To be fair the boundaries blur a bit and that is where magic happens.

I don't mean magic like JRR Tolkien magic or whatever, I mean magic like David Copperfield magic, Penn & Teller magic.

You go to a restaurant, you ask for a thing, magically it appears in front of your very eyes and it is delicious. The secret was a lot of "long work" that went into the situation before you got there, so the cooks could be ready for anything you might order and could assemble it in a short time for you.

Magic is very often just a cleverly concealed patience. “How could she have known in advance that I was going to pick the jack of spades? That envelope has been in my hand the whole time and she has not touched it.” Well, if it really mattered, maybe she bought 52 decks of playing cards, filtered out the jack of spades from each one, and assembled a deck which only had the jack of spades in it. You thought you had a free choice, and you did, in the sense that you can get a model T in any color you want so long as it’s black. Of course the concealment takes some skill too, like maybe she unwrapped a different 52-card deck and threw out the jokers and instruction cards pointedly and then shuffled it before your eyes, then used some sleight of hand to switch the decks. But the point remains that the thing which makes it “magic” is the absurd backflips done out-of-sight. David Copperfield surely wouldn't make a Learjet in the middle of a ring of blindfolded people holding hands disappear by going out and hiring a quarter of those people to be stooges, having them disassemble their part of the circle and tow the plane out with a cable, and then reassemble the circle and interview the non-stooges for the camera, would he? OK, but he surely wouldn't go to the expense of building a rotating theater in order to vanish the statue of Liberty though right?

If you want to appear magical to others, a lot of it is going to be long work. Funny story, a lot of my physics education was spent in this way. We would get a problem, and my peers would sit there and scratch their heads and say “I wonder, what is the best way to solve this problem” and I would sit there and say “this is _a_ way to solve that problem, it’s not gonna be pretty and it’s gonna be painful but I will grind and grind and get an answer.” Then I would look at the answer and be like “that’s actually profoundly beautiful,” like maybe it’s the sort of answer which suggests that there is a duality between position and momentum space such that you could rotate one into the other, because it involves u x² + v p² for some u, v. Or maybe the answer is something divided by the total energy and I am like “oh maybe multiplying through by the total energy makes this derivation really really simple.”

And then since I know the answer I can reconstruct this beautiful argument and then I can write _that_ down as my final answer. Someone else sees this and thinks I am smart. Not as smart as I look! Hah. Then I learned that this is actually the basis for several cryptographic attacks called “meet in the middle;” often if you're trying to figure out the right path through a complex forest to an unknown solution you have to try N paths, but once you know where you are going then you can simultaneously work forwards from the starting point and backwards from the ending point and see which ones end up passing through the same point midway through the forest and you’ll succeed after only 2√N half-paths total because you get the product of (start attempts)×(finishing attempts) for the total number of paths you are trying through the forest.