How to think like a strategic genius (5d thinking)

Your ability to think determines the outcome of your life. That is not an exaggeration, and learning to think has never been more important. Especially if you consider yourself a smart person, because you are the most likely to think like an idiot. I mean, it’s all over social media. There isn’t a day that goes by where you see a person with a verifiably high IQ fall into obvious traps. There are plenty of smart people who live in their moms basement who are one french fry away from a heart attack, and there are plenty of dumb people who are abnormally happy, healthy, and wealthy. Rather than talking about first-principles thinking, systems thinking, meta cognition, or anything else that you can ask ChatGPT to teach you about, I want to give you something different. We’re going to start with one-dimensional thinking and slowly work our way towards 5d thinking. If you read carefully, you will experience what it’s like to think on a new level. Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking. – Buckminster Fuller Thinking tip number one: If you want to understand what something is, like genius level thinking, then it helps to understand what it is not. That way, we can identify and avoid stupid thinking. When we observe what stupid thinking looks like, we come to a few insights: Stupid thinking is one-dimensional. People try to jam everything into their own perspective and have difficulty seeing outside of it. Stupid thinking is reductionistic. Experts in one domain, like business, try to reduce everything to a “strategy” problem, as an example. Stupid thinking is tribal. You only trust your group, party, or tribe and consider everyone else wrong because they don’t conform. Stupid thinking does not question. Your justification is “that’s just how it’s done.” As a whole, stupid thinking is about closing 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. With that, we can start to guess at a worthy definition of genius thinking, which could be: The ability to hold threatening ideas in the realm of possibility, paired with the intention to understand rather than just know. The mark of genius thinking is illustrated by the width, depth, and height at which you can think without being cut off from venturing further, often due to holding an idea as absolute. It’s your ability to traverse the full, universal web of ideas (reality, all potential knowledge) and pull them together into something coherent or useful, if not something entirely new. The question then is, what’s the difference between knowing and understanding? And how do you develop width, depth, and height of thought? What if you can take it even further than that? Knowing is horizontal. You learn a lot and memorize facts about a specific domain until you become competent. People who know a lot are “experts,” but we don’t need more experts in today’s world. Understanding is vertical. It’s 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 dumb” phenomenon stems from being horizontally advanced but vertically stuck. 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. A meathead that can’t hold a steady relationship. 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 lead to suffering. That’s why learning how to think is so important. Because your mind is how you interact with reality. You process information → make sense of it (thinking) → make a choice → receive information as feedback → respond to that feedback and repeat the cycle. 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. You can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it. – Albert Einstein Let’s work from the ground up. Lines of thinking are domains you can know a lot about. Lines represent horizontal development (width). These can be anything. Marketing, astrophysics, politics, social dynamics, religion, etc. When you attempt to learn domain specific knowledge, you are increasing the width of that line of thinking. It’s like gaining experience in a video game. (By the way, if you’ve studied Ken Wilber at all, you can see what I’m getting at here, just applied to thinking). Levels of thinking are how you think about each line. Levels represent vertical development (depth). When we observe how cognitive development evolves in collectives and individuals over time, we can notice 5 core patterns: Instinctual (Level 0) – You are born act out of the need for pure survival. You react to stimuli with little thinking in between. Conformist (Level 1) – Black and white thinking. You follow rules and obey authority without questioning. You adopt others perspective. Individualist (Level 2) – Critical thinking emerges and you construct your own model. You build your own perspective. Synthesist (Level 3) – You see your model as one among many. You hold contradictions and use perspectives as tools rather than law or some unquestionable truth. Generative (Level 4) – You create original perspectives that didn’t exist before, or you come to ideas without outside influence. Levels 1 and 2 can be considered “first tier” thinking, which is overly dogmatic. I’m right you’re wrong. Levels 3 and 4 can be considered “second tier” thinking, which reject dogma and seek the ultimate truth that lies in the middle. In the domain of meaning, you are often indoctrinated into one belief system, then you question that belief system and come to your own conclusions (often rejecting the prior), then you start to see truths in all belief systems, and finally you have the ability to create a more expansive one. In politics, much of the fighting and violence we see is do to the general population operating within levels 1 and 2. My group vs yours. Neither side can think beyond their bubble. Again, and I want to make this exceedingly clear because it is such an easy trap to fall into: Genius thinking is the ability to continue thinking. At each level of thinking, your ability to navigate that space of both known and unknown ideas continues to expand. When you are born, you don’t really think. When you are a conformist, you think until you reach a point where you have “the” answer, then you start defending that answer. When you are an individualist, you do the same thing, but with your answer. When you reach synthesist, you can think far and wide, but your ability to create new lines of thought is not fully developed yet. Reaching your highest ability to think, and thus providing the runway for your highest potential in this life, boils down to the simple practice of noticing when your mind feels threatened, being honest with yourself, and at minimum, staying open to new perspectives. Altitude of thinking is the average of all your levels. Altitude represents cross-dimensional development (height). To best understand this, and to almost complete the thinking puzzle, it helps to visualize thinking as a skill tree. In a video game, you can put “points” into certain traits that allow you to do more inside the game. You can take on higher challenges, have more fun, and continue playing. The same holds true with the mind. The thing is, higher level traits can only be unlocked once you meet a specific requirement of lower level traits. You can’t access “level 3” of dexterity without reaching “level 4”…