When I mention magic, what do you think of? A lot of people visualize a kid's birthday, party tricks, or even Val Valentino revealing how tricks are done, but what a lot of people don't know is the preparation that goes into a simple act of magic. A lot of those techniques for preparation and presentation can be reused in many other fields. Today, I'll tell you about five concepts from the world of magic that I use on a daily basis working in IT.

Val Valentino, known as Mister M in Brazil.

1. Make storytelling your bff

I have a deck of cards in hand.

I show you the deck of cards and ask you to pick one.

You pick the Queen of ❤️.

I count from 1 to 10 out loud.

I tell that you picked the Queen of ❤️.

YOU are not impressed. And that makes sense. I didn't show you the struggle to find what your card was, there was no excitement, there was no build-up. It is like I'm telling you a joke and jumping straight to the punch line. It's not funny.

But imagine...

I have a deck of cards in hand.

I show you the deck of cards and ask you to pick one.

You pick the Queen of ❤️.

I emphasize that you chose this card of your own free will, that I couldn't have forced it on you, that now this card is connected to you.

I mix the deck of cards. Shuffle. I put on a little show.

I give you the deck of cards to hold. I start asking questions about the card you chose, making guesses about the color, if it was a numbered or face card, and I get close. hmmm it's maybe a Jack, Queen or King, but I'm not sure.

I'm not sure what your card is, but I must have a guess. You've been holding the deck this whole time, so I tell you to reveal the top card in the deck, and slowly you reveal it is the Queen of ❤️.

Now, you are impressed.

Storytelling goes beyond telling a story

Understanding who you are talking to is just as important as what you are going to say. I remember the first time I tried to show a card trick to a baby. Yes, a baby! It was a color change, but the baby didn't understand and that makes a lot of sense! So I needed to change my magic act and the story really quickly to suit the baby's sensibilities. (I think the baby mocked me a little bit for trying to show him the first trick).

A Baby, but not the one that mocked my magic trick.

Here are some other examples of understanding/interacting with your audience:

• You need to understand who is your audience and how you can connect with them. Are you presenting your new feature to a PM, manager, designer? How can they understand and visualize what you are talking about?

• Include your audience in the story. Ask a person in the audience for his/her name, later in your presentation, you can use that person's name to bring attention to what you are going to talk about. "Now, John, imagine that you are going to add this new feature to X, Y and Z". At this point, John and the people around him will bring their attention back towards you.

• Add emotion to your speaking. Don't just be there talking about the implementations you did this week. Show them that you are excited about this new bug you solved, and the benefits of what you did. Really care and people will also care about you and your ideas.

Structure to apply to your presentations

Simon Sinek has a marvelous and simple model called Golden Circle that you can apply to any presentation, pitch or to anything that tells a story.

Basically, it focuses on you showing the purpose of what you have done first and from that you untangle the hows and whats. As an example, it's your turn on a daily meeting and you are going to explain the bug you solved yesterday. It could go like this:

• Why: The task I was in charge of yesterday was affecting 10% of our users who couldn't log in because the button wasn't showing.
• How: I used our debug logs to find which component was throwing those errors.
• What: I created a pull request explaining where the problem was happening and how we can prevent from that happening again.

You can try that on your next hackathon, workshop, weekly or even in a 1:1 with your manager.

2. Fail fast

There is a saying in the magic world: The first time is magic, the second time is learning. If you show a trick to a person the second time, the probability of them figuring it out is really high. That's why we don't repeat our tricks for the same audience, and always have a follow-up prepared.

Magic is a skill that depends on you showing it to someone else. The chances of it going wrong are pretty high, so why not fail as fast as possible? Don't give a chance to unluckiness.

The more you present, prepare and train, the better you get at performing your show. We can't be afraid of failure. That same thought applies to working on IT.

You don't want to fail, but you know that someday it will happen because that's the gist of the job. The important thing is what do you do after the failure happens: Document why it happened! Do you need to update your processes? How can you solve it? How can you solve it long-term?

If a trick goes wrong, most of the time I say: Well, but imagine if that worked, it would be awesome huh?, most of the time it works because I always have my backup trick prepared to show, and they will soon forget about the failure.

