The First Step to Making Money: Learning Deep Thinking

Naval Ravikant, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley Investment,” once proposed a viewpoint:

In modern society, if you want to make money, hard work is just a conventional factor, not a decisive one.

After years of working, he observed that the busiest people in the workplace generally have low salaries.

In his view, a person’s inability to make money is not due to insufficient effort, but to too little thinking.

Because when thinking decreases, the whole person lives as if on an assembly line, mechanically repeating every day.

Writer Li Shanglong said: You can never make big money relying on physical strength and time alone.

The first step to making money must start with deep thinking.

01

Let me first tell you a story about a shop owner.

In Yuyao, the “hometown of small appliances,” there are thousands of small appliance shops.

No matter what small appliances customers want, merchants can quickly find all the parts and assemble finished products within one town.

So every household does business in all categories, and who gets orders depends entirely on luck.

Gu Wenjie was one of these shop owners, and initially, his business was lukewarm.

To attract orders, despite having only a junior high school education, he read business cases everywhere and studied business knowledge.

Once, he suddenly noticed the phrase “differentiated management.”

He realized that his business was exactly the same as others’, so customers naturally had no reason to choose him.

For the next few days, he couldn’t eat or sleep well, constantly pondering how to create differences to attract customers.

A week later, he made a bold decision: cut all businesses and keep only electric blankets.

People around him laughed at him: this was tantamount to shutting customers out and cutting off his own financial path.

Unexpectedly, Gu Wenjie’s “only selling electric blankets” actually attracted the attention of electric blanket customers.

The originally scattered electric blanket orders gradually concentrated in Gu Wenjie’s hands.

But he didn’t stop there, instead thinking about how to expand his advantage.

Because the local electric blanket categories were limited, he decided to invest in research and development to make all categories of electric blankets.

In just one year, Gu Wenjie secured the top position in local electric blankets and made a fortune.

02

Now let me tell you a story about a salesperson.

After graduating from university in 2006, Cao Zhiyuan became a real estate salesperson.

To get commissions, colleagues worked desperately to sell houses every day, even skipping meals.

While everyone was busy, Cao Zhiyuan often hid away to think.

He believed that this bustling sales office had more than just one way to make money by selling houses.

He stared at the crowds and thought hard.

Gradually, he discovered there were two types of people: those who came to look at houses and those who had just bought houses.

Salespeople only focused on the former, always ignoring the latter.

Little did they know, the latter group was exactly the customer base for decoration companies and furniture companies.

The sales office happened to have first-hand information about home buyers, enabling quick and precise advertising for decoration and furniture.

After thinking it through, Cao Zhiyuan spotted this opportunity.

So he set his sights on the “Owner’s Manual” that new owners must have.

The reason was simple: the manual was used frequently and was perfect for carrying advertisements.

He contracted the printing of “Owner’s Manuals” for all local sales offices, providing them free to developers.

Through developers, he could naturally deliver advertisements precisely to home buyers.

Just like that, by adding advertisements to manuals, Cao Zhiyuan earned his first pot of gold.

03

Next, let me tell you a story about a mechanic.

Xu Zhen was originally a mechanic at a large enterprise.

Logically speaking, workers like him basically had no room for promotion and would remain at this level for life.

But in ten years, he was promoted repeatedly and eventually became general manager of a branch company with an annual salary of over one million.

It turned out that years ago, while maintaining a production line, he smelled a strange odor.

The maintenance supervisor told him that various smells in the workshop were normal and not to worry about it.

But he was puzzled about why there was this strange smell.

For the next week, he inspected this production line every day, crawling into various mechanical structures to find the source of the smell.

Finally, he discovered that a liquid seal tank had slight leakage.

After equipment operation, under high-temperature heating, the leaked liquid would emit the strange smell.

But he didn’t directly replace the liquid seal tank; instead, he thought about why other liquid seal tanks had no problems.

After careful comparison, he found that this production batch of liquid seal tanks had issues.

So he reported the problem to his supervisor.

Unexpectedly, a few days later, headquarters replaced all liquid seal tanks from that batch across more than ten production lines.

Afterward, he learned that liquid seal tank leakage caused insufficient machine pressure, increasing defect rates on many production lines.

Headquarters had previously sent technicians to investigate multiple times but never found the cause, while Xu Zhen’s thorough investigation directly helped headquarters solve the problem.

It was through this incident that Xu Zhen entered the chairman’s view and received promotion and reuse.

04

Why did I tell these three stories above?

I want to tell everyone: even with the most ordinary things, some people can achieve different results. The root of the difference lies in the different depths of thinking between people.

