The Miracle of Magic Moments
It’s a miracle that anything good ever gets made. I remember when we were producing Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, we were in the woods all night filming a Warthog racing down a dark forest road getting shot by aliens. It took almost 60 people that night over 12 hours to film a 30 second sequence. There were countless risks, things that went wrong and things that didn’t work. Yet the scene got done. And it was like magic to me.
Groups of us make creative magic, technology magic, relationship magic, operational magic, empathy magic, reconciliation and social magic, every day. I’ve been a part of groups that make that magic a small handful of times in my life and it is amazing. It’s being on stage when the band and audience merges into one. It’s shipping a product that everyone loves and watching trend arrows shoot up and to the right. It’s grappling with that insurmountable challenge, and then realizing one day that your team has a whole new of problems and you forgot about that insurmountable one. It’s a group flow, a satisfying combination of collaboration, creativity and rewards. The desire to experience that magic is what gets me up in the morning.
The magic is fleeting and difficult to create. It’s a momentary alignment of people, motivations, skills, market conditions, discipline and luck. How do you get the right people, motivated in the right way with the right tools, aligned to a real opportunity and customer need, and then have lightning strike, all at the same time?
My answer is to grind it out, work at it intentionally, every day, practicing, viewing it as a skill, not a tool or a plan. Like mindfulness meditation, or running, or playing an instrument, it’s a never-ending practice that will only pay off serendipitously. You never know when the fleeting alchemy of conditions will come together, but you can practice creating them. You can recognize when they are there and lean in. You can recognize when they are not and adapt or move on. That is the core of the operating model I use in work and life every day: practice creating the conditions that support magic moments.
