how do i get smarter — 1 thorough investigation
a thorough investigation into how i, specifically, might get smarter would, ideally, involve a control group, a notebook, and several unwilling collaborators. i lack the control group entirely. the others are dave, mom, and the man who calls. the early results are, to put it generously, mixed at best.
tuesday, 9:47am, anchored at the desk with a coffee that has cooled past the point of usefulness. carla is on the third floor for an all-hands she described, last week, as “mostly slides”. i have, by a charitable estimate, the rest of the morning before anyone notices the cursor hasn’t moved.
so. how do i get smarter. the verb is doing most of the work in that sentence and i want to be honest with you about it before we go any further. get implies a transaction. get implies a counter, a clerk, a receipt. get implies that i hand something over and walk away with the upgrade in a small bag. that is what i wanted when i typed it into the search bar. i wanted the bag. i did not want a process. i wanted a checkout.
how do i get smarter: there is no counter where you exchange effort for intelligence at a fixed rate. the closest workable answer is a four-step routine — ask one careful person, ask one careful machine, audit your own context, and remove the distraction that keeps eating the room. the rest is patience. patience is the part nobody is selling.
GETTING. IS. NOT. THE. WORD. YOU. WANTED.
i’m going to walk through the four steps i actually ran this week, in order, with the receipts. the receipts are not flattering. the receipts are, in fact, the entire point. you can’t get smarter by reading about getting smarter — that’s a closed loop, and i should know, i’m currently inside it. the only way out, near as i can tell, runs through the warm bath of always being correct. you have to drain it first. then you can refill.
how do i get smarter, the short version
the short version, the one i’d give mike at the corner if he asked, which he won’t, because mike does not ask follow-up questions about productivity, is this: you cannot get smarter the way you get a sandwich. the verb is the trap. the verb is what google sold you when you typed the query, and what google sold me, and what google will sell the next person.
the actual mechanism, as far as i can reconstruct it from one tuesday and forty-seven open tabs, is that you become marginally less wrong, in narrow domains, very slowly, often without noticing. there is no moment of getting. there is no transaction. there is, instead, a long period of being mildly embarrassed by things you said last year. that is the whole growth chart. mom, who is sharper than me by a wide margin, has been mildly embarrassed by things she said in 1998 for several years running. she is, by a long shot, the smartest person i know. the math, while annoying, lines up.
i typed how do i get smarter into the search bar at 8:51 this morning. by 9:14 i had ordered a book, opened a tab on a productivity app, and felt, briefly, more intelligent. (i had not yet read the book. the book was, at this point, a feeling.) by 10:02 the feeling had evaporated. the book is now in the kitchen, on the counter, where it will sit until thursday, when i’ll move it to the bedroom and call that progress.
step one, ask sarah, briefly
step one of the routine is to find one person who is reliably smarter than you about a specific thing and ask them a small, focused question. for me, on tuesdays, that person is sarah. sarah is in the office. sarah ran a marathon last spring on a schedule she designed in a spreadsheet. sarah understands her pension. these are three separate facts about sarah and they all point in the same direction.
i emailed sarah this morning with the question: “how do you decide which thing to learn next.” it was, in retrospect, too broad. sarah replied in eleven minutes, from a treadmill or a meeting or both, with two sentences. the first said: “i don’t decide. i notice the question that won’t go away for two weeks, and then i answer that one.” the second said: “stop emailing me from the same desk.”
i did not stop emailing her from the same desk. but i wrote down the first sentence on a post-it and stuck it to the bottom of my monitor, where it now sits next to a different post-it from 2024 that says “renew passport”. neither has been acted upon. but the sarah post-it is at least newer. that is, by my own definitions, getting smarter. that is also, by any external definition, sitting at a desk.
step two, ask chatgpt, briefly too
step two is to ask the same question to ChatGPT, not because the answer will be good, but because the answer will be different, and the gap between the two answers is the most informative thing in the routine. sarah, a person, gave me a sentence about not deciding. chatgpt, a machine, gave me a numbered list of seven items, the third of which was “develop a learning mindset”, a phrase i would not say out loud at the corner if mike had a working firearm.
the gap was the lesson. sarah’s answer was about noticing. chatgpt’s answer was about doing. one of those is what actually happens. the other is what gets sold. you do not need me to tell you which is which. you already know. you knew before you clicked.
i’m not anti-machine. i use the machine daily. i used the machine to summarize an email this morning that i could have read in nineteen seconds. but the machine is, by design, a confidence vendor. you ask it a question and it sells you a confident-sounding answer in a pleasant register. the register is the product. the answer is the wrapper. house, m.d. understood this — every cold open is a confident wrong diagnosis followed by a less confident right one. the second one is the smart one. nobody buys the second one as a t-shirt.
