Attention Magic Setting
The thing most people don't want to believe about magic is that it's simple.
It's true! I've given so many presentations over the years, and that's where the audience always pushes back. Magic is simple.
People are complicated.
Magic just wants your attention, your focus - all of it if possible, which is something usually reserved for intense pain or moments of great desperation, and something made more difficult by pesky little things like language. A human tries a relatively straightforward working - moving object X to location Y - and the very thoughts themselves of object and location spawn a thousand associations, each one nibbling away your attention until there's not enough left to entice the magic.
It's simple, like I said, not easy.
Most magi use things like circles, or sigils, or foreign languages to trick their brains - things they associate only with magic, which makes it easier for them to not get distracted by all the little background thoughts always going through one's mind.
(I know a guy with a knack for languages who keeps accidentally learning his magic languages, and having to switch to another. Last I checked he'd just moved on from finnish to yoruba, after going through several of the romance languages and something he called "slavic esperanto")
but really, all you need is the right state of mind - people have been doing magic since before they were human, after all, barely-upright hominids calling out to forces larger than themselves with that particular single-mindedness that makes the universe listen. If you can manage that, there's little you can't do, at least once.
See, that's the other thing - magic is jealous, like a spoiled pet. It wants your attention, and it doesn't much care how it gets it. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, and all that; Moses may have been the one to turn his staff into a snake, but it was Aaron who became a priest.
There's a story my mentor used to tell me, about a mage who could fly: the first time he tried it, he was falling off a roof, and reached out to the magic to save his own life. After that, he flew farther and higher, longer and more swiftly, as often as he could. It got to the point that he expected to fly, that he relied on it, and so he started noticing the irritation of the wind against his face, and the chill when he flew faster, and the beauty of the view.
And his focus slipped.
And he fell.
Learning to use magic, my mentor always said, was like training a cat. At the end of the day, the cat was going to do what it wanted to do - the trick was to make the cat want to do what you wanted it to do, when you wanted to do it. There are plenty of mid-level magi who died from offhandedly trying to light a candle, and the over-eager magic gave them more fire than they asked for, like a cat pushing glasses off the table just to hear you say no.
