Skip to content

A Step-By-Step Guide To Analogies

A Step-By-Step Guide To Analogies

Whenever you want to explain something to anyone, you need to understand it yourself. And then break it down to easy, digestible and fun elements so the other person can understand it too.

But can you add something to explain it better? Enter analogies. The trick is simple – you connect the complicated thing with something the other person already knows. So they can make a connection and fill in the gaps.

For example, if you want to explain starting a business is risky to someone who used to gamble. You can tell them that starting a business is more like gambling. The chances of being a millionaire exist, but in most cases, you are going to lose money and sometimes end up in bankruptcy.

This works because you aren’t directly stating something. You are making a connection to an already known fact by the other person.

In Teaching

If you are a teacher, you can use such examples to understand education in better, fulfilling, and entertaining manner.

One such example would be in explaining the movement of solid, liquid, and gas to students. Tell them to stand close to each other and then move in a fixed environment. Now, remove that restriction a little and then no limits.

What they will find is that with no restrictions, they can move anywhere like air does while with tight limits they can’t move much like solids.

This is easy for students to understand and relate because you have made a real life experience connection with an abstract concept.

Your Life

But that’s not all. In many areas of your life, you can use analogies to understand something better. The best application perhaps is to make something understandable to your kids as they are growing up.

Sometimes they didn’t need to know all the in-depth details, so you can make up an analogy and boom they can understand its consequences.

The more you can come up with analogies, the better you will become. And it will be like your secret weapon.

If you are in a meeting and you want to make a strong point, you can say – “Let’s implement this, or the impact will be huge like the ones that happened with a Ransomware attack last year.”

By making analogies, you can let people see the impact and thus make better decisions. Your communication becomes more than 2 times better, now that’s a bargain.