03/02/2026
If you're so smart, why are you broke?
To understand what something is, like genius level thinking, one needs to understand what it is not.
Genius level thinking is not stupid thinking.
What is stupid thinking? Stupid thinking is when you close your mind off once you’ve reached the limits of what you know. Stupid thinking is to stop thinking too early. To reach a point where you react with your pre-programmed thoughts and fail to reach any novel insight.
Genius level thinking, on the other hand, is the ability to hold threatening ideas in the realm of possibility, paired with the intention to understand rather than just know. It’s your ability to traverse the all potential knowledge and pull them together into something coherent or useful, if not something entirely new.
Now then, the question is; what's the difference between knowing and understanding?
Knowing is when you learn a lot and memorize facts about a specific domain until you become an expert.
Understanding is about how sophisticated your entire cognitive operating system is. One can understand a lot while knowing very little and use that insight to take an action that leads to a more worthwhile result.
The "smart but broke" phenomenon stems from knowing a lot but understanding very little. A business management lecturer who's money is eaten by ducks. A businessman who has all the money in the world but finds himself unhappy. A creative with beautiful work that can’t make a living. They know a lot in their respective domain, but can’t see outside of their bubble of knowledge, and that bubble of knowledge does not provide enough surface area to identify and solve problems.
That’s why learning how to think is so important.
Because your mind is how you interact with reality.
Thinking, then, determines the outcome of your life.
Every passing moment where you engage in stupid thinking contributes to a compounding effect, digging you into a rut so deep you can’t even access the idea that would lead you out.
