how do i be smart — 4 steps i tested

being smart, treated as a verb in the imperative, is grammatically suspect and operationally unclear in roughly equal measure. i typed the question anyway, because the search bar, by design, does not flinch at anything. it returned, helpfully, eleven million results in 0.4 seconds. i looked at six of them.

it is a wednesday, around 1:42pm, and i am at the desk issued for budget reconciliation, doing a thing that, by the strictest reading of my contract, is adjacent to it in the sense that it shares a desk with it. the boss is in a vendor onboarding two corridors over. that gives me the better part of an afternoon. the spreadsheet has been open since monday. the spreadsheet, in some sense, is winning.

how do i be smart: the short answer, in four steps i have personally tested, badly. (1) talk to mike, briefly, at the corner; (2) ignore the productivity bro who finds you anyway; (3) distrust the algorithm that thinks it knows you; (4) notice that the third yoga mat under the couch is not, has never been, and will never be the answer. it has not made me smart — only, on better days, less convincingly stupid.

SMART. IS. NOT. A. VERB. YOU. CONJUGATE.

that goes on the wall before we open the steps. there is a cinematic version — see the 2011 film “limitless”, in which a man takes a clear pill and becomes a savant inside a weekend — but cinematic versions have a budget. the rest of us have a kitchen and a tab count.

how do i be smart, the short version

the short version of how do i be smart is this: be slightly less wrong, on slightly fewer subjects, for slightly longer than the average wednesday afternoon. that is the whole post, technically. you stayed, which means you, like me, suspect the short version is too short. so we’ll go long.

none of this overlaps cleanly with thinking faster and smarter, which i drafted at this same desk and tested poorly. that piece was about speed. this one is the prior question — whether the verb has any meaning before you accelerate it. the answer: not much. but a little. and the little, defended for an afternoon, is the entire deliverable.

step one, talk to mike, briefly

step one is mike. mike has a seat at the corner of a bar that does not advertise. mike has not, by his own admission, filed a return since 2019. mike has, in spite of this, a thing he calls a system. on a slow night, he can be reached.

you order one drink, sit two stools from him, and ask a question with weight but no urgency. not about his system — that is private. about something on the news he has, in his slow way, considered. given thirty seconds and not interrupted, he produces one observation per pint. not always right. but not borrowed. that is the rare property.

last month i asked mike, mid-pint, what he thought it meant to be smart. he took longer than i expected. eventually he said, “smart is what you have when you don’t have anything else.” he did not elaborate. then he asked the bartender for water, which mike does, by his own count, twice a year. rough data. unsigned. briefly real.

i would put real money on this being more useful than another book about how the brain quietly confirms what it already believed, the long form, which is the pillar of this whole cluster. mike just speaks — in this house, a credential.

step two, ignore productivity bro

step two is the productivity bro. you do not have to find him — he finds you. it is, in a way, his only working skill. he posts at hours when nobody should be awake, with a green smoothie in the foreground and a watch in the background that costs more than my monthly rent. he attaches, occasionally, a flowchart of five rectangles and an arrow.

this morning his post said, paraphrased, that asking how do i be smart was the wrong question and that the right question was how do i 10x my output by friday. it had been viewed by 47,000 people, of whom — by my estimate — none were the bro and none were 10x-ing anything by friday. the comment section i did not read. on these accounts it is a graveyard with a like button.

i closed the tab at 9:47am. it reopened on a different device, on a different post, with a different watch. takes persist. the bro persists.

step three, distrust the algorithm

step three is the algorithm. the actual one — the one that picks, while you sleep, what your morning will contain. it has been telling me, for eleven months, to listen to a podcast about ancient rome at 1.5x speed while doing kettlebell swings. i have done neither. it has no theory of me, only of the demographic column i am filed under.

the column was assigned in 2022, by a click i don’t remember, on a device now in a drawer. the column is not me. it is a smaller, blurrier version of me, holding a kettlebell, on a database in a state i have never visited. the chain is broken at every link. it still pulls me forward.

related: cereal is soup with rules — i’ll not be taking notes. i mention it because the algorithm, two weeks ago, served me “is cereal a soup” and i did not click. it noticed the not-click and served the follow-up: “5 reasons cereal might be a soup, science says”. science did not say. a man at a content farm said. the algorithm sold the difference.

this overlaps with the confirmation bias meaning, with mike’s accusation in full, except the bias here is not mine. it is the column’s. the column has been told a story about a kind of person, and it keeps buying the story even after the actual person has moved on. the column has tenure.

step four, the third yoga mat is not the answer

step four is the third yoga mat. it is, at this moment, under the couch in my apartment, possibly evolving, definitely not the answer to how do i be smart in any reading i can defend. bought in 2023, on a sunday, in the half-hour after a bro post about morning routines. used, by my count, once.

the seventh microwave is in the kitchen, and i mention it because the mat and the microwave are, structurally, the same object. each was bought because of a story. each story was, at the time, plausible. each collapsed inside a week. the mat has more dignity.

the lesson: the answer to the question is not a thing you buy. not a mat, not a watch, not a kettlebell, not the supplement the bro is, this week, photographing in green liquid. the answer, if there is one, is the absence of the next purchase. that morning has been, in my counting, twice this year. i am working on a third.

this connects, at a slant, to the kind of person who lies, defined by someone who has met one. none of them — the bro, the algorithm, the mat — is, in the strict sense, a liar. they are selling a story about a future version of you that is not coming. the consumer is, somewhat, the co-author.

verdict, you do not, you simply are or aren’t

the vendor onboarding has, by the sound of the corridor, ended. someone is laughing in a tone reserved for vendors who have just been onboarded. the reconciliation tab is still open, still not reconciled, still mine.

somewhere, two miles north, the third yoga mat is under the couch from 2023, not voting. the seventh microwave, on the counter, hums the way the previous six did the week before they stopped. the system continues.

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