My dentist is a world-class user of analogies and metaphors.
Every time he needs to explain something to me about my teeth, or my gums, or a root canal, he employs an analogy or a metaphor. He’ll describe the situation like a ship at sea being pounded by a storm or like a rope that’s been pulled too tight or whatever else he needs to use.
And, even if I know what he’s going to say and why he’s going to say it, I let him have at it. Because listening to him is fun and instructive. I can only dream that someday I’ll be as good with illustrative language as he is. It’s a ridiculously effective communication tool.
When I was in school, most of my in-class time was spent three ways: sleeping, passing notes to pretty girls, or not being on the school grounds at all. It was pretty rare for me to actually learn anything, or want to learn anything, in school.
But there were those select few teachers who managed to capture my attention. And they all had one thing in common: they used examples.
The best teachers are not the highest-qualified or the friendliest or the ones who have been doing it the longest. The best teachers are the people who are the best at teaching. And that involves getting a student to willingly open his mind to you. Not necessarily because he’s infatuated with a subject (because he probably isn’t), but because he’s genuinely interested in the way you’re presenting something.
Any student, anywhere, will have an easier time learning biology when you turn it into a story or compare the functions of a cell to the functions of a factory.
One of life’s great miracles is to teach someone something complicated. And the only way to truly do that is by giving more than facts. What the best teachers are doing, through the use of examples and analogies, is making so many connections from the data to your existing mental infrastructure that it’s almost impossible that nothing will stick. They’re creating so many opportunities for connection that it’s almost impossible none of them will work.
I mean, think about it… if your teacher of Physics 101 manages to incorporate history, math, family, cars, and ice cream all in one lesson, as ways of illustrating a principle… there’s no way you’re not going to remember what he said. There are too many ways for you to remember. There are too many ways for you to wrap the principle up in something else and see what it looks like and what it does.
I had a few teachers like this. And I still think about them all the time. Their impact on me was in how they reach people.
If you have to memorize something, you haven’t learned it. Good teachers don’t make you memorize. Of course good students don’t sleep or skip class, but this isn’t about me and I’ll thank you to stay out of my personal affairs.
Professor Richard Feynman, one of the best teachers of the modern age, has long taught others the art of teaching. One of his favorite axioms is this: The ultimate test of your knowledge is your ability to convey it to another.
When my dentist uses metaphor to describe what’s going on in my mouth, he’s helping me to understand teeth the way a dentist does. When a great author moves you, through his characters, he’s teaching you how to understand the human spirit the way a great storyteller does.
One of the most controversial and misunderstood figures in history is Karl Marx. Both in and outside the realm of economics, very few people actually know how to teach his ideas.
Why is that?
Because almost nobody understands his ideas. He took economics deep into the realm of the philosophical, and used incredibly abstract language to decorate it.
Have you ever had a dream where you had collected a treasure in your hands, or maybe just a scoop of sand to build a sandcastle… and then you tried to walk away with it? Maybe you tried to bring your handfuls back to wherever you were going… and then you look down and the treasure, or the sand, is gone. For some reason your hands couldn’t hold it — you weren’t allowed to have it.
That’s what it’s like trying to bring Karl Marx’s ideas back into reality. They exist so far off in Narnia, off in the abstract, that by the time you try to put them into clearer words and bring them back to reality, there’s nothing left.
It’s no wonder that, everywhere Marxist ideas have ever been tried, they have led to tens of millions of deaths and a complete failure of state. Because it takes such reckless arrogance to claim that you understand his ideas, that only a narcissistic fool would even make that claim in the first place.
Economist Alfred Marshall once wrote a letter to his student and described how to develop his theories and ideas. In this letter, he explained that if you start with a mathematical idea, the next step should be to translate the math into English. After that, it’s essential to attach important real-world examples to the verbal explanation. If you can’t do that, burn the idea.
Perhaps what Marshall was saying was that if you can’t attach real, simple examples to something, there is one of two problems: either you do not fully understand the idea, or the idea is not a good one at all. If that’s what he was saying, I think he was right.
One of the most important aspects of having close relationships with people is being able to talk about things to understand them. This is part of why women like for a man to just listen, even though we’re unbelievably bad at that.
Half of what you’re doing when you talk to a partner or a friend is describing your life in words so that you can figure out what the hell is actually going on in it. While you’re describing, you’re learning. While you’re specifying, you’re clarifying.
Some of the smartest people in the world talk to themselves out loud. They’re forcing themselves to put something into words so that they can understand it. And then, in the absence of a partner to talk it out with, they will adopt various other positions or the role of a listener, for the sake of asking good questions about it.
The last few years, against my own wishes, I’ve started doing it too. I’ll try to explain something out loud as if I’ve been asked to teach what I’ve just realized to a friend. And as I go I’ll think of what the most obvious questions might be, and then answer them. Or revise my explanation so that it answers them by itself. Or, the best part, I’ll discover connections in my brain and make up illustrations and examples on the spot.
Nothing is more satisfying in learning than realizing that you already understand something because it’s like something else.
It doesn’t always require speaking out loud. Sometimes it’s silent. But it does require stopping what I’m doing and reaching inside my head for connections, so that I can immediately learn what I’ve just encountered before it slips away. By attaching other pieces of knowledge to it so that I can tell stories with it and share it with others.
The best way to learn how to communicate, how to illustrate, is by visiting my dentist. But other than that, it’s just by reading books.
Reading books is better than reading tweets, and that will never stop being true. Reading a book forces you to spend time down inside the idea. Down in the mud and the muck, wrestling with the idea and letting it connect to multiple, deep parts of you. It’s a crucible. And you emerge from it with something that you can never get by reading tweets or watching 58-second videos from Instagram gurus.
If you want to learn something, teach it. If you want to teach something, teach it in a way such that the other person would then also be capable of teaching it.
Drink some water and then describe the sensations to a friend.
JDR
“What one fool can understand, another can.” - Richard Feynman