Monday, 31 October 2022

Seth's Blog : Circus peanuts don't contain nuts

This is obvious. Circus peanuts don't have nuts, legumes or anything else that resembles a nut. They're a metaphor. Or perhaps a simile, it depends on your level of pedantry. And yet, many people have a hard time with metaphor. Metaphor, not ...
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Circus peanuts don’t contain nuts

This is obvious. Circus peanuts don’t have nuts, legumes or anything else that resembles a nut.

They’re a metaphor. Or perhaps a simile, it depends on your level of pedantry.

And yet, many people have a hard time with metaphor. Metaphor, not memorization, is the heart of learning.

If you understand A, and you see that B is like A but a little different, now you understand B.

Memorization is brittle. Metaphor scales.

Metaphor helps us create the next thing and find our footing when confronted when the new.

I believe that understanding metaphor is a skill. We can get better at it.

Find some circus peanuts you don’t understand and decode them.

   


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Sunday, 30 October 2022

Seth's Blog : The opportunity to be wrong

History is filled with examples of people who made errors in judgment. The executives at Decca that turned down the Beatles, the CEO at Digital who said that no one would ever need to have a computer in their home, and the reviewers that didn't like the ...
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The opportunity to be wrong

History is filled with examples of people who made errors in judgment.

The executives at Decca that turned down the Beatles, the CEO at Digital who said that no one would ever need to have a computer in their home, and the reviewers that didn’t like the movie 2001.

And of course, the creators that are wrong so often. The entrepreneur who raises a bunch of money and fails, or the musician who follows up a hit with a string of duds.

But these failures are all a sign that someone had been given the privilege to be wrong in the first place.

It’s tempting to find a sinecure where someone tells you what to do all day–after all, then you’re off the hook and you can’t be wrong, only the boss can.

But it’s far more thrilling and useful and fulfilling to be the one who might mess up.

   


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