A learnable framework for acquired-genius cognition. How to find the single variable that matters in any situation — and act on it before everyone else finishes deliberating.
Most people, when faced with a complex problem, do the same thing: they add more information. They research. They consult. They build spreadsheets. They hold meetings. They request more data. They treat complexity as something that requires more complexity to solve.
This is backwards.
Complexity is almost never inherent to a problem. It's decorative. It accumulates around problems the same way barnacles accumulate on a ship's hull — it looks like it belongs there, it feels structural, but it's actually dead weight that slows everything down.
The fastest and most accurate thinkers in any field — deal-makers, athletes, military strategists, emergency physicians — don't add information to solve problems. They subtract it. They strip a situation down to its load-bearing structure and act on whatever is left standing.
Count-To-10 Logic is the formalized version of this process.
The name comes from a simple observation: before you can do calculus, you need to count. Before you can count, you need to understand that one thing comes after another. Every complex system, no matter how sophisticated, rests on a foundation that simple. The framework forces you to find that foundation before engaging with anything above it.
A typical investor evaluates a real estate deal by reviewing the sponsor's track record, the market, the neighborhood, the property condition, the management company, the exit strategy, comparable transactions, the legal structure, and the tax implications. That's ten variables. A three-month process.
CT10 reduces it to two questions:
1. What is the cost basis per unit relative to replacement cost?
If you're buying apartments for less than it costs to build new ones, you have a structural margin of safety. Everything else — the neighborhood narrative, the market forecast, the sponsor's LinkedIn — is noise layered on top of this number.
2. What does the rent-to-price ratio look like?
If current rents service the debt with room to spare, the deal survives a downturn. If they don't, no amount of "value-add upside" fixes the foundation.
Investment bankers will produce a 60-page book with DCF models, comparable company analyses, precedent transactions, and weighted average cost of capital calculations. All valid. All decorative.
CT10: What is the buyer getting that they cannot build?
If the answer is "nothing" — if the technology is replicable, the user base is available through ads, and the team will leave post-acquisition — the company is worth its revenue multiple and nothing more. If the answer is "something that would take years and tens of millions to replicate" — a trusted distribution network, a regulatory license, a community with demonstrated purchasing intent — then the company is worth whatever it costs the buyer to NOT have it for another five years. That's the number.
Most people price their work based on how long it took, how hard it felt, or what other people charge for something that looks similar. These are all decorative variables. They have nothing to do with the answer.
CT10: What measurable outcome does this create for the person paying?
A consultant who spends 45 minutes recalibrating a CEO's strategy — leading to a 5% improvement in a $50M business — just created $2.5M in value. The 45 minutes is irrelevant. The $2.5M is the number. Take a percentage of what you create, not an hourly rate based on what you experience. These are two completely separate numbers, and most people confuse them their entire careers.
CT10 isn't a productivity trick. It exploits how human decision-making actually fails.
| Cognitive Bias | What It Does | How CT10 Neutralizes It |
|---|---|---|
| Information Bias | People seek more information even when it won't change their decision | Forces you to identify the single variable first — additional information must change that variable to be relevant |
| Complexity Bias | People trust complex explanations over simple ones, even when the simple one is more accurate | Strips the problem before evaluating solutions — complexity must be structural to survive |
| Authority Bias | People defer to credentials and consensus over independent analysis | Credentials are decorative — only the logic survives the stripping process |
| Anchoring | First piece of information received disproportionately influences all subsequent judgment | By rebuilding from the foundation up, you set your own anchor instead of inheriting someone else's |
| Analysis Paralysis | Too many variables prevent any decision from being made | Reduces variable count to one — the decision becomes obvious |
The core mechanic of CT10 is subtraction, not addition. This runs counter to how most professionals operate. In business, we're trained to add: more data, more analysis, more stakeholders, more slides, more models. The implicit assumption is that the person with the most information makes the best decision.
The evidence says the opposite. A landmark study by Gerd Gigerenzer at the Max Planck Institute found that simple decision rules — what he called "fast and frugal heuristics" — consistently outperform complex models in uncertain environments. The reason: complex models overfit to noise. They treat decorative variables as structural ones and mistake randomness for signal.
The best investors, operators, and strategists aren't the ones processing the most information. They're the ones who've gotten fastest at identifying which information doesn't matter.
CT10 fails when it's misapplied. Here's where people go wrong:
| Trap | What It Looks Like | The Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Confusing simple with easy | "The answer is obvious, so execution must be effortless" | The framework identifies the answer — it doesn't execute it. Knowing you need to lose weight is simple. Doing it is hard. Don't confuse clarity with ease. |
| Stripping too aggressively | Removing variables that are actually structural because they're inconvenient | Test each variable: if I remove this, does the answer change? If yes, it's structural. If no, it's decorative. Be honest about which is which. |
| Using it to justify what you already want | Reverse-engineering the "single variable" to support a predetermined conclusion | Start with the question, not the answer. If the foundation points somewhere you don't want to go, that's information — not a reason to rebuild the model. |
| Applying it to emotional decisions | Trying to logic your way through grief, relationships, or identity | CT10 is a decision-making framework for problems with outcomes. Some things in life aren't problems to be solved. They're experiences to be felt. Know the difference. |
Next time you're stuck on a decision — an investment, a hire, a pricing question, whether to take a meeting — try this:
If you crossed out more than half the list, you were carrying dead weight. If you crossed out almost everything, you already knew the answer — you just hadn't given yourself permission to trust it.