Commonalities of Cognitive Impairment: Are You Among Them?

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 at them, 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 households," 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 their cognition—when Apple rewrote the rules with touch screens, Nokia's executives were still testing "indestructible phone 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 essential to think more and have a certain foresight.

There is a psychological concept called "cognitive closure": to escape uncertainty, people forcefully put a period on problems. For instance, when hearing that someone has been divorced during a blind date, they immediately conclude, "This person must have issues"; when seeing a colleague promoted, they say, "It must be due to connections." This eagerness to jump to conclusions essentially replaces thinking with laziness.

Kodak invented the digital camera but was afraid to promote it, fearing it would impact their film business, and as a result, was abandoned by the times. In contrast, Fujifilm applied its photo-sensitizing technology to cosmetics and successfully transformed.

2. Stubbornness: Mistaking Prejudice for Truth#

People with low cognition live forever in their own logical closed loops, refusing to break boundaries. In Lao She's writing, the character Xiangzi saves money by pulling a rickshaw his whole 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, "It's more reassuring to hold money in my hand." When Huniu suggests he curry favor with the wealthy (which today would be called networking), he keeps his distance, ultimately ending up with nothing.

Such people are everywhere in reality: when you advise them to learn new skills, they say, "Can this thing make money?"; when you analyze industry trends, they respond, "I've eaten more salt than you've eaten rice."

Luo Xiang pointed out sharply: 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 example, someone who has just learned about fitness might instruct others on proper techniques, or someone who has read a couple of business books might feel qualified to give strategic 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 vast land, only for Socrates to ask him to find it on a map, and the student couldn't even mark a point the size of a sesame seed. From then on, the student kept quiet 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 full of water; pouring in new knowledge only causes it to overflow. I once saw an entrepreneur whose company had lost money for three consecutive years, and when employees offered suggestions, he dismissed them all: "What do you know? I built my business on 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 had become 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 keep crashing 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 every effort.

Steve Jobs said, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." The essence of this statement is "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?" Yet Musk proved them wrong with reality. The key to success in business has never been funding or resources, but rather the dimension of cognition.

Peter Drucker warned long ago: the most dangerous mistake is not an incorrect answer, but an incorrect question. Sometimes, when you ask the right question, you've solved half the problem. Some attribute their unhappy marriages to "astrological conflicts" and blame investment failures on "bad luck." They seem unable to distinguish between causation and correlation.

Casino slot machines deliberately 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 crushed its competitors 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 Cognitive Breakthrough?#

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 also what Musk constantly emphasizes as "first principles." 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 expensive, but past complexities in the supply chain and high assembly costs had inflated prices. 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 of your own judgment errors, and review it regularly to break down mental walls. Nassim Taleb, the author of "The Black Swan," said: what stands between you and cognitive peaks 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 decline of society. 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.