what really moves and stirs us is accomplishment, that moment of mastery when suddenly we feel that something profoundly difficult, tenaciously thorny, has given way, and we are now the Master of It, instead of us being mastered by it.

If magic is just magicians doing card tricks to impress other magicians—I’m not interested in that anymore. I don’t want magic that looks real. What I want are real things that feel like magic.”

We are not limited by our limitations. Again and again in these stories, we’ll see those constraints and limitations, far from crippling us, are the source and the goad and the ground of the mastery we seek.

At the heart of the Too Perfect theory is the insight that magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world. Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects. In every art, the Too Perfect theory helps explain why people are more convinced b

three themes seem to spiral out, educating me as they emerged. First, again, that the flow is always a function of fragments, fluid sequences are made of small steps. Separate, discrete actions learned by effort and then put together give not just the illusion of unity but the fact of mastery.

We make ourselves in our father’s sunlight but also in his shadow: what he beams down we bend away from.

mastery happens small step by small step and that the mystery, more often than not, is that of a kind of life-enhancing equivalent of the illusion called “persistence of motion” when we watch a movie or cartoon. “Flow” is the shorthand term that’s been popularized for the feeling of the real work as it seeps through our neurons and veins, and, thou

it is, I’ve come to believe, the most sustaining feeling. I know how to do this, and this is the thing I know how to do.

therein lies what I think of now as the asymmetry of mastery: we overrate masters and underrate mastery.