how do i make myself smarter — and i’m fairly sure

the question of how to make myself smarter became urgent the morning of the procurement walkthrough, which is happening down the hall without me. dave called twice during my…

writing this from my desk, second cubicle from the printer that nobody fills with paper. the procurement walkthrough is across the wall — i can hear the muffled clap when somebody finishes a slide. carla is in there. i am not. let’s go.

so. how do i make myself smarter. that is the sentence i typed into a search bar at 2:47pm, between dave’s first call and dave’s second call, with the procurement walkthrough audibly underway approximately twelve feet through drywall. the bar autocompleted before i finished. that means a lot of people, on a lot of tuesdays, have asked the same thing. comfort is, in this case, a low bar. but it’s the bar i’m working with.

how do i make myself smarter: probably you already are. smarter is not a destination. it is a series of small refusals — refusing to skim, refusing to autopay subscriptions you forgot existed, refusing to nod when stefan mentions tannins. you do not need a new app. you need to read one paragraph slowly and finish it.

SMARTER. IS. NOT. A. PURCHASE.

what triggered the question — a subscription audit gone sideways

at 8:51am i opened my bank app, which i do once a quarter under medical duress. i was looking for a charge i didn’t recognize. i found four. four subscriptions i had forgotten i was paying for. a meditation app from 2023. a language platform with a green owl. a finance newsletter for emails i delete on receipt. a productivity tool, twelve a month, signed up for during a podcast.

i did the math. four hundred and eighty-four dollars a year, paid quietly, on autopilot, for the privilege of feeling like i was becoming the sort of person who does these things. i was not becoming that person. i was becoming a man who pays for the impression of becoming. this is when the procurement walkthrough started. i cancelled three of the four. i kept the language one out of pride. the owl will outlive me.

dave called twice and i learned nothing useful

dave picks up before you’ve finished dialing and says “what did you do” before you’ve said hello. he works in insurance. he claims i owe him three hundred dollars. we don’t talk about it.

dave called twice this morning. the first, 9:14am, was about a thing involving a goat and a fence; i was three minutes into the bank app spiral and i told him i’d call back. the second, 9:41am, was dave asking why i didn’t. i told him i was figuring out how to make myself smarter and he laughed for forty seconds and said “by avoiding me, apparently”. i hung up. i was, technically, dodging my friend in order to write a post about self-improvement, which is, said out loud, a kind of joke.

the actual answer, before i bury it in jokes

the question how do i make myself smarter is the wrong question. it’s an upstream question, and upstream questions generate downstream purchases. the right question is what is the smallest unit of thinking i’m currently avoiding. for me today, it was the bank statement. for you today, it might be a contract you have not opened, a paragraph in a book you closed at 8:15pm because the phone was on the couch and the phone was easier.

that is it. the smallest unit of thinking you are avoiding is the unit you should do. not the seven-step morning routine. not the cold plunge. the gym i pay for has a sauna and i go for the sauna only; the receptionist has stopped pretending to look surprised. my schrödinger’s fridge — technically functioning, technically full, but which i am philosophically unwilling to open without a clear plan — is a model for how i live. my phone, currently at 23% battery at 10:11am, is a small accusation: i did not charge it last night because i was watching a video about productivity, which a textbook with cracked spine would call clinical.

the hot take that won’t leave me alone

on the subject of caffeine, which is relevant because i have had three cups since i sat down — i hold a position some of my colleagues find aggressive. “coffee is achievement. tea is wet leaves.” tea is what you offer a guest you don’t like, in order to give them something to hold while they leave. coffee is what you brew when you have decided to make a decision today. it is a commitment ceremony. how do i make myself smarter is, in part, a question about energy management. drink the coffee, eat the breakfast, stop pretending the energy will come from a podcast. there’s a longer version of these steps i drafted at this same desk last month, but that’s the spine of it.

what the books told me, what the bar told me

i have read parts of several books on this. i finished one. the others are stacked on the floor with their own dust pattern. the books say things about cognitive bias — how we mistake our gut for our reasoning, and we keep doing it because we keep getting away with it. they say the brain rewards completion over comprehension, which is why you can finish a podcast and remember nothing.

the bar version, from mike, is shorter: “if you can’t explain it to a stranger, you don’t know it.” mike has not filed taxes since 2019. but on this, he is annoyingly correct. i tried to explain what confirmation bias actually means to my mother on the phone last friday and i could not get through the second sentence. i had absorbed the silhouette, the vibe. that is recognition, not knowing.

which is, in part, why the whole confirmation bias problem is so hard to escape — it is the wallpaper. it agrees with you, daily, in calm patient tones, and you call that agreement “thinking”. the same calm patient tone my ex used when she insisted certain things did not happen. the two phenomena, i now suspect, share a workshop.

the procurement walkthrough, the part i’m not in

the meeting is wrapping up. i can tell because the muffled boss-voice has shifted into the cadence boss-voices use when explaining next steps. when carla returns to the cubicle next to mine, she will not tell me what happened. she will sigh once, sit down, and open a new tab. i will know everything from the sigh and nothing from the tab. i could have been in there. the wall is drywall, not law. but i did not, over the last quarter, do the small daily work that would have made my presence obvious to anyone in charge of inviting people. i skimmed the docs. i nodded. and now, four hundred and eighty-four dollars and three months later, the meeting is happening on the other side of the wall, and i am writing a blog post about how to be smarter. the symmetry is not lost on me.

the procurement walkthrough just ended. carla walked past my cubicle holding a glass jar of cold-brew that has been on her desk since 9:00am. she did not say anything. that is, traditionally, either a very good sign or the worst kind of sign.