Life is not actually a game of baseball. There is a danger in metaphor. In a metaphor. If you have a single way of looking at a problem, you may not even realize that you are in the thrall of a metaphor.

I help entrepreneurs create new products. I am fond of the product is a game metaphor. I offered it to a client, and he loved it. Too much. I spent much of my time trying to diffuse his enthusiasm for product is a game, because I felt that he was dwelling on it too much. What had been extremely useful to me became something that I hated.

My goal is to explore how to see things from multiple perspectives, to learn new ways of seeing things, and to see new things, things that we didn't even realize were there.

Metaphors are hard to dislodge, often because they come to appear almost self-evident. I thought that my problem was with metaphor, but I really had a problem with a metaphor, and I now know how to deal with a single metaphor: introduce more metaphors!

The power of a metaphor is that it is a way of thinking about, a way of seeing something. And there is a power in seeing something in terms of more than metaphor, from more than one perspective.

When you're out there, casting about for a way to wrap your head around a problem, don't be content to find a single guiding metaphor. Look for two. Or three!