Strands of Genius: Metaphors that Change Minds, A Paintbrush is a Pump, War On War
plus: our thoughts on metaphors, insights and ideas
WRITING FROM | Greenville, SC
WORKING ON | onboarding new client, preparing for first session this week
LOOKING AHEAD
Aug 7-14: Beersheba Springs, TN
Aug 14-17: Ashland City, TN
Aug 17-21: Nashville, TN
Aug 21-28: Beersheba Springs, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” ― Sylvia Plath
August is here, the odd uneven time, betwixt and between more significant punctuations of the year, the end of summer becoming back to school. Well, perhaps, this time around, but back to school feelings don’t leave you when you leave school.
We don’t work normal hours, and in the past, we’d often we work weekends preferentially. It’s better to visit busy tourist things during the week, and people don’t reply to emails on weekends [much]. However, the more intertwined your life is with others, the more exposed you are to everyone’s schedules. If you want to hang out with people who have jobs, you have to work around those. If you want to take your kids somewhere on holiday, you mostly do it during school holidays.
But even beyond that, we are sequenced by various intersecting time frames that schedule our lives. These are what the Romans called the ‘dog days of summer’, the hottest and most humid part of the year [for their time and geography] when people are prone to madness.
Why ‘dog days? Well, to the Greeks and Romans, the “dog days” occurred around the day when Sirius, the dog star [part of the constellation Canis Major], appeared to rise just before the sun. Then it got translated into English and began to accrue new explanations, the heat driving dogs crazy, or to lie down, or something.
That’s the beautiful thing about metaphors. They require imaginative leaps to work, which means there is always scope for different interpretations. More on metaphors in this edition. The dog of dog days was never a real dog, but has become a different kind of metaphorical one.
Dog Days bright and clear
Indicate a happy year;
But when accompanied by rain,
For better times, our hopes are vain.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Rachel&Mike&Stella&Chase, Aisha, socially distanced river tubing, Umbrella Academy Season 2, our new client Arco, yellow cake, summer weather, our tomato hauls from the garden, walking the dog, poke bowls, and all of the sparkling water. YES, ALL OF IT, OK?! ;)
THE SCHOOL OF STOLEN GENIUS PRESENTS
INTEGRATIVE BRAND MODELS :: PDF & VIDEO
Featuring the PDF download of the deck and the hour presentation with Q&A, you’ll learn about a variety of brand models, thoughts on the evolution of brand strategy, and how this applies to marketers today. All members may access the bundle for free, alternatively you may also purchase the bundle as a one-off.
:: THE LINKS ::
TIME FOR NEW PANDEMIC METAPHORS
Metaphors are powerful ways to frame complex issues and one of the most common framings is the ‘war on’. It’s inherently toxic, positioning social issues as villains to be conquered, creating winners and losers, sides, the sacrifices of untold unnamed heroes, the cruelty with which the opposition is treated. This is harmful in social attitudes to poverty and drugs, inspiring bellicose action, rather than pastoral, systemic approaches. The ‘war on Covid’ has been lost, and we need new metaphors “because a virus, the supreme agent of mass death in human history, will never be dominated…a new rhetoric of care, empathy, and respect for life is needed to face Covid-19.” (New Republic)
A PAINTBRUSH IS A PUMP
When was the last time you changed your mind? This will. Well, that’s what they claim, since the podcast is called “This will change your mind” and their inaugural episode looks at framing metaphors, exploring the work of labs in Amsterdam and DC. Yes, there are metaphor labs. [Diffusion Network]
HOW TO DESIGN A METAPHOR TO CHANGE MINDS
At the aforementioned metaphor labs, researchers explore and design metaphors, which is different from simply writing them. “The metaphors didn’t target people’s cognitive processes. They weren’t engineered to affect us in a specific way. Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are.” The author spent 5 years working at FrameWorks, a DC metaphor think tank, and shows in some detail the tools used. This is especially interesting, if you consider them structurally, because metaphors are, like insights, a class of ideas, created at the intersection of non-obviously connected things. A well designed metaphor considers its abstractions, how it categories and maps concepts, in order to change how you view something. (PSYCHE AEON)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: METAPHORS + MINDS ::
What’s a Metaphor? Changing Minds.
Metaphor is a concept of particular interest to linguistics, politics, creativity, writing, psychology, culture, cognition and oh absolutely anything at all that uses language, so everything humans think and say. Think we’re exaggerating? Everyday language is stuffed full of all kinds of metaphors, especially using space and time, as time flies and a meeting drags. The metaphors we use everyday often recede from analysis because we no longer think about them. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson comment:
“We still react with awe when we notice ourselves and those around us living by metaphors like TIME IS MONEY, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, and PROBLEMS ARE PUZZLES. We continually find it important to realise that the way we have been brought up to perceive our world is not the only way and that it is possible to see beyond the “truths” of our culture”.
Nietzsche went further, suggesting that all words are metaphors. Are they? Is this? Well, this isn’t really a news letter, is it…
Aristotle wrote that “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor; . . . it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”
The key thing that Aristotle is pointing at with ‘an eye for resemblances’ is abstraction, the ability to derive general things from individual things. The metaphors we use both reflect and change the way we think. The “war on [drugs, poverty, homelessness]” metaphor used heavily in American political rhetoric reflects the military mindset of the government and impacts how policy is then made. The implications within the metaphor have driven policy to be bellicose, which has been incredibly and necessarily destructive, since that quality is inherent in the metaphor.
Effective metaphors, according to Aristotle, are “lucid, pleasing and strange”, which suggests both clarity in meaning and luminosity, fun or satisfying to hear, and un-obvious.
The imaginative power of metaphor, pulling from things people already believe and connecting them in ways that open up new lines of thought, means that metaphors are powerful tools for changing minds.
And remember, metaphors, like insights, are a class of idea. They all work in much the same way. The metaphor designer must also have an idea of what makes a good one, just as the writer of an insight or idea must. The psychologist Walter Kintsch wrote about ‘strong’ metaphors that draw their source from ‘a concrete term, rich in imagery and potential associations.’ This is great guidance, anchoring abstract things into concrete images, and speaks to the inherent multiplicity of meaning of metaphor.
Additionally, this domain is unrelated to the thing you’re trying to explain: it’s ‘something unusual’, ‘a pleasant surprise. But it cannot be too much of a surprise.’ This is at the very heart of how we think about creativity, in all its forms, as obvious connections, with clear instruction that the things combined must contain some, but not too much, surprise.
This echoes the design principle of Most Advanced Yet Acceptable [MAYA] and suggests an underlying construct for effective creativity in general. A hint of the strange makes something interesting, a dash of the familiar makes it palatable.
We love things that are new and exciting but they are also scary and dangerous, so the ideal things, from the point of view of the brain, are new exciting things that it already knows are safe, which is logically impossible but not imaginatively so.
So, what’s the point?
To keep in mind that metaphors frame how we think.
To consider how the metaphors we and the media use frame approaches to complex problemsTo think about how we design metaphors, and insights, and ideas to maximum impact
To remember how prevalent conceptual metaphors are in everyday communication
To consider the intent of metaphors when they are designed and deployed
To learn as from as broadly as possible how to craft compelling concepts
:: AND NOW… THE BEAUTY OF UGLY ::
Tim Leake is an old friend of Genius Steals (and a former colleague of Rosie’s) and this 5 minute film on beautiful ugly in video production in the age of TIKTOK, or Triller, or Byte, or Reels, or whatever, is worth thinking about. Are ugly and beautiful metaphors? What for?
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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