During summer break, I led an entrepreneurship education class project. The mission was clear: guide students to build a functioning business website from scratch.

Four days passed. Most students’ websites had only one page, and it was nearly empty.

It wasn’t because they were slacking—they were genuinely working. But they didn’t know what to put on it. They opened their website editors and got stuck. Like a writer sitting before a blank Word document, cursor blinking, unable to write a single word.

The Comfort Zone of System 1

Before the project began, I introduced students to cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman’s “Dual System Theory.”

System 1: Intuitive thinking. Fast, automatic, effortless. When you see 1+1, you intuitively respond with 2, no calculation needed. When you see a face, you intuitively judge whether the person is friendly or threatening, no analysis required.

System 2: Rational thinking. Slow, deliberate, extremely cognitively demanding. You use System 2 when calculating 37×24. You also use System 2 when planning a business model.

Most people operate in System 1 over 95% of their daily lives. Because System 2 is exhausting. Activating System 2 is like switching your brain’s CPU from power-saving mode to full throttle—it’s effective, but you quickly feel tired, irritated, wanting to escape.

I told the students: For the next four days of this project, you must turn on System 2 and keep it on.

The results after four days told me: most people still turned it off.

The Truth Behind Blank Pages

Why were the students’ websites empty? Because they skipped the most crucial step: thinking clearly about the website’s purpose.

I asked them: “What does your website do?”

“Sell things.”

“Sell what?”

“Uh… sell some… products.”

“What products?”

“Still thinking about that.”

This is System 1’s trap. System 1 makes you feel like “I roughly know what to do”—but that “roughly” is deadly. When you actually need to implement ideas into concrete pages, copy, product categories, purchase flows, you discover that “roughly” is full of voids.

I’ve repeatedly experienced this in running my own company. Every time I feel “this direction should work,” when I actually sit down to write a business plan and force myself to think through every detail, I discover countless problems I had previously “roughly” skipped over.

The quality of a business plan will never exceed the clarity of your thinking.

Working Backwards from Purpose

I used a framework to help students activate System 2.

Every website has a core mission. Educational sites provide knowledge, news sites deliver reports. We were building business websites—the core mission is to help potential customers understand your product, trust you, then buy.

Working backwards from this purpose, the frontend must clearly answer four questions: Who are we? What products or services do we provide? What do the products look like and why are they attractive? How should consumers make purchases?

These four questions seem simple, but answering them clearly requires deep System 2 operation for each one.

“Who are we” isn’t just a company name—it’s brand positioning, value proposition, differentiation from competitors. “What we provide” isn’t just a product list—it’s what problem you solve, why customers should choose you. “What products look like” isn’t just posting photos—it’s the comprehensive presentation of visual design, usage scenarios, and social proof. “How to purchase” isn’t just adding a shopping cart button—it’s designing the entire user journey.

In my article “Pain Points Aren’t Everything in Transformation,” I discussed how the most common failure in digital transformation isn’t technical problems, but not thinking clearly about what problem needs solving. Business websites are the same—most failed websites aren’t due to ugly design or poor functionality, but because the underlying business logic was never thought through clearly.

System 2 is a Team Sport

Another observation: System 2 operation is more difficult in teams than individually.

Activating System 2 individually is already painful enough. But in a team, you need everyone to simultaneously activate System 2, and in the same direction. If anyone secretly switches back to System 1—“I think this is good enough” or “close enough”—the entire team’s thinking quality gets dragged down.

In “The End of the Lone Wolf: Seeing the Real Battlefield of Group Education Through Ironman Triathlon,” I discussed how the core of team collaboration is “having others in your heart.” The same applies to business planning—you’re not just thinking about your assigned piece, you must understand the entire system’s logic and ensure your part connects with others’ parts.

This requires everyone to activate System 2. And not just during meetings—after leaving meetings, every small decision you make must align with the overall logic.

Systematizing the Fragmented

At the end of the four-day project, I told the students:

A business website’s birth isn’t an accumulation of pages. It’s taking the fragmented ideas in your head and, through System 2’s power, organizing them into a logical, structured, self-operating system.

Technology tools are just the medium helping you present this system. If the system itself is empty, even the most beautiful medium is just an attractive shell.

This isn’t just the principle for building websites—it’s the principle for making any business decision. Your plan won’t be clearer than your thinking. To improve your plan, the only way is to deepen your thinking.

And that means you must endure the discomfort that System 2 brings—brain-burning, irritation, feeling stupid. That’s not the feeling of incompetence, that’s the feeling of growth.