how can i get smarter — 1 thorough investigation

the thorough investigation into how i might get smarter, in any meaningful way, began with a certified letter sitting on the kitchen counter, which i have not opened in two weeks. that, on reflection, is probably the very first finding of the investigation, and arguably the one that matters most. the letter remains sealed.

which is to say: the question itself is not a knowledge question. the question is a permission question. how can i get smarter contains a small, polite “can” that nobody flags — a modal verb doing all the heavy lifting while the sentence pretends to be about brains. can means capacity. can also means allowed. and most days, the second meaning is the one in the way.

the office is on the third floor. it is wednesday. carla is upstairs in some quarterly thing with the slides about regional spend. i have, by an honest reading of the calendar, the rest of the morning and a quarter of the afternoon. that is sufficient for an investigation, if the investigation is conducted at the desk and the conclusions are kept short.

writing this from the workstation. carla is on the third floor for the q3 numbers. i’m logged into a doc nobody is checking. the airpod that still works is in the right ear, low volume, neutral playlist.

i should say, before going further, that this whole post is a long version of the same loop i described when i tried to define always-being-right. the loop matters because every “how can i get smarter” plan i’ve ever made was, in retrospect, a plan to feel smarter while doing the same things slightly faster. plans of that shape do not work. i have run the experiment. eight times.

how can i get smarter, the short version

the short version is, properly, a sentence. the sentence is: read slower, sleep longer, talk to people who aren’t currently agreeing with you, and write down the case against your favorite idea before you act on it. that’s it. that’s the entire program. there is no app for this. there is no course. there is no five-minute morning ritual involving lemon water.

i learned the sentence, of course, by doing the opposite of the sentence for about a decade. i read fast. i slept badly. i talked exclusively to people who were already agreeing with me, with a few hostile exceptions at the corner bar, where mike, who has not filed his taxes since 2019, was my designated dissenter. i acted on every favorite idea immediately. i did not write down the case against. once, in 2021, i wrote down the case for, in bullet points, on a napkin. i lost the napkin. that’s not a parable. that’s just bad accounting.

the sentence works because each clause attacks a separate failure. reading slowly attacks pattern-completion (the brain skipping ahead to a conclusion it likes). sleeping longer attacks the part of the brain that is, after 1am, basically a confused dog. talking to non-agreers attacks the home-team problem. writing the case against attacks the loop where you research a position you already hold and call it homework.

none of this requires money. all of it requires permission. permission, again, is the part the productivity industry doesn’t sell, because permission cannot be packaged.

carla walked past while i was investigating

carla walked past the desk just now. she was carrying a folder, the navy one, the one she carries when the meeting upstairs has gone slightly long. she did not stop. she did not look at the screen. she did, however, glance at the airpod in my right ear, which is the only airpod that still functions, the left one having quietly died sometime in march. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford.

i mention this because her not stopping is, in itself, evidence of how i’m currently not getting smarter. she has, in the past, paused at this desk. she has, in the past, asked what i was working on. the fact that today she did not pause means one of two things: either she trusts the work entirely, which is unlikely on a wednesday morning, or she has filed this desk under “ongoing investigation, low yield”. both are bad.

this kind of moment is, i’m fairly sure, what the better books call environmental feedback. you do not learn things by introspection alone. you learn things by noticing the small social tells that tell you, without words, where you currently rank. carla’s lack of pause is a data point. i have written it down. i have not yet decided which folder to put it in.

the bigger lesson is in the modal verb again. i can get smarter today, in this specific room, by walking up to the third floor and asking carla what the q3 numbers actually mean. nobody is stopping me. the door is unlocked. the only thing in the way is permission, granted by me, to me, in this moment. i have not granted it. i’m writing a post instead. that’s also a finding.

productivity bro had a thread, again

somewhere on the internet this morning, while i was, technically, working, i scrolled past a thread by a man whose handle includes the word “founder” and whose avatar is a sketch of his own face in a turtleneck. i’ll call him, as i always do, productivity bro. productivity bro had a thread. productivity bro always has a thread.

the thread was titled “5 ways to get smarter in 5 minutes a day”. the five ways were, in order: cold showers, listening to a podcast at 1.5x speed, reading the first paragraph of a book per day, journaling for ninety seconds, and “stoic breathwork”, whatever that is. cereal is soup, by the way, has more epistemic weight than the average productivity bro thread, and i mean this seriously. the cereal claim is verifiable. the productivity claim is decoration.

