Little lengthy, but quite accurate.
Have you seen someone juggle several items with one hand? That's the point of async. Blocking (non-async) it like writing - it requires constant work from each hand. If you want to write twice as fast you'll need two hands and write with both at the same time. That's multithreading. If you juggle, the moment the item leaves your hand and is in the air, you have it left with nothing to do. That's similar to network IO - you make a request and are just waiting for the server to respond. You could be doing something in the meantime, like catching another item and throwing it back up again. That's what "await" does - it says I threw and item into the air, so I want my current thread / hand to switch over to catch something else now.
Source from the same user as last week!