metaphors - a love story

A sailboat always moves forward.

This remarkable fact is due to its asymmetrical shape: it is pointy at the front and flat in the back. This creates resistance to moving backwards, but a natural ease in moving forward. Even when the water is randomly undulating, “backward” forces are muted, while “forward” forces are allowed, so the boat glides... See more

you can have a huge fire going but you won't be able to light up a cigarette (not a thread)

The hard work is to shift our default. To imagine that every incident, story or example is actually a metaphor, and only eventually coming to the conclusion that the specific details are what’s on offer.

The adjacent possible is about taking two seemingly unconnected ideas and metaphorically placing them next to each other to see how they might work together.

Not sure if anything changed my approach to work and engineering in the past five years more than this passage from @Lethain, written in the context of staff engineering but much more broadly applicable.