Purpose Before Pattern
True intelligence reasons about what to seek before seeking what to reason about. This inversion transforms information-gathering from pattern-matching - finding what resembles existing knowledge - into purpose-driven discovery - finding what specific reasoning requires.
Most thinking accumulates data then discovers what sense emerges. Effective thinking determines what making sense requires, then pursues that deliberately. The difference lies in being either constrained by what you happened to find or guided by what you actually need.
Intelligence isn't about processing more information, but about reasoning better about which information to process.