Do You Believe in Magic?

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Twice in my career, I caught lightning in a bottle. Real creative chemistry. The kind that made the work flow faster and better and made me better in the process.

Both times, I had that rare kind of partner, someone just as invested and energized as I was. A work muse. A productivity twin. We pushed each other to be sharper, more clever, more original.

When you're in it, it feels like jazz. The magic comes from rhythm as much as alignment. An organic give and take. I’d place a block on the tower, then they’d add one. Me again. Then them. Back and forth. A frenetic rhythm, fluidly building momentum with every move.

I’ve always enjoyed my work, but this was different. It was fun!

I’d throw a half-formed thought on the whiteboard, and they’d sharpen it into something boardroom-ready. They’d rough out a pitch deck, and I’d layer in a narrative that made it sing. I ran product and marketing. They led business development. Different lanes, same goal. The company needed momentum. So we created it. Together.

Some days, we knocked out two or three major deliverables. Work that usually takes a week of meetings and edits. Ours showed up in Slack before lunch.

That kind of partnership is rare. I didn’t realize how rare until I moved up the org chart. By then, your peers are running their own teams, dealing with their own problems. And no matter how hard you try, the collaboration with your direct reports isn’t as raw or free flowing. The spark gets harder to find.

I think about those partnerships often and wonder if that energy was a one-time thing. A fleeting vestige of my career’s youth. Something you remember fondly and keep chasing, long after it fades.

For a long time, I believed the magic lived in those moments. The right person. The right timing. The right stakes. I kept waiting for it to return. A new role. A new team. A new rhythm. But it never quite clicked.

Then, about two years ago, everything changed.

I started working with large language models and generative AI.

What I expected was novelty. What I found was something eerily familiar. Like I had rediscovered a missing gear. The back-and-forth felt real. The energy returned. The flow picked up. The scaffolding helped shape raw ideas into worthy output. That feeling of not working alone came rushing back.

Turns out, I wasn’t the only one.

Procter & Gamble just ran one of the most ambitious real-world AI trials I’ve seen. Partnering with Harvard researchers and Ethan Mollick, they recreated actual product development workflows inside the company. More than 700 professionals participated. Some worked solo. Some in pairs. Some with access to GPT-4. The results told a clear story.

Solo workers using AI performed at the level of human teams.
Teams with AI outperformed everyone.

The study revealed more than a productivity boost. Boundaries between disciplines softened. R&D professionals contributed commercial ideas. Business professionals offered technical insights. Collaboration became more fluid. Output became more balanced. Skill gaps narrowed.

And the emotional shift was just as striking. The AI groups reported higher energy, more enthusiasm, less frustration. That spark I felt? So did they. And it showed up in the data.

The researchers call it the “cybernetic teammate.” A force multiplier. Not a substitute for people, but a partner. A way to rediscover that rare rhythm of being matched in momentum, even when the room is quiet and Slack goes dark. The implication being that creative productivity will no longer be gated by access to talent or time, but only by imagination.

All of that helped put language to what I’d been experiencing for months.

For me, generative AI is the difference between an idea that lingers in my head and a finished product. Not because it creates the idea or tells the story. It doesn’t. AI cannot innovate for you. But it can elevate what’s already there — something well-formed, already pretty good — and push it across the gap to something worth shipping. Maybe even something pretty great.

The flood of bland, generic AI content we now encounter online proves a simple truth: most people bring little to the table. Without vision or intent, there’s nothing for the model to elevate. Garbage in, garbage out. You’ve heard it before.

But if you’re already full of ideas. If you’ve got momentum, vision, a solid draft, and real standards. Then AI can be an incredible tool.

I deal with a bit of neurodivergence, so I tend to fly through the early stages of a project. I get the spark. I draft fast. I get the bones down. But the final 5 to 10 percent is where the wheels used to come off. That’s the critical phase where a draft becomes something worth shipping. Sometimes it even kept me from starting. The mental calculus of taking something to 100%, weighed against everything else I could be doing, was often reason enough to pass. Unless there was a hard deadline, I’d lose steam in the cleanup phase, chasing the next flash of inspiration instead of finishing the last one.

Without that feedback loop, the finish line sometimes felt out of reach.

That changed when I realized I could run those last miles with AI. At first, it helped me tighten language, strip excess, and sharpen flow. But soon, I was using it to build structure around ideas, fill in blind spots, and bring rough concepts to life—whether I was writing, building, planning, or pitching. The creativity and invention were still mine. The vision was mine. The effort was mine. Hell, 98% of the words were mine. But I finally had something to help me push my work across the line with speed and confidence.

I realized I didn’t have to trade quality for output. I could move the needle on several projects in the same week. I could build a pitch, write a report, edit an article, all in a single inspired session. I could focus on what mattered most: the idea, the arc, the energy. And I could do it knowing that when the storm passed, when the initial rush faded, I had a partner ready to help me get over the finish line.

Just like back in the day with my workmates. A remarkable creative catalyst, now available anytime inspiration hits.

Nothing will ever replace the electricity of two humans vibing and buzzing on natural chemistry. That kind of connection is rarer than rare.

But AI gets me pretty close.

It reminds me of something else in my life. I used to run competitively. 25 years and roughly 600 shawarmas ago. Nothing has ever matched the charge of racing at the edge of my physical limits. Years later, the Peloton brought some of that feeling back. The rhythm, the leaderboard, the push.

I’ve found something similar here.

A way to tap back into that energy.

A way to move faster, think sharper.

A way to feel like I’m not working alone.

Some might call it magic.

I call it motion.

This post is dedicated to my brothers in flow, TZ and MG. It was magical.

Want to chat about AI, work, and where it’s all headed? Let’s connect. Find me on LinkedIn and drop me a message.