If you’re trying to write a post, a book, or create IP of any kind, it helps to remember this: your idea does not have to rattle the world. It only has to add something to it. A small contribution is still a contribution.

Often, the work of creating something “original,” or at least useful, is simply noticing the ordinary, or moving an existing idea from one context into another.

Years ago, I took a stand-up comedy class, and the teacher, Stephen Rosenfeld, said something in passing. He told us that jokes come from “walking around in truth.” He didn’t linger on his comment, and he certainly didn’t present it as a grand theory. It may have been a throwaway line. For me, though, it was an instruction I could actually follow.

I started moving through the day a hair differently, as if I were a Martian whose job was to observe human life and report back. I paid attention to imbalances and absurdities, and to things everyone sees but few bother to remark on.

One afternoon in Walmart, I noticed a merchandise table holding three stacks of folded T-shirts. From a distance, the left stack and the right stack were equally tall. The middle stack, though, was far shorter, maybe a third the size of the others. I walked over.

The left pile consisted of smalls and extra smalls. The right pile consisted of larges and extra larges. The short center pile was exactly what I expected, all mediums. The joke followed naturally. Why do they make extra smalls and extra larges, but not extra mediums?

Another day, in a supermarket, I stood in front of a skid of bottled water. Then I thought about the fact that human beings are mostly water, roughly sixty percent. The joke became, if sixty percent of a human being is water, then drinking Poland Spring is cannibalism.

I didn’t invent anything. I just looked past the assumptions about what I was seeing and how I was supposed to interpret it.

The same habit shaped a magic effect I created for Steve Cohen, “The Millionaires’ Magician.” He was meeting a New York Times reporter in Central Park, and they walked toward the river. Steve asked the reporter to think of a place he had always wanted to visit but hadn’t, and to hold that place clearly in his mind.

Then Steve asked the reporter to take a coin from his pocket. He handed the reporter a black Sharpie and asked him to mark the coin. Steve had the reporter kiss the coin, make a wish that he someday visit the place he was thinking of, and throw the coin as far as he could into the river.

Only after the coin was gone did Steve begin “reading the reporter’s mind.” “I see trees,” Steve said. “Rocky terrain. You’re walking uphill, on a long trail. You’re thinking of the Appalachian Trail.” That was the place! An apparent miracle.

Steve smiled, as if this solved something. “That’s your lucky coin now,” he said. “Let’s get it back for you.”

Steve rolled up his right sleeve, closed his hand into a fist, and water began magically seeping out between his fingers. When he opened his hand, the reporter’s signed coin sat in his palm.

That effect came from things I already loved, and simply placed side by side. As a kid, I thought wishing wells were small miracles tucked into everyday life. I also loved an old magic trick where playing cards are thrown away repeatedly, yet somehow keep returning.

So I treated the river as a wishing well, and I let the coin behave like the cards in that old trick. Nothing new, exactly, but newly arranged.