The Skill That Actually Separates Us
Why abstract thinking is the most underrated competitive advantage you have — and how to use it.
Around 100,000 years ago, something shifted in the human brain that no other species could match.
Homo sapiens developed a cognitive edge — unique to us, absent in Neanderthals and chimpanzees — that didn’t make us stronger or faster or better hunters. It made us something far more dangerous.
It gave us creative self-awareness. The ability to think in the abstract.
And on the surface, that might not sound like much. Abstract thinking. Creative self-awareness. They sound like things you’d put on a LinkedIn profile or read about in a business book. But what they actually unlocked was something that no other species in the history of this planet had ever done before.
They made us able to believe in things that didn’t exist.
To understand what I mean, picture this. An early human reaches down and picks up a seashell from the sand. It has no nutritional value. It can’t shelter you, protect you, or keep you warm at night. By every practical measure, it’s worthless. And yet somehow — through nothing more than collective agreement, with no physical proof and no authority forcing the decision — a group of strangers decides this shell has worth. That you can trade it. That someone across the valley who has never met you, who owes you nothing, will accept it in exchange for something real.
That’s not just the origin of currency. That’s the origin of civilization. Every company, every government, every religion, every stock market that has ever existed — all of it built on the same foundation. The ability to take an abstract idea and make it real enough that other people will act on it together.
Neanderthals couldn’t do this — at least not at the same scale. Their brains were wired for the immediate and the concrete. What’s in front of me right now. What I can see, touch, hunt, use. They were extraordinary at that. But the moment you need to coordinate with strangers around an idea — something invisible, something agreed upon, something imagined — that’s where Homo sapiens left them behind.
We didn’t win because we were stronger. We won because we could think in the abstract.
And 100,000 years later, that same edge is still the most underrated advantage a person can have.
I think about this a lot in the context of my own career. Because the pattern keeps showing up.
I spent over a decade as a photographer — 400+ weddings, magazine shoots, editorial work. Then I moved into artist management in the music industry. Then start-up e-commerce companies. And now I’m building a personal brand. On paper, these look like completely different industries. Different skills, different markets, different languages.
But here’s what I noticed: the frameworks are always the same.
When I moved into artist management, I wasn’t starting from zero. I understood visual storytelling — so I could creative direct shoots, build assets, speak fluently with photographers and videographers we hired. The aesthetic instinct I’d built behind the camera transferred directly into how we built an artist’s identity, their brand, the visual world around their music.
When I started ecommerce companies, the same thing happened. Product photography, brand direction, the way a campaign feels — I wasn’t outsourcing that and hoping for the best. I understood it at a level most founders don’t because I’d built it from the ground up in a completely different context.
The skill didn’t change industries. I did. And I took the abstract understanding of how it worked with me.
That’s what abstract thinking actually is. It’s not a personality trait or some mystical creative gift. It’s the ability to look at a framework in one place and recognize it somewhere else. To see the bones of something — the underlying structure, the principle at work — and apply it somewhere it’s never been applied before.
Here’s the most powerful example I keep coming back to: the path to mastery.
Every athlete, every artist, every entrepreneur who has ever gotten genuinely good at something has taken a different journey to get there. Different starting points, different obstacles, different timelines, different breakthroughs.
But abstractly? The journey is always the same.
You develop some ability. You build momentum. You hit a ceiling. The ceiling frustrates you — emotionally, psychologically. Your performance dips. You reassess. You find new perspective, a new teacher, a new framework. You climb again. Repeat.
The specifics are always unique. The structure is always identical.
Once you see that pattern abstractly, you stop panicking when you hit the ceiling. You recognize it. You know what it means and what comes next. And that recognition alone gives you an edge over everyone around you who is experiencing it for what feels like the first time.
This is why all self-help is essentially the same advice. Because at an abstract level, all human growth is the same journey. The packaging changes. The lessons underneath don’t.
Creativity is the same way.
Most people think of creativity as something reserved for artists — a talent you either have or you don’t. But creativity is just abstract thinking in action. It’s the muscle you use when you’re figuring out how to take your partner on a date that actually means something. How to land a meeting with someone who has no reason to take it. How to position yourself in a market that’s already crowded. How to solve a problem at work that nobody has solved yet because nobody has thought to look at it from a different angle.
Every one of those things is a creative act. And like any muscle, it gets stronger the more you use it — and weaker the more you default to what’s familiar and automatic.
The people who consistently outperform their peers in business, in relationships, in life — they’re rarely the smartest in the room or the most talented. They’re the ones who’ve trained themselves to see connections that other people miss. To take a framework from one world and apply it to another. To stay curious enough, and uncomfortable enough, that their thinking never stops expanding.
That’s the edge. It’s always been the edge.
It’s the same edge that separated us from the Neanderthals 100,000 years ago. The ability to look at a shell and see a financial system. To look at a framework and see a possibility. To look at what is, and imagine what could be.
Use it.