People with Low Cognition Have a Common Trait#
Charlie Munger once said: "Those who have a hammer see everything as a nail." People with low cognition are like holding a rusty hammer; when faced with problems, they can only bang away recklessly, ultimately bending the nail and cracking the wall, yet blaming the tool for being inadequate. Their life dilemmas ultimately stem from the same pit: they have turned their brains into "nail houses," refusing to accept the complexity of the world.
1. Cognitive Closure: Eager to Label Life#
When Nokia was acquired by Microsoft in 2012, the CEO lamented, "We didn't do anything wrong, but we don't know why we lost." The answer was already written in cognition—when Apple rewrote the rules with touch screens, Nokia's executives were still testing "indestructible mobile keyboards" in the lab. Each of us is pushed along by the tide of society; the times will eliminate you without prior notice, so it’s important to think more and have a certain foresight.
There is a psychological concept called "cognitive closure": to escape uncertainty, people forcibly put a period at the end of problems. For example, when hearing that a blind date has been divorced, they immediately conclude, "This person must have issues"; when seeing a colleague promoted, they say, "It must be through connections." This habit of rushing to conclusions is essentially replacing thought with laziness.
Kodak invented the digital camera but dared not promote it, fearing it would impact their film business, and ended up being abandoned by the times. In contrast, Fujifilm applied its photo-sensitive technology to cosmetics and successfully transformed itself.
2. Stubbornness: Mistaking Prejudice for Truth#
People with low cognition always live in their own logical closed loops, refusing to break boundaries. In Lao She's writing, the character Xiangzi saves money by pulling a rickshaw all his life, yet because of his rigid thinking, he would rather exhaust himself than listen to advice. When others suggest he save in a bank or learn to invest, he insists, "Having money in hand feels secure." When Huni urged him to curry favor with the wealthy (which today means networking or seeking powerful connections), he kept his distance, ultimately ending up with nothing.
Such people are everywhere in reality: when you advise them to learn new skills, they say, "Can you make money from this?" When you analyze industry trends, they respond, "I've eaten more salt than you've eaten rice."
Luo Xiang pointed out: the less knowledgeable a person is, the more absolute their beliefs. There is a psychological phenomenon called the "Dunning-Kruger effect," where less capable individuals tend to overestimate themselves. For instance, someone who has just learned about fitness will instruct others on their movements, and after reading a couple of business books, they feel qualified to give advice. This blind confidence is essentially a cognitive "information cocoon"—they only accept information that aligns with their expectations, mistaking prejudice for truth and ignorance for personality.
3. Refusal to Self-Reflect: Only Seeing Others, Not Themselves#
In ancient Greece, a student boasted to Socrates about his land being "vast," only for Socrates to ask him to find it on a map, and he couldn't even mark a sesame-sized point. The student fell silent and never dared to boast again. In contrast, people with low cognition are the opposite—they always focus on others' shortcomings but never dare to look in the mirror.
True experts possess a "beginner's mind," while those with low cognition are like a cup filled with water; pouring in new knowledge will only cause it to overflow. I once saw an entrepreneur whose company had lost money for three consecutive years; when employees offered suggestions, he dismissed them all: "What do you know? I started with this model." In the end, the team dispersed, and the company went bankrupt. His problem wasn't a lack of ability, but rather that past experiences became shackles.
4. Rigid Thinking: Using "Old Maps" to Find New Continents#
There is a classic experiment: bees and flies are placed in a glass bottle with the bottom facing a light source. The bees desperately crash toward the light until they die from exhaustion; the flies, however, flit around chaotically and manage to escape through the opening. People with low cognition are like bees, only using past experiences to solve new problems, resulting in increasing despair with greater effort.
Steve Jobs said, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." The essence of this statement lies in "actively breaking cognitive boundaries." For example, Pinduoduo was criticized as "low-end" in its early days, but Huang Zheng saw through the purchasing power of the sinking market and the feasibility of the "social e-commerce" model; when Tesla first made electric cars, traditional car companies mocked, "Can this thing even be on the road?" In the end, Musk proved them wrong. The key to business success has never been funding or resources, but rather the dimension of cognition.
Peter Drucker warned long ago: the most dangerous mistake is not having the wrong answer, but asking the wrong question. Sometimes, when you ask the right question, half the problem is solved. Some attribute their unhappy marriages to "clashing zodiac signs," while others blame investment failures on "bad luck." They seem unable to distinguish between causation and correlation.
Casino slot machines intentionally set up the "near-miss effect" (almost winning) to create an illusion of control. Yet how many people mistake randomness for a pattern and luck for skill?
It is said that Uniqlo's Tadashi Yanai has a habit of personally working as a cashier for three days each year. He said, "What you see in the reports are just numbers; what you hear at the counter is the reality." Procter & Gamble once dominated its peers using this logic; they reportedly invited housewives to the company to discuss various inconveniences and needs in their lives, and once adopted, they would receive corresponding rewards.
How to Achieve a Cognitive Breakthrough?#
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Use "Occam's Razor" to Shatter Cognitive Shackles
When faced with complex problems, first ask, "If I could only keep three elements, which three would they be?" This is essentially the "first principles" approach that Musk constantly emphasizes. Traditional views hold that electric vehicles are expensive and have short ranges, making large-scale development difficult. But Musk sees it differently; starting from the basic elements of batteries, he discovered that the raw materials lithium and cobalt are not costly, but were previously inflated by complex supply chains and high assembly costs. Thus, he focused on optimizing battery production processes and renegotiating with suppliers to lower costs, ultimately allowing Tesla to enter the public eye at a more affordable price and driving a transformation in the entire electric vehicle industry. -
Establish a "Cognitive Error Correction System"
How to implement this? Prepare a "face-slapping notebook" specifically to record instances where you judged incorrectly, and regularly review it to break down mental walls. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "The Black Swan," once said: what stands between you and the pinnacle of cognition is often not the unknown, but the known. People with low cognition cling to old tickets while trying to board new ships, ultimately only able to complain at the dock about "the world going downhill." In contrast, true experts have transformed themselves into transformers—today they may break down into cars and race, and tomorrow they may assemble into planes and soar.
Let us encourage each other.