You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong cover art

You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong

You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong

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 Try to go through a day without using an analogy. I guarantee you'll fail within an hour. Your morning coffee tastes like yesterday's batch. Traffic is moving like molasses. Your boss sounds like a broken record. Every comparison you make—every single one—is your brain's way of understanding the world. You can't turn it off. When someone told you ChatGPT is "like having a smart assistant," your brain immediately knew what to expect—and what to worry about. When Netflix called itself "the HBO of streaming," investors understood the strategy instantly. These comparisons aren't just convenient—they're how billion-dollar companies are built and how your brain actually learns. The person who controls the analogy controls your thinking. In a world where you're bombarded with new concepts every single day—AI tools, cryptocurrency, remote work culture, creator economies—your brain needs a way to make sense of it all. By the end of this episode, you'll possess a powerful toolkit for understanding the unfamiliar by connecting it to what you already know—and explaining complex ideas so clearly that people wonder why they never saw it before. Thinking in analogies—or what's called analogical thinking—is how the greatest innovators, communicators, and problem-solvers operate. It's the skill that turns confusion into clarity and complexity into something you can actually work with. What is Analogical Thinking? But what does analogical thinking entail? At its core, it's the practice of understanding something new by comparing it to something you already understand. Your brain is constantly asking: "What is this like?" When you learned what a virus does to your computer, you understood it by comparing it to how biological viruses infect living organisms. When someone explains blockchain as "a shared spreadsheet that no one can erase," they're using analogy to make an abstract concept concrete. Researchers have found something remarkable: your brain doesn't actually store information as facts—it stores it as patterns and relationships. When you learn something new, your brain is literally asking "What does this remind me of?" and building connections to existing knowledge. Analogies aren't just helpful for communication—they're the fundamental mechanism of human understanding. You can't NOT think in analogies. The question is whether you're doing it consciously and well, or unconsciously and poorly. The quality of your analogies determines how quickly you learn, how deeply you understand, and how effectively you can explain ideas to others. Remember this: whoever controls the analogy controls the conversation. Master this skill, and you'll never be at the mercy of someone else's framing again. The Crisis of Bad Analogies Thinking in analogies is a double-edged sword. I learned this the hard way. A few years ago, I watched a brilliant engineer struggle to explain a revolutionary idea to executives. He had the data, the logic, the technical proof—but he couldn't get buy-in. Then someone in the room said, "So it's basically like Uber, but for industrial equipment?" Instantly, heads nodded. Funding approved. Project greenlit. One analogy did what an hour of explanation couldn't. Six months later, that same analogy killed the project. Because "Uber for equipment" came with assumptions—about pricing, about scale, about network effects—that didn't actually apply. The team kept forcing their solution to fit the analogy instead of recognizing when the comparison broke down. I watched millions of dollars and two years of work disappear because nobody questioned whether the analogy was still serving them. The same mental shortcut that helps you understand new things can also trap you in outdated patterns. Consider Quibi's spectacular failure. In 2020, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman launched a streaming service with $1.75 billion in funding—more than Netflix had when it started. Their analogy? "It's like TV shows, but designed for your phone." They created high-quality 10-minute episodes optimized for mobile viewing. Six months later, Quibi shut down. What went wrong? The analogy was flawed. They assumed mobile viewing was like TV viewing, just shorter. But people don't watch phones the way they watch TV—they watch phones while doing other things, in stolen moments, with interruptions. YouTube and TikTok understood this. They built for distraction and fragmentation. Quibi built for focused attention that didn't exist. That misunderstanding burned through nearly $2 billion in 18 months. We see this constantly where complex issues get reduced to simplistic analogies that feel intuitive but lead to flawed conclusions. Someone compares running a country to running a household budget—"If families have to balance their budgets, why shouldn't governments?" The analogy sounds intuitive, but it ignores that countries can print currency, carry strategic long-term debt, and operate on completely ...
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