What do a building made of glass and an electric street lamp have in common? One thing they have in common is that for the vast majority of human history, either would have been considered to be made of “magic” to most people. In fact, that’s still mostly true today.
How many people alive today actually possess the understanding necessary to explain how either of these two things work in practice, let alone possess the skills necessary to produce them entirely on their own? The answer is: “not many” - and this answer is true of most things. Any economy of scale and/or modern society is nothing more than an extrapolation of this principle: Cooperative collaboration.
Cooperative collaboration is the closest thing to “magic” human beings could ever hope to achieve. It is the force multiplier that can only be created when people of diverse skills and knowledge work together towards a common goal, because let’s face it: all of us are actually pretty stupid.
Okay, “stupid” might not be the most appropriate word, but the reality is that human beings are inherently ignorant to most things. We might learn a little bit about something, but the “Dunning-Kruger effect” has already shown that we tend to dramatically overestimate what it is that we actually know.
Whether we’re talking about a Fortune 100 company, a major league sports team, or something as simple as a fully functioning family unit - all of these things depend on cooperative collaboration in order to be successful. Mothers cannot be fathers, and pitchers cannot be catchers. Not at the same time anyway.
We all have our own unique set of skills and talents that we bring to the table and although we very well might be capable of doing everything on our own, we’d be much more successful if we did things together.
When unique individuals come together and apply their own unique, individual talents and skill sets toward a well defined, agreed upon, common goal - where all parties are equally rewarded in proportion to their own personal investment (ie everyone is “all-in” and success for one is is only achieved through “success for all”) - that is where the realest form of “magic” actually happens.
Be well!