An old man storms into his doctor’s office, furious.
“Doc, my new twenty-two-year-old wife is pregnant. You performed my vasectomy thirty years ago, and I want to know what the hell you’re going to do about it.”
The doctor doesn’t flinch.
“Let me tell you a story. A hunter once left the house and accidentally grabbed an umbrella instead of his rifle. Out of nowhere, a bear appeared. The hunter pointed the umbrella, pulled the handle, and the bear dropped dead.”
“Impossible,” the old man snaps. “Someone else must have shot that bear.”
“My point exactly,” the doctor says.
Why the doctor didn’t just say it
The doctor could have told the old man the truth directly: “Your wife is cheating on you.” That would have been efficient. It would also have started a fight, triggered denial, and accomplished nothing.
Instead, the doctor used an analogy, and the old man arrived at the devastating conclusion on his own.
That’s the secret power of analogy in persuasion. When people reach a conclusion themselves, they trust it in a way they’ll never trust something told to them. The analogy doesn’t argue. It invites. And the reader, walking through the door of their own volition, feels ownership over the insight.
Before we go further, let’s get precise about what we’re talking about, because analogy has two close cousins that get confused with it:
- A metaphor uses one thing to mean another. “The office was a beehive.” Brief, poetic, implied.
- A simile compares two things using “like” or “as.” “The office buzzed like a beehive.” A touch more explicit.
- An analogy is a logical argument. It demonstrates how two things are alike in structure, then argues that they must therefore be alike in conclusion. It’s not decorative, it’s persuasive architecture.
The doctor’s analogy works because the structure is airtight: a hunter fires a weapon that can’t actually shoot, yet a bear ends up dead. Therefore, someone else did the shooting. An old man “fires blanks,” yet his wife ends up pregnant. Same conclusion.
The old man couldn’t escape the logic because he built the bridge himself.
The Terminator analogy
For a masterclass in analogy-driven persuasion, let’s turn to an unexpected source: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In 2015, Arnold published a Facebook post called I don’t give a ** if we agree about climate change. His strategy was brilliant. Rather than arguing about whether climate change is real, he sidestepped the entire debate and led with facts no reasonable person could dispute:
- 7 million people die every year from pollution
- 19,000 people die every day from fossil fuel emissions alone
- Renewable energy drives economic growth
Then he deployed the analogy:
“There are two doors. Behind Door Number One is a completely sealed room, with a regular, gasoline-fueled car. Behind Door Number Two is an identical, completely sealed room, with an electric car. Both engines are running full blast.
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I want you to pick a door to open, and enter the room and shut the door behind you. You have to stay in the room you choose for one hour. You cannot turn off the engine. You do not get a gas mask.
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I’m guessing you chose Door Number Two, with the electric car, right? Door Number One is a fatal choice, who would ever want to breathe those fumes?
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This is the choice the world is making right now.”
It’s an Inescapable Box, an analogy so structurally sound that any intellectually honest person is forced to accept the conclusion. Arnold didn’t ask you to believe in climate change. He asked you to choose which room you’d rather die in. By the time you’ve made that choice, you’ve already agreed with him, and you did it yourself.
That’s the Terminator analogy. It doesn’t persuade by force. It persuades by design.
Why this works for you
Arnold was wading into a contentious social issue. You have an easier job. Your prospects want to be persuaded.
Think about it. If someone has a problem they want solved, a real, aching, persistent problem, they’re actively looking for a solution. And if they’ve found their way to your content, they’re hoping you’re the one.
They want to understand why you’re the right choice. They want to believe it. They’re not fighting you; they’re waiting for you to give them a reason.
The right analogy, at the right moment, told the right way, might be exactly what they need.
Because the deepest persuasion doesn’t happen when you tell someone what to think. It happens when you hand them a structure so elegant, so undeniably logical, that they can’t help but think it themselves.
Find the analogy that fits your argument. Build it carefully. Test it on someone who disagrees with you. If they can’t wriggle out of it, you’ve got your Inescapable Box.
Then open the door and let your reader walk through it on their own.