One big difference I see in how minds work is their ability to model. A few people I know focus on end-to-end model thinking — trying to maximize against some functions.
The rest of them seem to avoid thinking outside a small info bubble/closed system, not sure why, but it looks like it creates anxiety when they start feeding too much info. Instead of trying to extract abstractions that make it possible to model the complexity and fuzz the non-important parts.
The same people, when they come up with a product implementation idea, avoid thinking about all the things required to be in place for the product to actually satisfy some real need/want. The product ends up detached from user need. The tech doesn't work.
And it doesn't matter if they can code or if Claude can work, because the directions required to define what needs to be there are not present.
I realized I need to take the thinking of these people as their ideas and advice — as inputs that need to be sanitized. The easy way I found is to remodel why they think the way they think — it's like having a safe VM running their code (thinking) through my computer (my brain).
These same people, usually years later, realize you were telling them things they were not able to comprehend at the time, but they realized those things were so important and would have saved them from suffering so much. They start to treat your voice with reverence instead of thinking through with their own minds and stress-testing against reality.
I would love to read some research about this and how to take advantage of it, or at least avoid the toxic influence such minds can have against one's own well-being and success.