Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (2016)
I think this article is saying:  - 1st order thinkers primarily see causes and *direct* effects.
  - 2nd order thinkers frequently see causes and their *indirect* effects.

I guess that seems like a reasonable idea.For what it's worth, the truly exceptional people I've met in life had a different quality.* When most people are presented with a difficult/challenging problem, they soon give up.* The most exceptional people that I've met just kept hammering away after the rest of us had stopped. Most of the time, they failed, but if you have some aptitude and you keep hammering, you have a better chance to make breakthroughs that the rest of us don't make.Just as an example, I had worked for a company that used X-ray crystallography as a tool for drug-development. I would be in meetings with crystallographers where we discussed the technical problems they were having in trying to grow crystals. The crystallographers were all smart and talented, but when we had group meetings, there was only one guy who would float suggestion-after-suggestion-after-suggestion, long after everyone else had run out of ideas. I don't think he was any "smarter" than anyone else in the room, but he just could not shut himself off. He was relentless. He went on to make some important contributions to the field.