A few years ago, my wife asked me to help her design a magic trick. That had never happened before. She knew I’d been fascinated by magic for decades, but she’d never asked me to create one for her; until she brought home this assignment from her computer science class that sounded exactly like a magic trick.

The professor had asked the students to design a program that could identify, in ten guesses or fewer, a number from 1 to 99 secretly chosen by the computer.

I grabbed a yellow legal pad and a pen, jumped stomach-down onto the bed, and started working it out. I talked my way through the trick out loud, then wrote down what I’d just said, reasoning first, recording second, the way I often do when I’m designing something.

Tell the computer to think of a number without telling you what it is. Then, don’t guess numbers one at a time. Ask questions that collapse the search field quickly. Start by asking the computer whether the number is a single digit. If the answer is yes, you can guess all the single digit numbers until you hit the right one. If the answer is no, you eliminate every single digit number at once.

Next, ask whether the number is even. If the computer says yes, all the odd numbers disappear from consideration. If it says no, all the even ones vanish instead. Each answer cuts the field in half, or close to it. In a few steps, you’re no longer searching ninety-nine possibilities. You’re down to a small cluster. Ten guesses is more than enough.

It wasn’t a deceptive or entertaining trick, but it solved the problem cleanly. My wife studied my notes and said, “Great. Now I just need to turn this mathematical algorithm you wrote into code.”

Wait! Algorithm? That I wrote?

She explained that what I had built was, by definition, a mathematical algorithm. The steps fit the term exactly. She even added that I have a good mathematical mind.

This floored me. Why? I failed math regularly in school and avoided it whenever possible. If she had opened by asking me to help her write an algorithm, I would have been irritated at best and paralyzed at worst. I wouldn’t have known step-one about how to begin. I might not have tried at all.

But she didn’t ask for an algorithm. She asked for a magic trick. Nothing about the task itself changed. Only the frame. That difference stayed with me.

There’s an unlikely parallel that comes from biology. The Venus flytrap is usually described as the most aggressive of plants. After all, it eats flesh, or whatever a fly or insect is composed of. It sits with its jaws open, snaps shut when prey wanders in, and digests the unlucky thing alive. Gruesome.

But there’s another way to see it.

The Venus flytrap grows naturally in only one place in the world, along the coast of North and South Carolina. The soil there is shallow and nutrient-poor, and the flytrap is surrounded by larger plants that are better at capturing sunlight and extracting what little nourishment the ground provides. In that environment, the flytrap cannot compete directly. It would lose every time. It would get pushed out and cease to exist. So it doesn’t even try to compete at that game.

Instead, the flytrap evolved to occupy a niche the other plants can’t use. It waits for nutrients to come to it from a different direction entirely – in the form of bugs. Seen this way, the flytrap isn’t aggressive at all. It’s adaptive. In a way, its approach is passive or at least conservative.

Same organism and behavior, but a different frame.

I think about that often. About how many times we call something an algorithm when it could be a trick, or call something difficult when it’s simply unfamiliar under that name. How often the work itself is fine, but the label changes what we do with it.

Most of the time, nothing needs to be reinvented. Just reframed.