So watching this video is great.
It's really emotional, it's really exciting to watch.
But think about how many attributes they talked in that video.
Think about how much you learned about that laptop.
Well if you think about it, at the core, you don't know anything about the number
of modular options, about the docking ports, about the PC card.
You only know one thing.
You know that laptop is really, really thin.
And how do you know that?
Well you saw the side picture.
It was very thin.
But you also saw that it fit in an envelope.
Think about that.
It must be thin if it can fit in an envelope, right?
They didn't say, hey we make a laptop that's a half-inch small or an inch small.
They said, look at it, it fits in a laptop.
We all know what an envelope is.
We all know how thick an envelope is.
And because that, we get a sense of how thick that laptop is.
And the important idea here is simple.
Tell people ten things, they're not gonna remember any of them.
They're focusing their attention on all ten of them and
one-tenth of their attention gets to each of those things.
But you tell people one thing and only one thing, and they'll remember
because they focused all their attention on that one particular thing.
But in thinking about what should we focus on or
how we can communicate that one particular thing, analogies are a really useful tool.
Think for a moment about a pomelo.
Do you know what a pomelo is?
Well, if you've never heard of it before, you probably don't.
But if you do know what it is, imagine you had to tell someone else what a pomelo is.
How would you describe it to a friend or a peer?
Well you might say it's a large grapefruit.
It's sort of the color of a tennis ball.
Now for those of you who didn't know what a pomelo is,
do you have some sense of what it is?
Probably.
You don't know perfectly, exactly what it is but if you had to guess you have some
sense of how big it is, it's larger than a grapefruit.
Some sense of what color it is, it's sort of a light green color.
And some sense of the other attributes it might have.
It's probably a fruit given it was compared to a grapefruit.
It's probably sour just like a grapefruit might be.
And so the point is while analogies don't tell us everything about a product or
idea, they get us to 90% of that idea pretty quickly.
They give us some good sense of what's there by quickly
comparing it to something we all know.
By taking something everybody knows and
relating this new idea that they don't understand to that thing they all know,
helps them get a good sense of that idea quite quickly.