how to get smarter — 1 thorough investigation

getting smarter sounds simpler than being smarter, the way getting wet sounds simpler than swimming. i looked into the difference for two hours. then i looked at the productivity bro tweet for forty more minutes. there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

the verb did most of the work, and i didn’t notice. get. as if smart were a sandwich at a counter and you walked up and got it. as if there were a desk somewhere that handed it out. there is a desk. it’s mine. and it has, on it, a pile that has been pretending to be furniture since february.

i’m at that desk. it’s a tuesday around 10:38am. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor and the all-hands tends to run long when the projector mounts itself the wrong way, which it does. that gives me about an hour to sit with the question of how to get smarter without anybody on my floor noticing i am doing the opposite.

writing this from the desk on the second floor, mid-morning, while the third-floor all-hands runs long. the unopened mail pile is, by my honest count, four envelopes taller than monday. one of them is red. that’s also data.

how to get smarter, brief

the brief version is the verb. get is the wrong verb. nobody who is, by any reliable measure, smart, talks about getting smarter. they talk about reading a thing twice. they talk about being wrong on a wednesday and noticing on a thursday. getting belongs to the gym poster, the protein shake, the confirmation bias by the in-house authority on always being right, which i go back to weekly because i’m still always right and the post still proves it.

the productivity industry has trained us to treat the brain like a phone — chargeable, upgradeable, eventually replaceable. it is not. the brain is a slow animal that wants to be left alone. when you ask the brain how to get smarter, the brain says, nap. the brain says, finish the sandwich first. the brain is, in this respect, telling the truth.

so the brief version: shave the verb. the question becomes how do i think more carefully today, which is smaller, less heroic, and answerable in the time carla’s meeting takes to break for water.

step one, the unopened mail pile, ignored harder

step one is the unopened mail pile. step one is always the unopened mail pile. mine has been sitting on the corner of the desk in a leaning column that is, technically, a sculpture now. there is a red envelope at the top. there are three white ones beneath it, which i can ignore on the merits because white envelopes are usually a charity walk or a dental reminder. the red one is harder. red is the color the system uses when it has run out of other colors.

the smart move, by the brief version above, is not to open the mail. that’s the trick. the smart move is to see the mail and choose not to open it on a tuesday before noon. those are different actions. the first is paralysis. the second is, in its own way, a system. mike has a system for taxes — he has not filed since 2019 — and mike is, on most measurable axes, calmer than the people i know who file on time.

the unopened mail pile is, looked at honestly, an instrument. it teaches you to triage. the red ones lean. the white ones flatten. the certified ones go in a drawer i don’t make eye contact with. by the third quarter, you can tell the temperature of the year by the angle of the lean. that’s data. it is, technically, smart. it is not what the productivity bro tweet means by smart, but the productivity bro is on his fourth ring light and the ring lights are, also, a pile.

step two, the seventh microwave, observed harder

step two is the seventh microwave. i will explain. the seventh microwave is the one currently in my kitchen and it is, by the count i keep on a sticky note, the seventh i have killed in the apartment. each one died for a reason that, at the time, i felt was innovation. one of them died because of a fork. (i am not going to relitigate the fork. the fork has its own post. the fork is in the file.) what matters here is the watching.

i learned, by the third microwave, that the smart move was not to be a better microwave operator. the smart move was to watch the microwave. just stand in front of it. don’t multitask. don’t go fold a thing. don’t go open a tab. watch the plate go around. listen for the noise that is not the standard hum. the cost is ninety seconds of looking like a man with no inner life. the benefit is microwave eight, which i have not yet bought.

this is the principle. getting smarter, in the practical sense, is mostly watching the thing you are using while you are using it. the brain wants to be elsewhere. the brain wants to compose an email while reheating soup. the brain is, in its way, an idiot. the smarter posture is the posture of a man at a microwave on a wednesday, watching a bowl spin, feeling, briefly, sane.

step three, the desk holds the line

step three is the desk. specifically, the standing desk i bought standing and have, since the eighth day, been sitting at. the desk did not make me smarter by itself. the desk made me smarter by being in one location and refusing to move. it is, in this respect, a discipline tool. you cannot be smart on the move. you cannot be smart from a coffee shop. (yes, i know what the freelancers say. the freelancers are also tired. they just have better lighting.)

the desk is where the watching happens. the watching of the mail pile. the watching of the inbox. the watching of the calendar on the second monitor, where carla’s meetings appear like weather. the desk does not generate intelligence. it generates the conditions under which a slow thought can finish a sentence. those are not the same thing. the productivity industry confuses them, which is how you end up with a $300 ergonomic chair and zero finished thoughts.

i’m typing this on a tuesday and the desk has been, in the last two hours, the smartest object in the room. it has held the laptop level. it has held the sticky note with microwave seven on it. it has held my coffee at the angle a coffee should be held. that’s three jobs done correctly. by the count of the meeting on the third floor, that is two more jobs than have been done at the all-hands.

step four, getting is the wrong verb

step four is the verb. i said this at the top and i’m going to say it again because the verb is the entire game. getting smarter is a transactional posture. it implies a counter, a clerk, a receipt. becoming smarter is a slower verb that admits time. noticing things is smaller than both and, in my experience, the only one that produces results.

i looked at this from another angle in how do i make my brain smarter — the 1 honest answer, which i keep returning to because the honest answer keeps being the same and i keep being mildly disappointed by it. the answer is small. the answer is read the thing twice. the answer is not, has never been, and will not be a tab in a course portal.

here’s a hot take, while we’re on verbs: if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. i’m bringing this up because parsley is the verb-equivalent of get. it is the part of the dish that the dish does not need. it is the productivity step you can shave without consequence. there are about forty parsley steps in the average self-improvement plan, and the smart move is to learn which forty.

i’d point at the dunning-kruger effect here as a footnote, since the dunning curve is what you walk into the first time you try to be smart on purpose. you climb the small hill of confidence, fall off the back of it, then settle, slowly, into the valley where you stop performing intelligence at people who didn’t ask. the dunning-kruger effect, in plain language covers the mechanic better than i can — i’m too close to the curve to describe it from above. i’m somewhere on the slope. the slope is the post.

verdict, the verb is the bias

the verdict is small. it is, in fact, embarrassingly small for a post with this h1. but here it is. the verb is the bias. when you ask how to get smarter, you have already conceded the frame. the frame is that smart is for sale, on a counter, somewhere outside of you. it is not. the frame is the productivity industry’s favorite frame because the frame keeps you buying.

the smart move is to swap the verb. how do i notice more. how do i sit with this longer. how do i shut up for a beat. those are not viral questions. those are not on the cover of a book with a man on it. those are the questions that, by the time you’ve sat with them for a tuesday morning, have already done some of the work. the work is the reading. the work is the watching. the work is the pile that you do not open because opening it would be the bad kind of motion.

the all-hands is wrapping. i can tell because the elevator just made the noise it makes when seventeen people press the button at once. carla will be back in the next eight minutes, and when she walks past the desk i will be looking at a spreadsheet. the spreadsheet will not have changed since 9am. the spreadsheet does not need to change. the spreadsheet is, on this particular tuesday, smarter than i am, on the merits of having opinions about exactly nothing.

postscript from the desk: the red envelope is still on the pile. i looked at it. i did not open it. by the standards i set in step one, that counts as a win. by the standards of the institution that mailed it, it counts as a count.

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