A painter had three colors of paint: black, white and what we would call “red”. Red was the only hue he knew about, so he he just called it “intensity”. He described the colors he mixed in terms of their relative lightness, darkness or intensity.

The painter worked in a studio and never left it. Everything in his studio was some shade or tint of red or gray. (Scholarly note: Some theorists have speculated that the reason all the objects in the artist’s studio were red and gray was that the artist himself had painted them all with the same paints he used for his paintings.)

The artist would compose these red, pink, black, gray, mauve and white objects into monochrome still-life scenes and paint them perfectly photo-realistically in red, pink, black, gray, mauve and white.

One day the painter’s assistant burst into the studio babbling excitedly about a new blue paint he’d seen at the market.

“Blue?” The painter asked him to describe where it fit in the range of colors. How light was “blue”? How dark was it? How intense was it?

The assistant tried to explain it. The painter could tell that what his assistant was describing was nothing more than plain-old intensity. And being a no-nonsense, plain-spoken man, he said so.

The assistant told him that wasn’t right. “Blue” really was different from normal “intensity”.

So the painter challenged him to show him what this so-called “blue” was. “It is easy to talk about theoretical new intensities,” he said, “but it is a whole other thing to actually mix a color. Produce this ‘blue’ for me.” The artist handed the him his black, white and red paints.

The assistant sat down at the easel and began painting the color blue. Or trying to. He mixed up a million permutations of red and black. Then black and white. Then red and white. Then he tried mixing the three pigments together in varying proportions, until he finally found the right combination to make blue.

Seeing blue with his own eyes for the very first time, the artist was amazed. He realized in hindsight how narrow his pink-and-gray studio-enclosed world had been. He spent a few days experimenting with his improvised and somewhat imperfect blue, and decided it was time to leave his studio, and venture out into the world to buy himself some real blue paint.

After this, the artist’s paintings acquired an entirely new depth of richness and expressiveness. His career entered a new stage, and it was only at this point that he became the legendary figure we remember today.

The end.

*

The moral of this story: Anyone who wishes to introduce a completely new concept to another person must start where the other person is. We cannot ask anyone to come to us — not right away.

Instead we should explain the concept simply, using only familiar terms that the other person understands. And we should show the other person how this new idea will work within his existing way of doing things.

Once we’ve done that, the other person will understand us better and trust us more, and be far more willing to take the next step in exploring the matter to its depth.

This is how the world changes.

Good luck!