Chapter 24 3. Solving problems by analogy

Mao Liqun is the founder of the famous Fangtai Group.When he first started his business, he invented an electronic flint gun. The product was very good, but there was no market for it.Later, he decided to participate in the factory fair, hoping to use this platform to open up sales. However, in such a big trade show, how can it attract the attention of buyers?Suddenly, he remembered the story of Chinese Moutai entering the international market At the Panama International Fair, no one cares about Moutai.On the last day, the salesperson simply threw Moutai into the hall, and the aroma of the wine immediately attracted many merchants and judges, who re-selected and awarded Moutai an international gold medal.

This story inspired his thinking, and he decided to take similar measures: holding a flamethrower in his left hand and a pulse gun in his right hand, dancing with both hands, da da da, pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa, and shouted: ha Hello!The humorous behavior and product demonstration immediately attracted many merchants, and the electronic lighter became a hit. Mao Liqun's successful breakthrough lies in his use of analogy. The so-called analogy is a thinking method that starts from the fact that two or two types of objects have some similar or identical attributes, and deduces that one of the objects may have other attributes that the other or another type of object already has.Analogy has a great guiding role in guiding inventions and solving problems, and has been highly praised by thinkers and scientists.Astronomer Kepler said: Analogy is my most reliable teacher.The philosopher Kant said: Whenever reason lacks a reliable line of argument, the method of analogy often guides us forward.Now, the role of analogy is getting more and more attention.Japanese scholar Dalu.Jean believes that the psychological mechanism of creating associations is first of all an analogy. Even if people have already understood the psychological process of creation, they cannot enter a similar mental state from the outside. Therefore, in order to provide a good psychological state for creative activities, a special method must be adopted. Simply put, use an analogy.

To sum up, there are three main functions of analogy: (1) guiding research; (2) transplanting experience; (3) effectively influencing others.There are many types of analogy, including shape analogy, functional analogy, causal analogy, symmetric analogy, model analogy and many other aspects.We will focus on how to develop our own analogy ability. (1) Cultivate an intuition for similarity The development of human cognition is always from unfamiliarity to familiarity.For the understanding of a new thing, you can use the old things as a reference.In order to create new things or effectively understand new things, one must first have an intuition sensitive to similarity.

One Sunday, the famous French doctor Rene Kewa took his daughter to the park to play.Daughter asks dad to play seesaw with her, and he says yes.After playing for a while, the doctor felt a little tired, so he put half of his face on one end of the seesaw and pretended to be asleep.The daughter was very happy to see her father.Suddenly, the doctor heard a crisp sound.When I opened my eyes, it turned out that my daughter was knocking on the other end of the seesaw with a small wooden stick.This phenomenon immediately reminded the doctor of a problem he had encountered in medical treatment: at that time, the way doctors auscultated was to directly stick the ear to the patient's diseased part, which was neither convenient nor scientific.The doctor thought: Since knocking on one end of the seesaw can clearly hear the other end, can the sound of a certain part of the patient's body be heard clearly by the doctor through something?

Renekewa rolled a long trumpet out of cardboard, placed the big end against the patient's chest, and stuffed the small end in his ear. As a result, he could hear the heart sounds very clearly.The world's first stethoscope thus came into being.Later, he replaced hard paper with wood and made a single-ear wooden stethoscope. Later generations developed a modern and widely used binaural stethoscope on this basis. Analogy thinking has the function of drawing inferences from one instance and understanding by analogy.Thinking by analogy tends to follow these three steps: (1) Alertness to phenomena, that is, to act on the fly.

(2) Touch the class. (3) Bypass. The instant unity of these three points is the intuition of similarity. (2) Find the correspondence directly Analogy thinking is not only a passive feeling, but also an active development, that is, you can force yourself to make analogies.Therefore, when you want to create something but your ideas are exhausted, you can use analogy to directly find the counterparts similar to the objects and purposes of creation from nature or artificial objects, so as to reduce the shortcomings of imagining out of thin air.Such as borrowing the principle of the tortoise, designing water and land dual-purpose vehicles, imitating the flight of bats, and carrying out ultrasonic orientation and so on.

There is another type of directly looking for analogy counterparts: it does not first clarify the purpose of creation, but first discovers that something has characteristics that are worth learning, and then finds and creates something that can correspond to it. If you accidentally step on a banana peel while walking, it is easy to slip.This is a phenomenon that many people are familiar with.In the 1960s, an American scholar became very interested in this phenomenon.He observed through a microscope and found that the banana peel is composed of hundreds of thin layers, and it is easy to slip between the layers.He suddenly thought: If you can find a substance similar to banana peel, it can be used as a good lubricant.In the end, he found that molybdenum disulfide was very similar in structure to banana peel.After repeated experiments, a lubricant with excellent performance was produced.

After reading such a case, are you tempted? If you can also think about this common phenomenon by analogy, maybe you can also create such a miracle! (3) Let the lessons of the past effectively guide today In the latter part of World War II, Germany began to study nuclear weapons.This news attracted the attention of scientists such as Einstein who had moved to the United States. They hoped to persuade President Roosevelt to conduct research on nuclear weapons in the United States.Roosevelt's friend economist Alexander.Sachs, volunteered to persuade the President.But the president was not interested in these jerky scientific theories at all, so he flatly rejected his request.The next day, Sachs went to see the president again.This time, instead of talking about nuclear weapons research, he talked about history from the very beginning:

During the Anglo-French war, Napoleon was defeated repeatedly at sea.At this time, a young man named Fulton invented the ship.He found Napoleon and said that as long as he made ships according to his method, he could defeat the powerful British fleet.This was a very desirable suggestion, but because Napoleon did not believe in this new invention and believed that the use of ships was impossible, he missed the strategic opportunity to defeat Britain. After the talk, the far-sighted Roosevelt immediately agreed, and immediately organized some people to study the atomic bomb, which eventually led to the production of the atomic bomb.

A creationist said it well: To have the ability to transfer experience, you must first have the ability to be good at discovering similarities.Whether it's to achieve new results or avoid old mistakes, don't underestimate the power of analogies!