I have always been fascinated by the weird ones who aren’t following the traditional rules and, by doing so, have found a way to achieve outcomes that seemed impossible. Almost as if they were able to harness magic. These people saw something most everyone else failed to see. Maybe it allowed them clarity in what others saw as chaos and randomness. Or they understood subtle patterns which evaded everyone else. Or they figured out ways to move the more fundamental levers under the surface controls everyone else sees. Or operate on some other collection of insights that allow them to create magical outcomes consistently and predictably. While I'm fascinated by these weird magicians, they also surfaced a couple of annoying problems for me. First, the magicians were hard to find, which meant that the vast majority of people were suffering from an utterly suboptimal approach to achieving their outcomes. Sometimes it is because the magician was great at creating magic but terrible at sales and marketing. Other times it is because the magician was unconsciously competent: they can do amazing things but have no idea how they do what they do or how to train anyone else to do it. Regardless of the reasons, the vast majority of weird magicians only dabble at the edges, unable to drive even a tiny fraction of the positive impact they could have on the world. The second annoying problem that troubled me is that magicians are typically amazing at shifting a fundamental root cause in a very specific area but haven't connected their brilliance with the brilliance of other weird magicians in adjacent areas—they are lone wolfs. They each solve a fascinating piece of the puzzle, but all of the other fascinating pieces of the puzzle are scattered and disconnected. In retrospect, I realized that I had been uncovering, collecting, and connecting these weird magicians. In doing so, I've been able to help them turn their magic into apprentice-able systems that allow others to achieve similar outcomes, so it was no longer just trapped in the creator’s head, and their insights could be applied by regular people to solve what previously seemed like impossible challenges. Just as importantly, my engineering background has helped bring insight into which combinations of magicians’ approaches would drive the most favorable outcomes for a given situation and how to combine them most effectively. So if you’ve run across a weird magician, I would love to meet them. And if there is an impossible problem, I'm always fascinated to hear about it.