I was at a leadership conference with my Entrepreneurs’ Organization group when a magician took the stage. Not a keynote speaker or a strategist or a founder with a turnaround story, just a magician. The room didn’t quite know what to make of it.
He talked briefly about the difference between “how” and “wow”, how we’re wired to explain things rather than experience them. Then he performed a trick.
I won’t describe it, since that would do exactly what he was warning against. What I will say is something happened that shouldn’t have been possible, and for a moment, the room went completely still. Not a polite audience, still. Actually still. The kind of pause that only happens when a group of people are all caught off guard at the same time.
And then, just as quickly, he asked a simple question: how many of you were already thinking about how I did that? Almost every hand went up, mine included. I could feel my mind already trying to reverse-engineer it before I had even fully taken it in. It was a small moment, but it stayed with me.
Because most of us in that room, founders, operators, executives, spend our days living in “how.” How do we solve this? How do we scale it? How do we do it better next time? That instinct has value. It’s behind much of what we’ve built.
And yet sitting there, I started to wonder about the tradeoff.
When every “wow” immediately becomes a “how,” we don’t spend much time actually experiencing things. The win becomes something to analyze. The milestone becomes a debrief. A great conversation becomes something to interpret on the drive home. Even moments that are meant to land get pulled into problem-solving mode before we’ve really felt them. It’s not intentional, it’s just how we’re wired. By the time we notice it, the moment has usually passed.
“Wow” doesn’t scale. It doesn’t optimize anything or move a project forward. It does something else. It creates a pause, just long enough to register what’s actually happening. And more often than not, those are the moments that stay with us.
I’ve been paying more attention to how quickly I move past them. How often I trade the experience for the explanation without even realizing it. Some moments are meant to be figured out, but others are simply meant to be experienced.
The challenge is knowing which is which, and catching yourself before you’ve already turned one into the other.
“Experience, not explanation, is the language of the soul.” – Carl Jung
If you think about your last “wow” moment, did you stay in it, or move straight to “how”? I’d be curious what that looked like for you.
Spend the weekend in the ‘wow’.
-Vijay