The mind can only understand what the senses have experienced.
But thankfully, the senses have experienced quite a lot. Like travelling from one place to another, the vastness of the sea, or the sweet taste of an apple.
And many things we experience in life follow familiar patterns.
Progressing in our careers is a lot like travelling from one place to another. There are bumps in the road, ups and downs, starts and stops. The journey can be challenging, we might get lost, we might go in the wrong direction. But so long as we keep moving forward, we’ll eventually reach our destination.
Searching for a new job after being made redundant is a lot like being lost at sea. The sea is vast and there is no land in sight. You float hopelessly waiting for something, anything. The only thing you can do is sit with desperation.
Finding the job of our dreams is a lot like the sweet taste of an apple. After such a long time of being lost in the vastness of the sea, depending on luck to keep you afloat, being able to taste the sweetness of something so familiar is rejuvenating. You’ve got what you wanted. The wait is over.
Connecting an idea to a familiar pattern is the act of poetry.
It can be even more powerful than just showing.
Experiences are always subjective, and we may have different interpretations of the same experience. For some people, searching for a new job is like being lost at sea, whereas for others, it’s like waking at the crack of dawn, excited by the thought of what this new day will bring. Choosing the right patterns enables you to share your exact thoughts and feelings a lot more accurately.
This is why poetry like music, painting or ballet is an art. Musicians, painters and ballet dancers master their medium, and use it to express a thought, feeling or idea. Poets have mastered the art of expressing thoughts, feelings or ideas through metaphors.
Connecting with Familiar Ideas
Compound interest, is quite an abstract concept. It would be quite difficult to explain to a child. Unless, we connected it with a familiar idea such as:
“Compound interest is like a snowball rolling down a hill. It gets bigger and bigger.”
Black holes are also quite abstract and difficult to explain to a child. Unless, again, we connected it with a familiar idea such as:
“Black holes are like vacuum cleaners. They suck up everything they touch.”
But how about explaining to a staunch conservative the importance of voting in favour of transgender rights. Now that’s a tough one. You would be going against decades of ideas that have been solidly cemented into their pyramid of meaning. You can’t just take out certain ideas and replace them with new ones, the pyramid would topple, and, as we’ll see in a later chapter, that could be a very bad thing!
The only thing we can do, is again, to connect it with a familiar idea. And this is exactly what a group of political canvassers did in Miami-Dade county after a bill was passed to ban discrimination against transgender people. There was a fear that there would be a strong backlash from conservatives as a result of this bill, so the canvassers went in to try and change peoples’ views on transgender rights.
Rather than start their canvassing by telling people all about the troubles transgender people faced and the facts and statistics to back that up, they tried something different. Instead, the canvassers encouraged people to find a parallel situation from their own experience to help them relate by asking them to think about times in their lives when they were judged negatively for being different.
For example, one military veteran reflected on his experience of companies not wanting to hire him because he had post-traumatic stress disorder. This was just one part of who he was, but the potential employers couldn’t look beyond it. Reflecting on this experience helped him understand what a transgender person must go through.
This approach made a significant difference, and even helped sway the minds of those most strongly against the idea (source: https://behavioralscientist.org/jonah-berger-catalyst-in-times-of-disagreement-how-to-find-unsticking-points/).
This same approach was used to bring one of the most famous horror movie series into existence.
In the 1970s, a filmmaking team had a great idea for a horror movie involving an alien. Their one challenge was getting the studios to accept their idea. So they thought about how they could make their pitch as appealing as possible, and the movie Jaws kept on coming to mind. Jaws had been a big hit in 1975, millions had seen it, and its success could not be denied. So, when pitching their idea, they simply said ‘Jaws, in Space’.
And so, in 1979, the movie Alien was released. Its success speaks for itself. I am sure you have at least heard of it, and have probably seen it. All the producers did was connect their new idea (terrifying alien in space) to a very successful, well established idea (‘Jaws’).
Using Metaphors and Analogies
A metaphor is when we say something is something else, and an analogy is when we say something is like something else. In other words, they’re pretty much the same thing. They are bridges between ideas we want to share, and familiar ideas the audience is comfortable with.
They are incredibly powerful tools for explaining feelings, ideas and concepts. Yet they are so simple as well. All you need to do, is find a similar idea that they are familiar with.
To find those ideas, you can use the following tool as a reference:
•Things everyone does everyday
•brush teeth, read the news, take the subway etc.
•Everyday objects
•doors, boxes, tables, keys, mobile phones etc.
•Famous things and people
•movies, songs, landmarks, holidays, celebrities, politicians etc.
•Common life experiences
•breaking up with a loved one, buying a house, the birth of a child etc.
•Jobs or industries
•plumber, banking, scientist, astronaut etc.
•Animals
•parrots, lions, ants etc.
•Environmental elements
•weather, natural disasters, landscapes etc.
•Places
•The Sahara Desert, Paris, your backyard etc.
