The final step to mastering analogies

As with every skill, you start from ignorance and forge a path towards mastery.

What I’ve tried to do over these past six days is to get you to expand your awareness and provide the tools needed to kick down those barriers you may have had before. If you’ve been following along and making the effort, then congratulations! You’re already better at analogies, and you’re seeing the world more holistically than before…

Now let’s make it second nature.

Here are three ways to do that.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Yeah, I hate that saying as well, but it does have truth to it.

For as long as I can remember, this was every musician’s mantra that was drilled into our heads. Carnegie Hall was, and is, the gold standard of venues to say that you’ve “made it” in the classical music world.

I didn’t get anywhere close to that in my music career, but it laid the foundation for the self discipline that I cultivated throughout my life when it came to focusing on learning and mastering various skills.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

Every chance you get, take the opportunity to use an analogy. Regardless of whether you’re an introvert who’d rather text a friend or write newsletters, or you’re an extrovert who’d rather go out to a bar, a party, or any social gathering to talk face to face with someone or the center of attention onstage, get your message across with an analogy.

Pay it forward

As Mark Twain said, “To teach is to learn twice.”

The more you explain anything, the more ingrained it becomes. There’s more than enough material that I’ve offered in the past week for you to reinforce by repeating it to others. Again, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, pull back the curtain behind your newfound skill after you dazzle people with your wit and wisdom.

Even if you flub it, that’s your chance to explain which type of flub it was.

One of the coolest things about analogies and the subsequent lateral thinking that it cultivates is your awareness of how common it is. Being present in your life can open up a lot of possibilities to observe, reflect, and recombine different aspects to create endless examples.

It’s the beginning of something greater than merely this skill.

You might even use your phone less and your senses more to receive the world around you.

Share what you experience by using another experience. Your world will be richer for the effort.

Jot it down

You knew this one was coming. Building the swipe file isn’t only for reference, it’s also for refinement and reflection.

Tiago Forte is a champion of the second brain approach. Our minds are evolved to process data around us more than to retain all of it. There are those who have a photographic memory or can remember the day of the week for any date in history. That’s not the vast majority of us.

Write your insights down. Whether using a phone to text it to yourself or pop it into a note taking app or recording yourself, capture these ideas as soon as possible.

Your mind is the oven in which you bake the dough of inspiration into the fresh, warm loaves of ideas you can serve up to your audience. How’s that for an analogy?

Oh and if you’re a fan of Colbert, you may enjoy all of his nightly descriptions for his “Meanwhile” segment of his show. Those are some of the most vivid and detailed analogies. Those take some real effort to come up with on a daily basis.

Exiting the starting zone

So I leave you with these final tips to hone this newly-acquired awareness of a skill.

Write down at least three of your top three analogies from this seven-day crash course and use them in conversation, your next presentation, or your next article.

This is a skill like any other. The more you do it, the better you get, and the more natural it becomes.

The head fake is that it’s one of the most powerful ways to enhance your critical thinking. Using analogies forces you to consider ideas from many angles and perspectives, to explore the validity of concepts and systems and whether or not they follow a natural progression or have a solid thought structure that aligns with others.

The world is simple in its complexity, and it’s why we’ve come so far in our understanding of the universe.

Analogies are the key.