In daily work, many people’s thinking always stays at the surface level.

But smart people often find problems and solutions from higher dimensions.

In Huizhou, Guangdong, there’s a Mr. Mo who has been in the small appliance business for 20 years.

Because he entered the industry early, he made hundreds of thousands of yuan annually back then.

Later, with the rise of e-commerce, his business plummeted.

Throughout the year, the money he earned could barely make ends meet, living a tight life.

In recent years, with no business, he stayed home thinking of ways out.

He summarized the reasons for his decline, mainly failing to keep up with the times.

He wondered if there was any place that was like China 20 years ago.

The answer was: Vietnam.

With this idea, he hired a translator and went straight to Vietnam.

After a round of investigation, he came back, directly closed his shop, rented a warehouse in Vietnam, and started working.

He skillfully followed his decades of business experience and quickly expanded sales channels.

In the first month, he earned what he would make in a year in China.

Einstein once said: The answer is always one dimension higher than the problem.

Low-dimensional diligence can never match high-dimensional thinking.

If you’re always trapped in low-level thinking, you’ll be confused by appearances and keep spinning in place.

When you can’t deeply touch the root of problems, all efforts are naturally wasted.

As stated in “Deep Thinking”:

For people to stand out, they must first excel in thinking ability.

In this era of fierce competition, the only way to truly make money is through brainpower.

Learning to think in higher dimensions and seeing the essence clearly is how you discover the secrets of wealth.

05

In “Cognitive Breakthrough,” there’s a “Thinking-Return” curve.

When thinking accumulates to a certain degree, returns will show explosive growth.

For a person to become wealthy, they must start with thinking in daily minutiae.

I’ll provide two methods for deep thinking.

1. Continuous Active Questioning Method

Business blogger @Wendao is a mechanical parts factory manager.

During the pandemic, the factory almost collapsed due to broken capital chains.

Several shareholders proposed urgently collecting payments from customers to ease cash flow pressure.

But Wendao rejected this outright, instead providing customers with payment deferrals and other preferential schemes.

Why did he do this?

He shared his thinking process in an article:

Why did the capital chain break? Because the factory accumulated large inventory, occupying cash flow and increasing storage costs.

Why was there inventory? Because customer purchasing volume declined.

Why did purchasing volume decline? Because customers had tight funds.

Why were customer funds tight? Because the pandemic caused customers additional operating costs.

So rather than collecting payments and making things difficult for customers, it was better to offer incentives to quickly clear inventory.

With a series of preferential schemes, the factory quickly cleared inventory and recovered some funds.

This is the continuous questioning method, relying on active questioning to gradually go from surface problems to core and essence.

In the questioning process, you’ll also discover new angles and new connections.

Gradually, you can further enrich your understanding of events.

Finally, you can prescribe the right medicine and find the secret to making money.

2. Diary Passive Review Method

Writing a diary seems simple but is actually a powerful deep thinking tool.

Sales expert Li Lin, when working as a frontline salesperson, spent one hour every night writing in his diary.

He would carefully recall from morning work:

Where did he make sales pitches and to whom?

What scripts did he use, how did the other party react, and how did they respond?

How was this deal closed, and why did that deal fail?

Like this, from morning to night, he reviewed every customer he met without missing one.

Then every week, through his diary, he summarized successful cases and conducted data analysis.

Finally, in just one month, he could summarize highly successful scripts and accurately describe user profiles.

Using the diary review method, Li Lin could win sales championships regardless of what product he sold and gradually became a sales expert.

In real life, many people always fall into a state of muddled work.

Even if you want to escape the current situation, you don’t know where to start or find ideas.

At this time, you might as well use the diary review method to force yourself into deep thinking.

In your diary, you need to record your daily observations in detail.

This way, your brain will naturally analyze, help you clarify the internal logic of things, and then explore ways to make money.

At Oxford University, there’s a widely circulated “Gray Man Theory.”

So-called “gray men” refer to students who haven’t thought sufficiently and only obtained degrees through desperate hard study.

Such people are at the bottom of the contempt chain at Oxford University.

Because people who bury their heads in hard study and repeatedly learn shallow knowledge are destined to be unremarkable.

Making money is actually the same - blindly working hard, exhausting yourself, makes it difficult to earn big money.

Financial scholar Tang Ya said in “Where Does Money Come From”:

Wealth is just a result; behind it is actually a series of correct decisions about people and capital.

So no matter when, learning to work with your brain and understanding how to dig deep into underlying logic is how wealth flows to you.