step three, the 23% phone battery again
step three is to audit the room you are trying to think in. for me, the room is the desk, and the room contains a phone, and the phone is, currently, at 23% battery. it has been at twenty-three percent battery for, by my honest count, the last fourteen months. the percentage moves but the feeling doesn’t.
twenty-three percent is not a number. twenty-three percent is a state. twenty-three percent is the constant low hum of “you should plug this in”, under every other thought i have, all day, at every desk, in every room. you cannot get smarter through a low hum. the low hum is using up the bandwidth that would otherwise be available for noticing whether the chicken in your fridge has gone off, or whether the meeting you just agreed to is one you actually need to be in.
i killed the seventh microwave last spring. i’d like to claim, in good faith, that i learned something from microwaves one through six and improved my outcome on the seventh. i did not. i killed the seventh in exactly the same way. the variable was not me. the variable was that i tried to heat a fork wrapped in foil at 11:47pm on a tuesday, while half-watching a video on my phone, which was, naturally, at 23% battery. the room was thinking for me. the room was also wrong.
step four, the q3 review distracts me
step four is to remove the largest current distraction. i cannot do this. the largest current distraction is the q3 review carla is, at this exact moment, sitting through on the third floor, and the fact that i am scheduled to attend it next quarter, and the fact that, between now and then, i will think about it approximately once every nine minutes for no productive reason. the distraction is in the calendar. the calendar belongs to a system that does not know i am trying to get smarter. the system would not care if it knew.
let me lay this out, if i may, with the calm of a man who has been wrong recently and has the receipts to prove it.
here is the hot take, in the strict sense: every meeting could be a 3-line email. every single one. and the reason every meeting could be a 3-line email is, structurally, that meetings are confirmation devices, not learning devices. the people in the room are not getting smarter. they are getting aligned. those are different verbs. the q3 review, the all-hands, the budget walkthrough — none of these change a single mind. i’m fairly sure there’s a study, somewhere, in a journal i don’t pay for, that puts the figure at zero opinions changed per quarter, across the species. i didn’t read the study. i agreed with it on contact. that’s, by itself, a small confirmation of the point.
i rest my case.
so step four, in practice, is impossible at the company level. i can, however, run a smaller version of step four at my desk. i can close the seventeen tabs that are currently open in support of a position i decided about coffee on sunday morning. i can mute the group chat that has been arguing about a restaurant for six days. i can put the phone face down. i can, briefly, manage forty minutes in a row of a single thought. forty minutes is, by current standards, a personal record. forty minutes is, by the standard of any person who has ever, in human history, gotten smarter, an embarrassment.
verdict, getting is a fee, paid in tabs
so here is where i land, three coffees and one carla flyby in.
you cannot get smarter. you can, however, pay a small recurring fee, in attention, in tabs closed, in questions asked of one careful person and one careful machine, in the willingness to be slightly embarrassed by something you said last march. the fee is not refundable. the fee is also not advertised. it is also, if you’re honest about how much of your day you spend on a phone at twenty-three percent, a fee you are technically already paying — just to a different vendor, for a different product, which is, in this case, the comfortable feeling of being about to start.
anyone who tells you they have a routine that “works in seven days” is selling you the wrapper, not the answer. they are also, possibly, the same person who told the previous version of you to journal at five in the morning. that person does not know you. that person has not seen the kitchen counter. the kitchen counter is, currently, where the new book lives, unread, next to a banana that has gone past the point of being a fruit and is, generously, a smell.
i rest my case.
i don’t think i got smarter today. i don’t think i’m stupid, exactly — i looked into the linguistic conspiracy of the word last quarter and concluded the term itself is doing some heavy lifting that nobody asked it to do. but i didn’t get smarter. i got, at best, slightly better calibrated about how unlikely getting is, in the verbal sense, in the transactional sense, in the sense i typed into the search bar at 8:51 this morning. that calibration is, possibly, the only thing on offer. that calibration is also, i suspect, what mike has been selling at the bar for years, in single-sentence portions, on tuesdays, to whoever is sitting next to him. mike has a system for taxes. has not filed since 2019. mike, on the topic of getting smarter, is nevertheless eight steps ahead of me.
carla just came back from the third floor. she did not look at the screen. either i’m fine or she’s filing it. the next q3 review will sort it out.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
tuesday-morning correspondent on the verb that wouldn’t deliver
P.S. the new book is still on the kitchen counter, two feet from a banana that has, as of an hour ago, transitioned from food to smell. the book and the banana are, by my honest count, both at 23% battery in their own way. neither will get me smarter by thursday.