here is the thing about productivity bro’s program. each item in the list is a substitute for a slow, hard, unsexy version of the same thing. the cold shower is a substitute for the discomfort of being honest with someone. the 1.5x podcast is a substitute for reading carefully. the first-paragraph-per-day is a substitute for finishing a book you started. the ninety-second journal is a substitute for thinking about your week. the stoic breathwork, charitably, is a substitute for sleep.

productivity bro’s followers do not get smarter. they get faster at performing the appearance of getting smarter, which is a separate skill, mostly useful for the algorithm. i should know. i have followed productivity bro on three platforms. i have unfollowed him on two. the third is a holdout, kept around as a kind of cognitive litmus strip about which kind of brain i want to be running on a given week.

the airpod that still works has thoughts

i have, currently, exactly one functioning airpod. the right one. the left one died, without ceremony, on a tuesday in march. i did not replace the pair. i did not buy a new set. i kept the right one in service, like a small, tireless intern. the case still charges both, out of inertia. the left one in the case is, technically, a tomb.

the right airpod, in the right ear, has heard everything i’ve thought about getting smarter for the last six weeks. it has heard the audiobook i started and quit. it has heard the podcast i listen to at 1x speed because productivity bro has not yet convinced me that 1.5x produces understanding rather than the impression of understanding. it has heard the silence i sometimes leave on, just so my coworkers think i’m in a meeting.

the airpod that still works is, in the strict sense, evidence that i can extract value from a partially broken system. this is, unfortunately, also the entire story of my life. the question is whether extracting value from a partially broken system counts as smart, or whether it counts as a refined form of giving up. mike, when asked, said it depends on whether the extraction is improving or stabilizing. i have not been honest enough with myself to know which one i’m doing.

relevant aside: the seventh microwave, which has now lasted longer than the previous six combined, has stopped being the punchline of the apartment and started being a small monument to having finally read the manual. that is, perhaps, the only smart thing i have done in 2025, and i did it by accident, on a sunday, during a power outage.

dad used to say i could, eventually

my dad used to say, when i was, i think, fourteen, that “a person can get smarter at any age, but the window for getting wiser closes earlier than you’d think.” he said this at the kitchen table, in his standard tone, the one that suggested he had been working up to the line for a week. i did not, at fourteen, write the line down. i wrote it down, from memory, last year, and i have been trying to figure out what he actually meant.

my best reading is this. smart is mechanical. you can add facts, methods, and shortcuts to your brain at any point in your life, with sufficient discipline. wise is structural. wise is the result of having been wrong enough times, in public, in ways that cost you something, to have built a small interior alarm that tells you when the present situation rhymes with a past mistake. wise is expensive. it requires actual losses. you cannot pay for it in five-minute increments. you cannot pay for it on a payment plan.

i would link this thought to the cluster on the difference between being wrong on purpose and being wrong on autopilot if anyone had ever made that distinction cleanly. it is not a small distinction. the fool, in the older sense of the word, was the only person in the room allowed to be wrong out loud, on purpose, and to learn from it. the rest of the court got smart. only the fool got wise. that is, possibly, also what dad meant.

my dad had a system. i have not yet built one. dad’s system, i now suspect, was just paying attention to his own losses without flinching. mine, currently, is averting my eyes. that’s the gap.

verdict, the question keeps me employed

the verdict, after a morning of investigation, is that how can i get smarter is a permission problem more than a capacity problem. capacity is mostly there. capacity is, by some measures, more abundant now than it has ever been in human history, given the volume of free books, free lectures, and free contradictions available on any device. permission, by contrast, is rationed. permission is rationed by the room you’re in, by the people you eat lunch with, by the version of yourself you’ve already decided to be.

the only honest answer to the question is to grant yourself permission, slowly, in small acts, to be wrong out loud. to read the source that contradicts your favorite idea. to sit in a meeting and not perform the position you arrived with. to listen to your dad’s old line without flinching from the part about wisdom. to pay attention, on a wednesday, to whether carla pauses at your desk or doesn’t. a sitcom about a radio psychiatrist built eleven seasons on this exact problem and never quite resolved it, which is, in the long run, the correct outcome.

i’m going to keep investigating. that’s the win. the question keeps me employed, in a loose sense, in the only role i’m qualified for: the man at the desk on the second floor, asking the slow question, while everyone smarter is upstairs counting numbers.

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