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Comment by deltaonefour | Hacker News Reader

I've talked to some of these people in depth and analyzed them.

The difference with these people is incredible lack of brain fog. Everything is utterly clear for them. If you're a 10xer then this post characterizes the difference between you and others. It's not that other people are stupider, but there's a sort of brain fog that prevents people from seeing a solution. We sort of have to wander through a fog and look things up to arrive at a solution.

What you will find is that this brain fog is independent of creativity. There are many 10xers who aren't that creative.

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I think it's about breaking down things into abstracts. Sort of a mental principle component analysis.

I'll preface this by saying I've been described as a 10x-er by others my whole career. I do not consider myself one but I've noticed that what people respond to is my ability to break down problem spaces into very small pieces and think about it in the abstract.

I also notice that this is what I see in folks that I consider are 10x-ers.

It's also not that I think others can't do that. That would be hubris. However I think it takes practice, and practice first requires self reflection.

I'm currently mentoring interns and juniors, and I am trying to teach them to approach problems with that kind of thinking. The ones who can shift into breaking things down like that, are able to chew through stuff much faster and cleaner.

coincidentally the system architects I've worked with who can think like this are always the strongest at creating scalable solutions and adapting to change.

I think there is a deeper truth behind this observation. At least we know that smarter people often have larger brains, better control of alpha-rhythm, better fronto-parietal gamma synchronization, longer dendrites. It is plausible to hypothesize that all these differences add up to larger representational capacity and better separation of concept representations, which subjectively could feel like less brain fog while performing demanding mental tasks.

Anecdotally what I have found is 10xers or high IQ people tend to find the solution that makes utter and complete sense. The simplest most efficient solution is the one they come up with.

The thing that they miss is the novel solution. The WTF solution that's so left field it changes fundamental understanding of everything. It is even rarer to find these types of people. I believe the "creativity" skill is highly independent of "lack of brain fog" so often times the creative people aren't noticeably more intelligent because they have brain fog and aren't as sharp as the classically intelligent person.

They say that Einstein once called his secretary to ask about his address because forgot where he lived.

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