If you can’t describe it, you don’t know it well enough

A key to understanding how well you know a subject is how easily you’re able to explain it to others. As I shared last year in “ Explain it to me like I’m five “, being able to distill a complex subject down is a great skill to develop.

In the case of that post from last year, Oscar was very quickly able to come up with an analogy to share with Michael to help explain the situation, and for me, that’s a big designation of whether I really understand something. With most aspects of what I do, analogies can go a long way toward simplifying an explanation of something that’s really more complicated.

For example, understanding the difference between a website “domain name” and website “hosting” can be tricky if it’s not something you deal with regularly. A quick analogy might be to explain the domain name like your mailing address (so people can find you) and your hosting like your land (where all of your stuff is).

Another one is the example I shared last year that used an analogy to attempt to explain the difference between the data you get from Google Analytics versus the data you get from Google Search Console.

If done well, analogies can be amazing.

The Process