soul of a New Machine not with computers but with a boat in a storm, Tom West awake for four straight nights while everyone else is seasick, the rest of the crew left wondering what on earth this man does for a living.

None of these ledes summarize. All of them hold.

What they share, I think, is a quality of disturbance. They’ve moved the ground slightly underfoot. Something is tilted.

Didion’s first sentence argues that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and you feel the vertigo in it immediately — wait, is that true? Is that a good thing or a desperate thing?

Talese gives you a man diminished by illness and silence, and everything that follows is measured against that diminishment.

Kidder’s boat goes somewhere that prose about minicomputers wouldn’t, and by the time you’ve crossed that dark water with West, you’re already a different kind of reader than you were on page one.

I think about this when I try to write.

I grew up reading ledes the billboard way — I thought the first paragraph was a promise about what the reader would receive. And sometimes I still write them that way, which is to say I write them first and delete them later, because they’re stage fright disguised as generosity. Here is what I’m about to tell you really means please don’t leave before I find my footing.

The Orlean formulation — captivate, hold, keep reading — shifts the pressure off the writer’s anxiety and onto the reader’s experience. The question is no longer what do I need to tell them? The question is what will make them unable to leave?

That’s a harder question. It requires knowing something about what people can’t resist. Strangeness. Motion. A body in trouble. A door left open. The suggestion that someone knows something you don’t.

The best ledes I’ve ever written didn’t come first. They came after I’d already written the whole piece and finally understood what it was actually about — which turned out not to be the thing I thought it was about at the start. You can’t write the sentence that makes someone stay until you know what you’re asking them to stay for.

The lede isn’t a promise. It’s a wager. You’re betting that the reader will follow disturbance into the dark — and the only way to make that bet is to trust the disturbance yourself first. Most of us don’t. Most of us write the billboard because we’re afraid that if we don’t explain what’s coming, the reader will leave.

But the reader doesn’t leave because they’re confused. They leave because nothing reached out and held them.

The explanation never does that. The strangeness might.

Categories
Creativity Magicians

Forget the Goal, Embrace the “Magician”

Recently I watched David Perell’s conversation with Packy McCormick on YouTube (part of Perell’s excellent How I Write series of interviews).

At one point late in the conversation, Perell asks: “Where do you find to be the most fruitful place to be looking that fuels your writing process?” McCormick tells how he likes to ask people for suggestions of their favorite essays – and he keeps a list of these that he goes back to for inspiration. He says “Some are just magically written. Some take an idea that I’d never thought of before and just go deep on that idea and then talk about the world in a different way.”

Perell then asks “What’s one of those essays?” McCormick then describes “Becoming a Magician“, an essay by Autotranslucence.

Perell responds immediately “I love that piece…it’s almost like ethereal…I know exactly what you’re talking about where these people who are just so unbelievably good at a certain thing.”

Perell continues “the way she defines a magician is somebody who’s different than you, not in quantity but in kind. So somebody where if you walked along that path, the path that you think that they’re on and you walked a trillion miles, you would never get to where they are because there’s something that they know that they’re doing that you fundamentally cannot comprehend. And your attraction to them is the puzzle to try to figure out, what is it that they’re doing?”

Obviously, given such high recommendations from Packy and David I was intrigued to read this particular essay – one that I’d never heard of before. So I did…and it’s a wonderful essay!

The most impactful part of the essay describes how “you can’t keep your gaze tightly fixed on the outcome you want because it will lock your mind onto the strategies you currently have for meeting them, which by definition probably don’t work (otherwise you would have succeeded already and you wouldn’t need to use the strategy).”

Almost the opposite of our usual thinking: “I’ve got a plan and I’m sticking to it!”

The essay closes with this advice: “Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now). Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.”

It’s true, isn’t it? We often get bogged down in the practicalities of the present, failing to truly engage in “blue sky” thinking. This imaginative, unrestricted approach to problem-solving and goal setting often gets sidelined by our limited self-knowledge and, perhaps more surprisingly, by limiting beliefs about our age when you’re a senior citizen like me! We might tell ourselves that “it’s too late” to pursue a new dream or that certain ambitions are simply not for “people like us” at this stage in life.

But as the essay reminds us, the path to becoming a “magician” may lie in letting go of these very limitations. While I’m not sure I possess the true magic touch myself, I very much enjoy the serendipity of being close to those who do, learning from their perspectives and expanding my own horizons. Challenge assumptions, embrace the unknown, and dare to dream big, regardless of the number on a birth certificate. Remember, the magic is not in achieving a specific outcome, but in the transformative journey of becoming the “magician” you envision yourself to be. And who knows, you might just surprise yourself along the way and look forward to it!