You can be more than a label, or category. In fact, the breadth of your knowledge and experience is your superpower in whatever field you work.

Being a magician made me a better technologist, and my experience in the tech world made me a better magician.

As Richard Hamming put it:

“There is an essential unity to all knowledge…”

How does magic make me a better technologist? The short answer is Magic is about doing the impossible. It turns out spending 30 years engineering impossibility has left me with a wealth of mental models and cognitive tools that make me a more effective problem solver.

Beyond that I have developed unique communication and presentation skills which prepared me to interface with the business and allowed me to move into positions of greater influence.

Sales skills honed from decades of selling myself and my shows have enabled more ideas to go from my head to my teams to my organizations. Psychological skills from a deep study and practice of mentalism made me a more empathetic and effective leader.

The list goes on and on. We all have our secret superpowers and the first step to leveraging them is de-compartmentalizing ourselves and accepting the value of breadth and range.

Advancements in AI are bringing existential dread to narrow specialists. We are in a new age where our value is predicated on everything we bring to the table, not just narrow knowledge. Be the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts because, as Robert Heinlein once said, “Specialization is for insects.”

This is the essence of our humanity and a value proposition that cannot yet be replaced. Context is everything, how many contexts do you span? (Hint: more than you think!)

The full Heinlein quote is:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Embrace your whole self in 2025!