Humans didn’t evolve to memorize, we evolved to predict.
We process predictions up to 30 times faster than memories because evolution wired us to think ahead, not behind.
For 300,000 years, survival meant anticipating where the predator would strike, which seasons would bring drought, when rival tribes would attack. The humans who could predict the future lived. The ones stuck remembering the past became fossils.
Today, the predator is the market. It doesn’t pay you for what you remember. It pays you for what you can predict.
This is why fortune tellers, prophets, and oracles have commanded attention for millennia. We once paid shamans to read bones; today we pay quants to read markets. Prediction meant survival then. It means power now.
The Brainwashed Memorize. Legends Predict.
School makes you spend high cognitive energy on low-leverage tasks (memorizing historical dates, roman numerals and so on.). This leaves you with no energy to spend on the high-leverage work: seeing patterns and creating new explanations.
Education itself is not worthless: knowing what 9 means, understanding historical context, building vocabulary, these are the raw materials. But school stopped there.
School gave you ingredients without teaching you to cook.
School trained you to regurgitate answers, not to invent explanations. Explanatory knowledge is knowing why empires collapse, not the date they did.
Like survival, magic is also about prediction.
David Blaine didn’t survive 17 minutes underwater by luck: he studied physiology, trained lungs, adapted systems. That’s the secret: magicians master invisible systems. Mathematicians do the same: coders see algorithms, designers see proportions, traders see market rhythms. Everyone else sees chaos.
Magic equals mastery of systems. Once you understand the patterns, you bend reality in ways that seem impossible to outsiders.
The Magic of Prediction
“…We all know it’s not magic. It’s the opposite of magic. It’s grinding, focused work, it’s sitting on their bed for weeks, months at a time, working slip cuts, perfecting the Elmsley Count... so that the audience never sees where the cards really are.
No. It’s not magic. But when the effect is presented, it is so compelling that it looks like it is.” —Taylor Mason, Billions
Everyone wants shortcuts. Memory hacks, productivity gimmicks, “learn faster” systems sold by gurus. They’re optimizing for the wrong game.
The real edge isn’t learning faster; it’s thinking faster.
Here’s how you develop the mental superpower that matters:
1. Spot the Pattern (The Invisible Thread)
Chaos is an illusion. Structure is everywhere.
Look at this sequence: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25...
Most people see randomness. You should see perfect squares instantly. More importantly, you should start recognizing that same pattern in growth curves, engagement metrics, compound interest, population dynamics, market bubbles.
This is the invisible thread connecting everything.
“What is repeating here?”
Your brain is already doing this unconsciously, it’s generating predictions about what comes next in every conversation, every email, every market movement. The question is whether you’re training it to spot the right patterns.
Practice everywhere.
When you scroll twitter, ask what makes posts go viral.
Study successful people, find the patterns in their decisions.
The pattern is always there. Most people just don’t know how to look.
Master this, and you stop reacting to the world. You start anticipating it.
2. Compress the Complexity (The Sleight of Hand)
Intelligence compresses information.
Schools demand the opposite: Make it longer, explain every step, “Not less than 3000 words”,
But true insight unifies knowledge.
You can know everything.
Not with your plan to “memorise everything”, but by understanding high-level knowledge that allow you to build up any other knowledge you need.
You don’t need to memorise morse code, roman numerals or RegEx, you can deduce them from first principles, this makes it okay to ignore petty stuff.
The golden mean of knowledge is first principles.
E=mc² compresses an important property of the cosmos into something you can write on a napkin.
Here’s a concrete example: squaring numbers ending in 5.
Calculate 15², 25², 35², 45² manually. Look at the answers: 225, 625, 1225, 2025.
The invisible thread: every answer ends in 25. The digits before it are always the first digit multiplied by the next consecutive integer (1×2, 2×3, 3×4, 4×5).
The compression: Take the first digit N, multiply by N+1, append 25. Done.
Now you can calculate 75² instantly: 7×8=56, append 25. Answer: 5625.
What took five steps now takes one. This is what your brain craves: the biological search for efficiency.
That struggle you feel during rote calculation is entropy, your nervous system screaming you’re running high-cost, low-leverage code. The dopamine hit when you see the pattern is payment for collapsing entropy to zero. Life isn’t meant to be difficult. It’s meant to be leveraged. Spend energy once to create the one-step explanation, then walk through it infinitely.