Magician's choice

Some magic tricks are rigged, you don't have a choice on them, but what makes the trick beautiful is that you believe you have. We call this technique magician's choice. There are a lot of ways of doing it: card forcing, using gimmicks, taking advantage of human responses, and others.

What is critical to Magician's choice is to be in a controlled environment. You know what is going to happen because you've prepared everything beforehand. Same as when you are showing an in-development program, you know what is working and what is buggy.

If I'm going to show a new page for a client/user, I won't show a non-tested page that is currently in development. It really comes down to knowing what you want to show and impact them with.

3. Make it pretty

If I'm showing a magic trick I want people to have their best time. We, humans, are fascinated by visual shows, tactile artifacts and everything that excite us at least a little bit. In a card trick, even with a simple one, you can add a false shuffle, card fans, color changes and other visual effects.

Woman blowing sparkles in the air. Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash.

Presenting something in its best form shows that you cared about how it was going to be delivered, and makes you think about the experience you will be giving to other people. It is not only about visuals but about the content also. Structured content that is easier to follow, from the perspective of your audience, is something really difficult to achieve, but when done well can yield great results.

You can transpose that thinking when working on your digital product. Maybe it's easier to understand how making something pretty fits in front-end development, but it goes further than what the user can see on a screen: design patterns in the code, infrastructure models, organized pull requests and even presentations you give to your team.

I'm not a designer, but for those who are into front-end development, maybe you should take a look at some inspirations before submitting your next idea. Here are some links that might be helpful: daily ui inspirations, design resources for developers.

4. Learn to be shameless

When I started performing magic at my high school I didn't know what I was doing and why I was doing it, but one thing that I learned right away was that I couldn't afford to be shy when performing.

Even if you are not a really confident public speaker, fake it that you are one and when you least expect you are performing as one. With practice, you start to find your speaker persona, the jokes that work and what people most enjoy in your shows. You could start to learn that in every presentation that you do in your job, pitching a new business or in an informal conversation.

5. It will go wrong, be prepared

One of the things about magic is that it relies on many things that you can't control. Maybe you made a technical mistake, maybe the stars didn't align that day and you forgot to bring the deck of cards to the party, maybe someone in the audience has already seen that trick and will reveal it out loud without regard to everyone else.

It is difficult to be prepared for every mistake that can happen, mainly because most of them we haven't experienced yet. The only certainty we have is that someday a trick will go wrong, but what matters is what we do next. You must have a plan B. I literally have a backup trick in my wallet, that I can use in any situation.

It is difficult to have a backup trick when we are talking about development, but I have gone through some experiences that could have been avoided. An example is when I was giving an elevator pitch and my computer just froze. It was a timed pitch, so I had to continue without the slides. Fortunately, my friends were able to fix it right before the end, but if we had another computer with the slides loaded it would've been easier. This backup plan could also apply when we don't upload a new version of the code to the version control server.

It will also go right

A few years ago, I didn't know how to accept compliments. I just nodded and smile. It was a strange feeling to have someone acknowledging your effort on the trick you spend hours training. I was only focused on getting better from my own mistakes that I forgot to enjoy the big and little moments of what some would say success.

What should we do captain? Just smile and wave boys. Photo by Brian McMahon on Unsplash.

I found that it is important to have a routine of personal gratitude and expressing it when you feel you have the chance. Maybe it is just a 5 minutes reflection on your day, or it is an active type of gratitude. Appreciating the trick you performed with the people in the audience feels like a big present that both of you just witnessed and shared in a small fraction of time, but that it is going to be in your minds for a long time.

When someone in your team learns something new, or shares knowledge between their peers, and maybe the most important of all when there is a successful launch: express your content and gratitude towards everyone that help achieve it. These little moments help build a team belonging feeling.

For me, magic is a very personal skill. It is my go-to hobby. It is my ice breaker in conversations, both personal and professional. It is a memory of a younger me in high school. Sometimes you can really only connect the dots and see something come together after putting some effort into it. Reading a new article every week could be it. This is the main idea of Serenpit: read things that you never thought of connecting and create new ideas.