To be a second level thinker, you need to go beyond the obvious. You need to grab higher than the low hanging fruit intellectually. So here are a few examples that howard marks uses to illustrate what this looks like in practice. First level thinking says, it's a good company. Let's buy the stock. Second level thinking says: It's a great company but everyone thinks it's already priced in. Another example is i think the company's earnings will fall, so i should sell. But they're going to fall far less than other people expect and cause the stock to go up.