The fastest way to explain anything? A perfect analogy

Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate! My mission here is to turn AI into your creative partner. Each week, we roll up our sleeves with a new experiment you can use immediately to refine your ideas, accelerate your workflow, and innovate in your field.

This week’s playground: Using AI to generate powerful analogies and metaphors for your most complex ideas

The "curse of knowledge" is real. When you're an expert in something, it becomes incredibly difficult to explain it to someone who isn't. You use jargon. You skip crucial steps. You can see the blank stares, but you don't know how to bridge the gap. This is where great ideas stall and pitches fail.

A powerful analogy is the bridge. It connects your complex idea to a simple concept your audience already understands. It’s the difference between confusion and clarity, between a lost opportunity and a "lightbulb" moment. Finding the right one is a creative superpower, and AI can be your partner in discovering it.

Use case spotlight: Making the complex compelling

A founder is pitching their revolutionary blockchain technology to a venture capitalist who has a finance background, not a technical one. Instead of diving into "decentralized ledgers" and "cryptographic hashes," they say, "Think of it like a Google Doc. Everyone can see the changes in real-time, and there’s a permanent history of every edit, so no one can secretly alter it." Suddenly, the core value proposition—transparency and security—clicks.

This happens every day. A data scientist explaining a predictive model to the sales team, "It's like a weather forecast for customer behavior. A doctor explaining a complex treatment to a patient, "Think of it like training your body's personal security team". Leaders, sellers, and educators who communicate most effectively are masters of analogy. Now, you can use AI to generate and test these powerful communication shortcuts in seconds.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

Think of a complex, technical, or niche topic you often have to explain. It could be a key part of your job, a product feature, or a personal passion.

👉 Time to tinker: Open your favorite AI tool. Copy the prompt below, filling in the [bracketed] sections with your own details.

📝 Prompt:

💡 Pro tip: Want to refine the output even further? Try these follow-up prompts after the initial response.

• To match your audience's interests: "Great, now can you generate three more analogies for the same concept, but this time they should all be related to [a specific domain, e.g., 'cooking,' 'sports,' or 'gardening']?"

• To stress-test your analogy: "Let's use the [Chosen Analogy]. What are the potential ways this analogy could be misunderstood by my audience? How can I clarify it to avoid that?"

What did you discover?

This is one of the most creatively satisfying AI experiments.

• What complex topic did you choose?

• Which analogy was the biggest "aha!" moment for you?

• Did you find a metaphor you can immediately use in your next meeting, presentation, or email?

Share your best analogies in the comments!

📩 Until next time—keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep innovating. Not subscribed yet? Hit the button at the top. You won’t want to miss what’s next.

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Hi, I'm Natalie, Founder & Managing Partner at GenEdge. At GenEdge™, we partner with marketing and communications teams who are under pressure to do more with less. And we help them do it smarter—by integrating generative AI where it actually works. We help you build real workflows, create better content, and get the kind of results that matter to your organization.

Learn more about my services on the GenEdge website.