9 metaphors to supercharge your thinking

Introduction. Metaphors make our speech interesting. By comparing apparently unrelated things and drawing strange connections, metaphors make conversation psychedelic. In this Memo, discover 9 metaphors that will make you see humans, conversations, and politics in a new light👇

Like children playing with colorful shells on a beach, we spend our lives chasing our fancies. A child leaves his old stone behind for a “smoother pebble or a prettier shell,” we chase greener pastures in new people and places. Meanwhile the great sea remains unknown. (Newton)

A child sits on the “shoulders of its father” and thinks he’s taller. We mock our ancestors for being backward and regressive, not realizing that we are ahead because they labored on the road behind. (Macaulay)

In a shipwreck, everything light and worthless floats and is saved, while everything heavy and important “sinks to the bottom, and is lost forever.” Such is government - reports grow thicker & live on, initiative and decision-making disappear in the depth of bureaucracy. (Junius)

Weak drops of water, by falling consistently, will cut through rock. Small consistencies, carried through a long time, will burn through any obstacles. (Trollope)

A tower up close may have “ingenious detail and impressive solidity” - but when you see it from a distance, you realize it’s tilting one way. Our political inventions are similar - novel and interesting up close, but often unbalanced when we gain distance on them. (Chesterton)

Let a tree assume its natural shape and size, and it will “flourish for ages with little care.” Impose an artificial form on it and it will need the “constant use of the pruning knife.” Societies too need violence to keep humans in a shape foreign to their nature. (John Stevens)

To find Gold in the ground, you have to dig through a lot of “earthy rubbish” first. Similarly, to find genius insight in a conversation, you have to keep digging past the small talk. (Melville)

Stuffing your speech with pompous words is like putting paint on the “eyeglasses of a telescope.” The actual purpose of the telescope is ruined - the actual meaning of your speech is lost. (Boyle)

When light hits an object, it becomes known not by the color it absorbs but that which it rejects. People too are known by their “dislikes and antagonisms” - what we reject is a more unique marker of personality than what we accept. (Hardy)