Before You Read
I don’t know how you landed on this page. Maybe you searched for something. Maybe a friend sent you the link. Either way, since you’re here, I’m not going to talk like I’m giving a lecture.
None of the conclusions in this post are things I “believe” in the sense of permanent truth. They’re all things I currently think, for now. There’s a difference.
My Stance on “Genius” Is Pretty Straightforward
I don’t think genius exists.
That’s not modesty. It’s not irony. I mean it.
Think about it carefully. If there really were genetically hardwired, unbridgeable cognitive differences between people, those differences should show up as deficits—like congenital alexia, or total color blindness. Those are hardware-level, pathological differences. But do you really think Newton or Einstein was in that category compared to the average person?
I don’t.
Everyone has basically the same brain structure, and more importantly, the brain is plastic. That’s been proven over and over in neuroscience. Whatever you do repeatedly, your neural pathways strengthen accordingly. Whatever kind of thinking you practice, that “muscle” grows.
So where does the real difference lie?
In how you use your brain. In what thinking habits you’ve built. In whether you swallow conclusions whole or chew on them first.
If that premise holds, then the word “genius” needs to be pulled down from its pedestal. It should describe a state, not an identity. If someone performs extraordinarily well in a domain, it means they’ve built an exceptionally efficient mental operating system for that domain—nothing more.
What we should actually do is not get anxious, not feel inferior, not bow down to other people’s achievements, but deconstruct: How do they think? What’s their first step when facing a problem? How do they get unstuck? What’s their information diet?
Extract that, then practice it.
That’s my entire methodology.
How I Actually Think
Let me walk you through a few of my own habits. Nothing earth-shattering, but they’re the底层 logic of how I work and think.
One: I instinctively dig one level deeper
I use this ability so naturally that I used to assume everyone did. Then I realized that’s not the case.
When faced with a problem, my first reaction is never “how do I fix this,” but “what kind of problem is this, at its core?”
For example, when something breaks, many people’s first instinct is to find out who’s responsible. My first instinct is to reconstruct the internal state of the system at the moment of failure. Who did it is irrelevant. What matters is which part of the design was flawed.
This “see-through” intuition, I traced back, probably comes from two things叠加: some childhood experiences that forced me to learn how to observe people and situations early on, plus years of intense math and science training in the Chinese education system—the kind that teaches you to strip any word problem down to a few equations. That compression ability gets etched into your muscles.
But I have to remind myself—and you, if you’re reading this—intuition is not truth. It’s just a fast mapping based on your past experience. When the environment changes, the “essence” you used to rely on might be wrong. So I added a safety check: every time I feel like I’ve “seen through” something, I ask: “What if my underlying assumption is wrong?”
Two: I act first, then read
This might be the opposite of how many people operate.
When I have an idea, I don’t say “let me go learn the theory first.” I just start building. Whether it’s a product prototype, an article, a workflow—I get an ugly, working version up and running.
Then, while it’s running, I run into concrete problems. That’s when I go look things up, read, ask around.
What’s the benefit? You have a coordinate system.
Every piece of knowledge you acquire is attached to a specific, real problem. You don’t get lost in the ocean of information because you know exactly what you’re missing and what you’re looking for. By contrast, if you learn first and then do, you have no anchor—you remember a lot but don’t know where to place it, and eventually you forget most of it.
Of course, this approach has a cost: you’ll make mistakes early on, and your initial output will be rough. But I don’t mind that. Rough is fine, as long as it works. A few iterations and it smooths out.
Three: I connect seemingly unrelated things
I can’t fully explain where this comes from, but it’s there.
I often find that when I’m discussing a problem in domain A, a model or case from domain B pops into my head, and I can clearly sense that they’re structurally isomorphic.
For example, business models and ecosystems, human learning and algorithm training, organizational evolution and biological evolution—on the surface they have nothing to do with each other, but their underlying feedback loops are extremely similar.
This associative ability is valuable, I know that. It lets me borrow tools from one field to solve problems in another, sometimes with surprisingly good results.
But there’s a trap too. Correlation is not causation, and structural similarity doesn’t mean identical mechanisms. I’ve learned this the hard way—over-analogy has led me astray. So now I add a verification step after every association: besides the similarities, what are the key differences?
Four: I filter everything through my own framework before accepting it
This habit probably makes me come across as a bit “stubborn” to others.
No matter who says what to me, my default mode is not “accept,” but “pause.”
I run their words through my own framework: What are their premises? Is the reasoning chain complete? Does the conclusion match what I’ve observed? Is it compatible with my own value system?
