Indistinguishable from magic
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke
Over the last few years, I’ve coached more than fifty people, many of them curious generalists, creative leaders, and multipassionate folks trying to make sense of the many threads in their lives.
What’s striking, once you step back a little, isn’t just how different they are, or how original their work is, or even how intensely they care about solving problems that matter, from climate justice, to agency in the age of acceleration, to building a new kind of networked, commons-based journalism.
All of that is true, but the thing that consistently resurfaces is that they know they’re good at what they do, but they can’t explain why.
Ask them how they reached a particular conclusion, how they cracked that strategy or reframed the question or pulled clarity out of a mess no one else could untangle and nine times out of ten, they’ll hesitate, shrug, and say, I dunno… it just made sense. 🤷🏻♀️
Which is lovely, and modest, and entirely understandable (especially if you’re British) but it’s also not quite right. Because these aren’t wild guesses or lucky leaps. They’re not magic.
What I’ve started to see, over hundreds of hours and Zoom calls and voice notes and Notion docs, is that nearly every one of these people is using some kind of high-functioning, highly trained cognitive pattern they don’t have the language to explain.
And that’s a bit of a problem, because if you can’t name it, you can’t develop it, and if you can’t name it, you can’t teach it. Other people then don’t know what they’re looking at, they just see something intuitive and slightly mysterious, and they either trust it or they don’t and - as a result - the value that these people bring gets overlooked.
So let’s name it.
The thing I see time and again is that the best problem-solvers, especially the multipassionate, non-linear, generalist ones, are using three core mental processes, often unconsciously:
- Pattern recognition: the ability to spot familiar structures in unfamiliar situations, to draw on stored experience and make connections others don’t see.
- Systems thinking: the ability to see loops, tensions, relationships, to understand that cause and effect are rarely linear, and that most problems don’t have clean edges.
- Abductive reasoning: the ability to make the best possible guess based on incomplete data, to fill in gaps with plausible logic that feels like intuition but isn’t.
These three processes show up time and again, in different people, different fields, solving different kinds of problems, but always with the same quiet power.
So I thought I'd make a short video about them that talks about how to recognise, develop, and teach these skills, whether you’re a coach, a team lead, a solo creator, or just someone trying to make your thinking visible.
Because, for me, whether we’re talking about ChatGPT 5.1 or your brain, Arthur C. Clarke was 100% right. What looks like magic is usually just advanced technology, misunderstood.
But once you can see what your brain is really doing, you can make it visible, transferable, and trusted by others and, crucially, yourself.
Have a great day,
Adam