how can you become smart — 1 fairly sure investigation

you become smart, supposedly, by patiently stacking small habits one on top of the other for years on end. i stacked three small habits in early october and watched the whole tower fall over right around halloween, with conviction. i’m fairly sure the foundation, not the stacking, was the actual issue here.

and the answer to how can you become smart, near as i can tell from this chair, is that you don’t, exactly. you accumulate the appearance of it, slowly, by being in rooms where you keep your mouth shut at the right times. that is a different skill than the one being sold in the books on the airport shelf.

writing this from my desk, the standing one, where i sit. third floor is hosting the q3 review and the boss is, as usual, in another meeting on a different floor entirely. i have until somebody refills the coffee carafe, which gives me a clean window if i don’t get distracted by the phone, currently at 23%.

so. the search engine sent you here because you typed a sentence with a question mark in it, and now you’re stuck with me. i won’t waste your morning. i’ll give you the version i give mike at the corner, on a wednesday, after the second beer but before the third, when his epistemology is at its peak. for the wider tour of how this whole self-improvement loop tends to collapse on contact with a brain like mine, the longer write-up lives over at confirmation bias, by someone always right.

how can you become smart, the short version

the short version is, you can. the short version is also, it will not feel like getting smart. it will feel, mostly, like getting quiet. the smart people i have known across various offices, including this one, are the ones who pause before they answer, who say “i don’t know” without flinching, and who do not, ever, weaponize a vocabulary word in a meeting just because it landed on their tongue.

i have, by my own honest accounting, weaponized vocabulary in approximately every meeting i have ever attended. i once said the word “orthogonal” in a budget review. i did not know what it meant. nobody asked. that, too, is a clue about how rooms work. the room rewarded the word, not the understanding. (this is going to be awkward.) i kept saying it for three weeks. orthogonal. orthogonal. someone eventually just nodded, slowly, the way you nod at a man who has misplaced his keys.

the standing desk where i sit, by the way, has been an active participant in this delusion. i bought it as a productivity intervention. i told colleagues, with the calm of a tenured professor, that “standing desks reorganize the spine and, by extension, the mind”. i sat down at hour one. i have been sitting on a standing desk for six months. the desk did not reorganize anything. the desk stands. i sit. we have an arrangement.

the boss is in another meeting, again

(in the org chart i drew on a napkin, the role is filed the_boss, with the underscore, because the role is structurally one word — a unit, not a person.)

the boss, on the topic of becoming smart, has views. the boss never communicates these views directly, because the boss is, structurally, in another meeting on another floor at all times. i have not had a one-on-one with the boss in fourteen weeks. i have had, in that span, four cancellations, two reschedules, and one meeting that ended in eleven minutes because someone “needed the room”.

but the boss communicates intelligence indirectly, through the small selections the boss makes about whose ideas get repeated upstream. the boss repeats stefan’s ideas. the boss does not repeat mine. stefan-type expert, for the record, is a man who reads the contradicting source first, does not weaponize vocabulary, and never says “orthogonal” unless he has a chart to back it up. stefan got promoted last quarter. stefan has a corner with a real plant. i have brenda, who has been dead since 2023, and the third yoga mat under the couch from october of that same year, possibly evolving.

this is, on inspection, a piece of evidence. the boss is performing a small, slow filtering, week after week, on which voices get amplified and which get archived. that filtering is, in its own quiet way, a definition of becoming smart inside an institution. you do not become smart at the office. you become repeated. the repetition becomes the reputation. the reputation becomes the corner office with the real plant. nobody tells you this on day one. they tell you this on day never.

the q3 review and the smart-adjacent talk

carla is, as we speak, in the q3 review on the third floor. q3 review is a particular kind of room. it is the room where everyone tries to be smart in front of everyone else, simultaneously, for ninety minutes, with slides. nobody comes out of q3 review smarter than they went in. several people come out hoarse, one comes out with a new buzzword, and the boss, who attends remotely, comes out with a list of names who are not, in the boss’s opinion, “operating at the level we need”.