If it fits, I take it in. If not, I set it aside. Even if it comes from an authority, an elder, or the mainstream consensus.
This isn’t rebellion. It’s self-defense. In the information age, countless people are trying to stuff their conclusions into your head every day. If you don’t have your own filter, your brain quickly becomes a racecourse for other people’s opinions, and you lose real judgment.
But this habit has a risk too, and I’m well aware of it. It can trap me in confirmation bias—only accepting what fits my existing framework and blocking out genuinely challenging information.
So I added a patch: whenever I instinctively want to reject a viewpoint, I force myself to fully restate the other person’s reasoning process until they say “yes, that’s exactly what I meant.” Only then do I decide whether to accept it. This ensures that I’m rejecting it because I genuinely disagree, not because I’m being lazy.
A “Meta-Habit” I Only Recently Noticed
Those four habits above—I’ve known about them for a long time. But after a recent conversation, I realized: there’s an even more fundamental habit that’s been running in the background all along, and I never even named it.
That habit is: I periodically overturn my own previous positions.
Concretely, it shows up in three scenarios:
Scenario one: looking back and cringing at myself
Occasionally I flip through things I wrote three months ago, six months ago. More often than not, my first reaction is: “How could I have thought that? That’s so naïve.”
I used to just chalk that up to “growth.” But now I realize that the truly valuable thing is the specific trigger that made me feel that way—what book did I read? What experience did I have? Who did I argue with?
If I can identify that trigger, I can actively seek it out, rather than passively wait to be hit by it.
Scenario two: arguing myself into a sudden realization
Sometimes when I’m in a heated debate, passionately defending my position, a thought flashes across my mind mid-sentence: “Wait, he might have a point… my original stance has a problem.”
It’s a strange feeling, like the car you’re driving suddenly brakes on its own.
I used to suppress that thought and finish the argument. But now I call a timeout—sometimes even saying out loud: “What you just said made me rethink things. I think my previous reasoning had a hole. Let me walk through it again.”
There’s no shame in that. Turning a debate from “who’s right” into “let’s figure this out together” yields much more fruit.
Scenario three: a too-perfect conclusion makes me uneasy
Here’s an interesting one—when a conclusion is too neat, too self-consistent, with no visible holes, I actually get restless.
This isn’t lack of confidence. It’s the system throwing a forced-update alert. The real world is messy. A perfect conclusion usually means you’ve ignored too many variables, or your assumptions are overly idealized.
When that happens, I deliberately stop and search for counterexamples. I ask: “Under what conditions does this conclusion not hold?” This isn’t about proving myself wrong—it’s about attaching an expiration date and a scope of application to the conclusion.
Tying It All Together
So those five habits—seeing through, acting first, associating widely, filtering critically, and overturning myself—they’re not isolated.
The first four are the application layer of my daily operation. The fifth is the system layer that maintains and upgrades them. Each cycle, the system layer scans the application layer, patches bugs, and sometimes rewrites entire modules.
That’s what I think “progress” really is. Not epiphanies, but day-by-day operation, punctuated by deliberate reflection.
I set myself a minimal daily复盘 (retrospective), with just one question:
“If today’s me could give yesterday’s me one piece of advice, what would it be? And what mistaken premise did that advice reveal in yesterday’s me?”
Just that one question. Answer it every day.
I don’t expect a new insight every single day. But whenever one appears, it’s a tiny version bump—from 1.01 to 1.02, slowly stacking up. Stack them long enough, and when you look back, you might find you’ve迭代 from one old version into a completely different system.
Finally, About “Genius Anxiety”
If you’ve read this far, I think you get the point.
I don’t feel anxious, because I’ve stopped putting myself in the position of “being evaluated.”
When I see someone doing something extraordinarily well, my first reaction is no longer “why can’t I do that,” but “how did they do it? What’s their input? What’s their processing flow? What pitfalls did they avoid?”
Once you switch to the researcher perspective, anxiety vanishes. All that’s left is curiosity and the urge to deconstruct.
You can try it too.
The brain is plastic. So-called genius is just someone who has practiced a set of efficient habits until they became automatic. So-called insight is just a sudden parameter jump in the system after countless trials.
There are no gods. Only algorithms hammered out through repetition.
And today’s algorithm is allowed to be overturned by tomorrow’s.
That’s all I have to say.
One last note: by the time I typed the last word of this post, a few of the positions I took were already flagged for re-examination in my next cycle. That’s not a rhetorical flourish. It’s a fact.