trick tea volunteer one willing card embrace

Embrace the Grind# Embrace the GrindThere’s this card trick I saw that I still think about all the time. It’s asimple presentation (which I’ve further simplified here for clarity): avolunteer chooses a card and seals the card in an envelope. Then, the magicianinvites the volunteer to choose some tea. There are dozens of boxes of tea,all sealed in plastic. The volunteer chooses one, rips the plastic, andchooses one of the sealed packets containing the tea bags. When the volunteerrips open the packet … inside is their card.⚠️ If you don’t want to know how the trick is done, stop reading now.The secret is mundane, but to me it’s thrilling. The card choice is a force.But choice from those dozens of boxes of tea really is a free choice, and thechoice of tea bag within that box is also a free choice. There’s no sleight-of-hand: the magician doesn’t touch the tea boxes or the teabag that thevolunteer chooses. The card really is inside of that sealed tea packet.The trick is all in the preparation. Before the trick, the magician buysdozens of boxes of tea, opens every single one, unwraps each tea packet. Putsa Three of Clubs into each packet. Reseals the packet. Puts the packets backin the box. Re-seals each box. And repeats this hundreds of times. This takeshours — days, even.The only “trick” is that this preparation seems so boring, so impossiblytedious, that when we see the effect we can’t imagine that anyone would dosomething so tedious just for this simple effect.Teller writes about this in an article about the seven secrets of magic:> You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice> than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My> partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on> the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We> hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches> (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught> us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we> built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials> cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking> the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you,> probably. But not to magicians.I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success.There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something soterrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.We’re an industry obsessed with automation, with streamlining, withefficiency. One of the foundational texts of our engineering culture, LarryWall’s virtues of the programmer, includes laziness:> Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall> energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other> people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to> answer so many questions about it.I don’t disagree: being able to offload repetitive tasks to a program is oneof the best things about knowing how to code. However, sometimes problemscan’t be solved by automation. If you’re willing to embrace the grind you’lllook like a magician.For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning inbugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing wastagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issuesto tackle. They were stuck essentially pulling bugs at random, but it wasnever clear if that issue was important.. New bug reports couldn’t be triagedeffectively because finding duplicates was nearly impossible. So the openticket count continued to climb. The team had been stalled for months. I wastasked with solving the problem: get the team unstuck, get reverse the trendin the open ticket count, come up with a way to eventually drive it down tozero.So I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did thework. I printed out all the issues – one page of paper for each issue. I readeach page. I took over a huge room and started making piles on the floor. Iwrote tags on sticky notes and stuck them to piles. I shuffled pages from onestack to another. I wrote ticket numbers on whiteboards in long columns; Iimagined I was Ben Affleck in The Accountant. I spent almost three weeks inthat room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized,and prioritized.The trend reversed immediately after that: we were able to close severalhundred tickets immediately as duplicates, and triaging new issues now tookminutes instead of a day. It took I think a year or more to drive the count tozero, but it was all fairly smooth sailing. People said I did the impossible,but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had beenwilling to do it.Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation anda fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’rewilling to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.