i do not attend q3 review. i was, at one point, on the invite list. then i sent a calendar decline with the comment “conflict” and nobody followed up. that, also, is information. the room of “smart-adjacent talk” is fundamentally optional for the people who already know they will not change anyone’s mind by attending. the taxman sends letters in serif font, mike likes to say, by which he means: the people who actually decide things do it on paper, slowly, in a typeface, weeks after the meeting ended. the meeting was decor.

this is, i think, why every office has a person whose entire job appears to be attending q3 review and saying things that sound smart in q3 review. that person is not getting smarter. that person is performing a very specific theater. there is, structurally, no path from that theater to actual intelligence. there is, however, a path from that theater to the next q3 review, which is in approximately twelve weeks, which is enough runway to perform smartness at least four more times before anyone checks the math.

the standing desk supports the question

i want to come back to the desk. the standing desk i sit at, where i am writing this, was sold to me as a piece of furniture that would, in some unspecified way, make me think better. the box said “ergonomic”, the brochure said “active focus”, the YouTube video said “your second brain”. the standing desk is now, on the strength of two years of evidence, a flat surface with adjustable legs. it does not think. it does not focus. it does not have a second brain. it has, at most, a small motor that hums when carla walks past my desk and i pretend to raise it.

but the desk, in its own dumb wooden way, supports the question. it supports the laptop where i am typing the question. it supports the mug. it supports the phone, currently at 23%, which is its eternal state. the desk holds the apparatus of the inquiry. it does not, despite the marketing, conduct the inquiry. that’s me. or it’s supposed to be me. it is increasingly the man on the imdb page i opened earlier, of frasier, who has more vocabulary than i do and uses it, mostly, to lose minor arguments to his cab-driving brother.

the broader case for “how do you actually upgrade the brain that’s sitting on this desk” is parked over at the long-form companion piece on how to think faster and smarter, which is the kind of answer you produce when you have given up on the question and started typing anyway.

the 23% phone battery cuts the inquiry short

my phone is at 23%. the phone has been at 23% for as long as i can remember. (i am aware of how that sounds. it is, technically, possible to charge a phone. i am aware of this. the universe declined to comment.) the 23% is not a number. the 23% is a state of mind. it is the state of the inquiry into how to become smart, conducted from a desk, on a tuesday, with a phone that will die in approximately fourteen minutes if i do nothing about it.

this is, i submit, structurally how the question of becoming smart actually plays out in a real life. you have a finite window. the boss is in another meeting. carla is in the q3 review. the phone is at 23%. the desk is supportive but not, itself, intelligent. you have, give or take, a clean half hour to become smarter. you will not. you will, if you are honest, write a paragraph, get distracted, open 47 tabs, and at the end of the half hour you will be, by my generous count, half a percentage point dumber.

the books on the airport shelf do not factor in the 23% battery. the books on the airport shelf assume you have, at minimum, a charged phone, an empty calendar, and a clean kitchen. i have none of these. i have, in their place, a spreadsheet i did not open and a microwave that’s gone through six predecessors. nobody is writing the airport book for me.

verdict, you can, the boss won’t notice

here is the answer in plain language. yes, you can become smart, on a long enough timeline, with enough honesty, in a room that’s quiet enough to think in. it will not look like the airport book. it will not feel like a montage. it will feel, mostly, like a series of small, slightly humiliating updates to opinions you used to defend in public.

and the boss will not notice. the boss is, structurally, in another meeting. the boss is in the q3 review on the third floor, or the budget pre-read on the fourth, or the all-hands on a screen in a conference room you have never been inside. the boss will not, in the foreseeable future, look up from the calendar and say “you got smarter this quarter”. the boss will, instead, slowly, over years, repeat a few of your sentences in rooms you are not in. that is the only verifiable signal of intelligence inside an institution. the rest is theater.

phone is at 21% now. carla is, by the schedule on her wall, halfway through the q3 review. the standing desk continues to stand, in its dumb, wooden, supportive way. the boss is, presumably, on floor seven, in a room with no windows, deciding which sentences to repeat next quarter. i’d offer one but the cursor keeps blinking.

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