When you compress complexity into clean mental models, you move 10 times faster than peers drowning in information.
Magicians hide years of complex preparation behind one fluid motion. You need to do the same with knowledge.
3. Predict the Outcome (The Prestige)
Pattern recognition and compression are powerful, but by themselves, they’re only tricks of memory. The real leap is turning those patterns into explanations. Explanations let you see why events unfold, not just that they repeat.
Prediction isn’t fortune-telling. It’s the natural side effect of good theories. A theory explains why something happens, which means you can anticipate how it will happen again, until criticism or new evidence refines your model.
Take markets. Most people watch price charts like tea leaves. But the few who thrive don’t just memorize patterns, they explain them. They ask: Why does this adoption curve bend here? Why do crowds behave this way? What mechanism drives the hype cycle? Once you grasp the underlying process, you can place bets others think are impossible.
This is why prediction works: not because you’re rolling dice with better luck, but because your explanations dig closer to reality. You don’t need certainty, only theories strong enough to survive criticism, humble enough to evolve, and precise enough to guide action.
When your explanations consistently out-predict chance, people ask the magic question: “How did you know?”
4. Create the Future (The Grand Illusion)
The ultimate prediction is creation.
Pattern recognition is the input. Creativity is the output.
Once you can see patterns others miss, you get the real superpower: combinatorial creativity. You take a pattern from one domain and apply it somewhere no one else has looked.
Steve Jobs didn’t run focus groups asking if people wanted a thousand songs in their pocket. He recognized the pattern of human desire meeting miniaturized tech, and built the thing that made his prediction inevitable.
This is the grand illusion: becoming the magician who doesn’t just perform tricks, but designs the entire reality others live in.
Use mathematical thinking to build tomorrow’s solutions today. Write content that anticipates conversations. Code answers to problems people don’t know they have yet.
Stop shuffling cards the world deals. Start designing your own deck.
Memorization Makes You Cheap
The moment a skill becomes teachable, it becomes replaceable.
If someone can teach you a skill, they can teach someone else. That means your expertise is a commodity, either another person or AI can do it. When the same knowledge is mass-produced across millions, it stops being leverage. It becomes a race to the bottom.
You study engineering. You charge $10,000 for a project. Someone hungrier and equally skilled undercuts you at $2,000. Then someone else does it for $500. Then AI does it for free.
You’re spending high mental energy to memorize and execute what machines can replicate at zero cost. Your value approaches nothing.
AI is the perfect memorizer. It stores information at infinite scale and executes known patterns faster than you can think. Every teachable skill, every memorized formula, every linear process, is one computation away from obsolescence.
Your only edge is what AI cannot do: the wrenching correction of prediction error.
AI replicates patterns brilliantly. It memorizes, compresses, even predicts within known domains. But when it’s wrong, it doesn’t try to explain why. It doesn’t invent a new theory or test a bold conjecture. It just adjusts weights. Humans do the opposite: we use error as the spark for new explanations, leaping across domains to connect finance with psychology, physics with art.
This is the irreplaceable edge. Not memorization. Not execution. Pattern recognition that creates new explanations.
In a world where knowledge is free and execution is automated, the only real value is what can’t be copied: your unique insights, your proprietary systems, your asymmetric predictions.
The Only Magic Trick That Actually Works
Productivity gurus teach you to work harder. Learning experts teach you to memorize faster.
They’re all missing the point.
The only magic trick that actually works is developing the ability to see patterns others miss, compress complexity others find overwhelming, and predict outcomes others can’t imagine.
This isn’t generic tutoring. This is training your brain’s native prediction machinery, the same system that kept your ancestors alive for 300,000 years, and pointing it at high-leverage modern problems.
It’s the closest thing to magic that exists. It’s pattern recognition at intuitive speed. It’s compressing infinite complexity into actionable insight. It’s prediction that feels supernatural because everyone else thinks backwards.
Intelligence isn’t fixed. It’s a muscle. Learn to build it by reading my free newsletters: https://crive.substack.com or click the Subscribe button on Hackernoon.
Grab my free first-principles reading list: https://selar.com/firstprinciples
The future belongs to people who can see it coming.
Stop being the audience. Become the magician.
Cheers,
Praise J.J.
See you in another essay;
https://hackernoon.com/how-to-get-so-exponentially-smart-it-feels-illegal