how to think faster and smarter — what they don’t tell you
thinking faster and smarter is the kind of phrase you see on a podcast cover next to a man with very white teeth. i tried it on a tuesday. i thought faster about whether to have cold pizza for breakfast. the answer was yes.
writing this from the desk, mid-morning, wednesday. the boss is in a vendor walkthrough that nobody asked him to schedule. i have, give or take, until the second coffee goes cold.
the phrase how to think faster and smarter has been hovering over me. it sits on the cover of a book i did not buy. it sits in the bio of a cognitive performance coach, which is a job i did not know existed last year and now appears to be the only job available. it sits in tab 31 of the 47 i swear i was going to read.
how to think faster and smarter: you don’t, mostly. the brain runs at the speed it runs. faster thinking produces faster wrong answers. smarter thinking takes longer than the meeting allows. the productivity industry has sold both as a single skill. they are two different skills, and most of us only have one of them on a tuesday, and never the same one twice.
FASTER. AND. SMARTER. PICK. ONE.
how to think faster and smarter, the short version
the short version is that you can’t, on demand, do both. asking your brain how to think better is like asking a microwave for a structural review of microwaves. you’ll get an answer. it just won’t be useful.
what you can do is pick a setting. on a tuesday i pick speed. i answer the email in eleven seconds and regret it for forty minutes. on a wednesday i pick smart. i look at the email for forty minutes and never reply. either way, the inbox wins. it has fewer feelings than i do.
the productivity-bro pitch is that you can run a brain at full clock speed and full intelligence at once, on five hours of sleep, while doing breathwork. that is not a brain. that is a haunted spreadsheet.
the ikea aisle and the speed of my thoughts
i tried to think faster and smarter while standing in an ikea, which is an environment specifically engineered to dismantle both qualities at once. there was a couch i did not need. there were eleven cushions, none of them the right cushions. there was a small wooden child’s chair, marked down, which i held for twelve minutes before remembering i do not have a child.
between the entrance and the marketplace section i had four serious thoughts:
- i should buy the small lamp.
- i should not buy the small lamp.
- the small lamp is, technically, two lamps.
- why did i come here.
ikea expects you to also have an opinion on bookshelves, which i can hold in my head for nine seconds before the bookshelf becomes a metaphor for my unfinished projects. at which point i am no longer thinking faster, smarter, or at all. i am standing very still, in front of a flat-pack, mouthing the word billy.
i bought a candle. i did not need a candle. fast thinking, slow regret. that is the loop.
the wip 2022 list, still wip
i have a list, on a piece of paper, in a drawer, labeled wip 2022. it has fourteen items. they were going to be, by my own ambitious count, finished projects. it is not 2022. it is not even 2023. the list, i’d argue, has been thinking very smartly about itself, in the dark, for a long time.
item three says “learn keyboard shortcuts.” item seven says “fix the chair.” item eleven says “call the bank.” the bank prefers letters. those go in the unopened mail pile, which has a working system: red ones lean, white ones flatten, certified ones live in a separate drawer i don’t make eye contact with.
the list is not a failure of speed. i could finish it in a weekend. it is a failure of order. my thoughts arrive in the wrong order. the chair gets fixed before the bank gets called. the keyboard shortcuts get learned before the chair. by item eleven, the bank has stopped calling and started writing, in envelopes that cost them extra to send.
thinking smart would be reordering the list. thinking fast was writing it. those happened on different days and have not met since.
the standing desk could help, allegedly
the standing desk is a sitting desk i bought standing. i used it, standing, for eight days. on the ninth day i sat. it has been, since then, a sitting desk dressed up as a moral position. every piece of advice on how to think faster and smarter eventually arrives, by week two, at the standing desk. the claim is that being upright sends more blood to the brain. i have read this in three places. two of them were the same blog with a different layout.
my findings from the period i was actually standing:
- i was very aware of my knees.
- i thought about my knees four times an hour.
- my emails were, if anything, slightly worse.
- i bought a mat to stand on, which is the next thing.
the next thing is always the next thing. you buy the desk. then the mat. then the lumbar cushion. then the second monitor. by the time you are properly equipped to think faster and smarter, the only thinking left is how to pay for what you bought to think with. i wrote about this loop in how to be smarter — 4 steps drafted at my desk, which is mostly the four steps you’d already guess and one i made up.
faster vs smarter, the small distinction
faster and smarter are not the same axis. faster is reaction. smarter is reflection. reflection is the part where you sit with the thing for a minute longer than feels comfortable. that minute is what makes it smart. shave the minute, you have speed. you do not have smart. you have twitch.
here’s a thing nobody on the white-teeth podcast will admit.
most of what is sold as “thinking faster and smarter” is responding faster while pretending to think. you fire off the answer, you feel decisive, you mistake the dopamine for clarity. and you can quote me, with the caveat that the paper i’m thinking of went behind a paywall i refused to pay. consider the source: a man at a desk, with a candle. my position on parsley, which i hold without flinching, is that the recipe never needed it — you can leave the parsley out and the dish stays exactly the dish. the same instinct — skip the leafy thing because it adds nothing — needs to be applied to most thoughts before they leave your mouth. skip the parsley thought. you’ll sound smarter. you will not be faster. you will be slower, briefly, on purpose. that’s the trade.
i rest my case.
if you want the longer version of why your brain confidently arrives at fast wrong conclusions, the mechanism is laid out in confirmation bias, by someone who is always right, which i keep, suspiciously, agreeing with on every read. it explains why fast feels smart. read it slow.
related: cognitive bias meaning is the entry-level version of “your brain is doing it again,” define cognitive bias is the slightly more rigorous one, and confirmation bias meaning is the one i printed and lost. fast thinking is mostly biased thinking with the volume turned up.
verdict — i was already thinking, slowly
so. after the ikea. after the candle. after the standing desk. after the wip 2022 list, which has aged but not into wisdom. after the eleven cushions. after this entire post.
my finding is this: i was already thinking. the thinking was happening, slowly, in a manner the internet had trained me to consider insufficient. faster would have been worse. smarter, when i tried it, mostly meant quieter. the smart move on tuesday was to not answer the email. the smart move on wednesday was to leave the chair in the corner where it has been since february, where it does no harm and contains my coat. those are not feats of cognitive performance. they are the absence of a worse decision. that counts.
the candle was eleven dollars. i lit it last night for forty minutes while staring at the ceiling. that was the smartest thing i did all week. i did it slowly, on purpose, with no podcast on.
the boss is back from the walkthrough. i can hear him laughing at something three doors down, which is usually the warning sign before he comes asking what i am up to. i’ll close the tab now. forty-six tabs to go.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
a man holding an eleven-dollar candle and a slightly stale opinion
P.S. the small wooden child’s chair is, i checked, still on sale. i still do not have a child. the chair, i’m beginning to suspect, is for the candle.
