How to Avoid Becoming a “High-Cognition Poor Person”?

Have you ever had this kind of experience? There are quite a number of people in society who think they’re high in cognition, as if they can see through everything. At first, you think they’re awesome, but once you get to know them more deeply, you find out they’re actually pretty stupid—living very poor lives and doing things in a very short-sighted way—extremely disconnected.

In today’s society, people like this have a specific name: high-cognition poor person. They surf the internet every day, love to learn, and love to think, but when it comes time to properly solve a specific problem, they often can’t do it.

If you’re reading my articles, you’ll usually go through three stages. In the first stage, your cognition isn’t that high yet. After reading my content, you think it’s great and inspiring; in the second stage, you gradually feel like you have some cognition, thinking you’re also quite something, you just lack a bit of opportunity; in the third stage, you realize that the you back then was still “sb,” just that you’d convinced yourself you were awesome.

When you’re in the second stage, you feel like you’ve “leveled up” your cognition, so talking with friends becomes smooth and eloquent. Friends start praising your high cognition and high level, and that’s when you get carried away. You easily look down on this person and that person, and everyone looks “just average” to you. But has life changed? No. So people in this stage are the most likely to end up concluding that “high cognition is useless,” which is a very typical high-cognition poor person phase.

But once you really have experienced many things and you’ve gained real firsthand feelings, then when you come back to reread the articles, your agreement will be much deeper. For example, in investing; for example, in starting a business. It also includes relationships within the family and matters of the heart. After you’ve suffered losses and stepped in shit, you’ll truly know what I’m writing about.

Someone will say one thing, but when it’s time to deal with things, they do another. Why? Because they don’t truly believe in the framework they claim to be following. The thinking people have when reading my articles isn’t that it’s not real—it’s just that their firsthand experience isn’t enough. So all they can do is repeat my viewpoints to people at lower levels. When they encounter someone at a higher level, their repetition is very likely to get them shut down, and they themselves won’t act on it based on that. They’re just doing the work of a parrot—completely mimicking a certain way of speaking and a set of values they like, but without real examples to support the way those ideas are built in their own heads. For example, they may always say that doing business should be based on integrity—but when they turn around and sell something themselves, fuck it, they just want to make a quick buck. They might be able to repeat everything I say, but they’re only carrying out another form of “political correctness,” not truly knowing why I say it, nor why they must do the same.

Once you meet some people, you’ll find they’re very “thick.” It’s not that they memorized a few success-cultured one-liners online. Instead, in any industry, when you bring up a problem and ask questions, they can break down the key points and give you very practical, grounded solutions. But the other kind of person is different—if you don’t happen to hit the exact point they’ve memorized and skimmed before, they can’t give you the “standard answers” out loud. If you do, then sure. If not, they’re helpless, or they can only throw out a bunch of big words, like: “AI will eliminate everything,” “the useless class,” “people, goods, and locations,” “blockchain changes the world,” “RWA empowers the real economy,” and so on.

So how can you avoid becoming an all-talk, all-sound “sb” who boasts nonstop? The key is that you need to keep doing things. You need to continuously and deeply understand the internal structure of many things. This thing has no teachers, and no books can directly cram into your brain—you have to experience it and summarize it through real practical matters. When other people bring up these topics again at this point, you’ll find it’s very easy to see where they’re wrong—not because you can only tell them what the correct answer is, but because you can clearly point out the mistakes in their way of thinking, and then explain in a logical, well-structured way why they’re wrong. What do we mean by “well-structured logic”? As long as the other person isn’t someone who doesn’t talk logically, they definitely can’t keep insisting on their own viewpoint anymore. If you can’t do that, then you still need to keep practicing, keep reflecting, keep experiencing, keep cultivating.

A high-cognition poor person is a kind of mockery. In this world, in fact, there doesn’t really exist a group called “high-cognition poor people,” because high cognition is meant to help you achieve strong results. If you’re poor, how high can your cognition be? Whether a person’s cognition is truly high—I can basically tell at a glance. Just ask a few questions about details in specific matters. People who genuinely got results will describe the details very precisely, with very small focus points. In every tiny matter, there’s a lot of space where you can truly fine-tune and work it over. But the high-cognition poor person posing like a show-off is the kind that avoids talking about grounded details and instead only talks about macro trends and state policies, only memorizes internet money-making slogans and quotes from celebrities. They give you a few new concepts, a few network buzzwords for “bashing,” and they want to stop you from continuing to pick apart the details.

The former is common among entrepreneurs. The latter is common among college students and deadbeats who hang around. It’s a kind of “boasting sickness,” and once you cure it, you can move upward; otherwise, that’s just how things will be for you for the rest of your life #Gate广场四月发帖挑战