Clustering. This is a word and visual game that engages your inner mind in the discovery of yourself. The technique is used by writers to get unstuck about a topic and gain new insights. Play some relaxing music and get comfortable so that you can concentrate and become absorbed in concentration.

In the middle of a piece of paper write a key or nucleus word or phrase - such as “money” or “being ordinary” or “myself” - and draw a heavy circle around it. Then free associate another word that comes off the first word. Write it down, circle it, and draw a line between the two circles. Let your mind go free on the topic and continue to write words, circling, and connecting, stimulated by either the nucleus word or any of the others.

Work quickly and easily, almost impulsively. Don’t let your analytical mind get too involved. If you get stuck, try doodling; connect the circles with lines; draw in arrowheads; touch up or go over your circles. Then see if there is anything more coming out.

Be playful. Just let it flow at random. Be ordinary. Allow the words and connections to happen. Have faith that they are within you and you are merely allowing to come out.

Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works. For this reason it can be fruitful for psychologists to use various, well-understood aspects of a computer—such as memory, buffers, or processors —as inspiration to locate similar functions in the brain.

Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise. For example, Disney calls its employees “cast members.” This metaphor of employees as cast members in a theatrical production is communicated consistently throughout the organization:

• Cast members don’t interview for a job, they audition for a role.

• When they are walking around the park, they are onstage.

• People visiting Disney are guests, not customers.

• Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes.

Inferences from labels can be so strong that people are often careful to separate labels from the behaviors they describe.

The British linguist J. R. Firth once noted, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” Said another way, you can learn a lot about what words mean and the relationships among them by looking at the contexts they show up in and the words that surround them.

FIFTEEN: The Transformer

“Words themselves meant nothing: in isolation, they were arbitrary collections of sounds. The only way to capture their meaning was to draw links between them and other words in the text. So if you had a knowledge graph linking the words “hop,” “green,” “tongue,” “flies,” and “amphibian,” then you knew enough to guess that the word in the center was “frog.” Not only that, but the graph should look the same in German, French, Swahili, or Vietnamese. The word wasn’t the letters “f,” “r,” “o,” and “g”—those letters were just placeholders. The word, in a cognitive sense, was that unique map of links to the rest of the vocabulary.