how can you get smarter — 1 fairly sure investigation

you get smarter, the bio on the tweet promised, by waking up at five. i get up at six and forty. i’m fairly sure the extra ninety minutes belong to a man who has been awake too long to know.

the question, properly read, is not really a question. it is a small dare wearing a sweater. how can you get smarter contains a “you” that is, in the trade, called second person, and a “can” that is, on closer reading, doing two jobs at once. one job is capacity — whether you have the equipment. the other job is permission — whether anyone in the room would let you. most days the second job runs the desk and the first one watches.

i’ll be working through this from the apartment, in spirit, but writing it from the workstation. carla is on the third floor in the q3 review with the slides nobody volunteered to make. the boss is in another meeting, still — the_boss, on the calendar, listed exactly that way by whoever set up the shared view, in a single block from nine to noon and has, on the map of my morning, the heft of a small nation. that buys me, on a generous reading, the rest of the morning before anyone returns to a chair.

workstation, wednesday, 9:47am. the chair leans slightly forward, which i have decided is a feature. one airpod in the right ear. carla hasn’t passed yet. the q3 deck on the third floor presumably continues without me.

before i go further, you should know this whole post sits on top of a longer loop i described when i tried to describe the warm bath of always being right. the loop applies here too. every plan to get smarter i’ve ever drawn up was, in retrospect, a plan to feel smarter while doing roughly the same things, slightly faster, in a slightly tighter shirt. plans of that shape do not work. i’ve run the experiment. eleven times, by a count i’m not proud of.

how can you get smarter, brief

the brief answer, on a generous accounting, is a sentence. read slower than feels natural. sleep longer than feels productive. talk, on purpose, to the people in your day who are not currently nodding. write down the case against your favorite idea before you act on it. that is the program. there is no app. there is no morning ritual. nobody has wrapped this in a turtleneck and sold it.

each clause attacks a separate failure. reading slowly attacks the brain’s habit of completing a sentence before it has finished reading it. sleeping longer attacks the small confused dog that runs the brain after midnight. talking to non-agreers attacks the home-team problem, which is the warm hum that makes any disagreement feel like a personal attack. writing the case against attacks the specific loop where you do “research” on a position you already hold and call it homework.

none of this requires money. all of it requires permission. permission is the part nobody packages, because permission cannot be packaged, only granted, in private, by you, to you, on a wednesday, with the office quiet enough to hear it land.

the boss is in another meeting, still

the boss has been in another meeting since 9:00am. i have not seen the boss in person, in any meaningful way, since last thursday, when the boss walked past my desk holding a coffee that, by the look of it, was the third of the morning and the first not from the lobby cart. the boss did not stop. the boss does not stop. the boss is, in fact, defined, in my head, by not stopping.

this matters because how can you get smarter is, in any office, partly a function of who is around to notice. i could, on this morning, walk to the third floor and ask the boss what the q3 review actually concludes about regional spend. nobody is stopping me. the door is unlocked. the only thing in the way is permission, granted, in private, by me, to me, in this room. i have not granted it. i’m writing this instead. that, also, is a finding.

the trick of the second person, in the question, is that it pretends to be about you, the reader, when in fact it is about you, the person at the desk who has not yet gone upstairs. you can be the reader, by all means. but you can also, on certain mornings, be the man at the desk, with the airpod in the right ear and the rest of the morning open, who has not yet stood up. (the airpod situation: the left one died in march. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford. the right one has, by now, heard most of my best resolutions go silent.)

CAPACITY. IS. NOT. THE. PROBLEM. PERMISSION. IS.

the gym sauna is the answer, allegedly

i go to the gym for the sauna. this has been true for two years and i no longer pretend otherwise. the sauna is, in any honest reading, the only equipment i use. the weight room is a hallway i pass on the way. the treadmills are, to me, decorative. the man at the front desk has stopped asking, by name, about my plans. that’s a small mercy and a complete diagnosis at the same time.

which brings me, on a winding path, to the hot take of the morning. showers over 4 minutes are theatre. they always have been. anything beyond the fourth minute is no longer hygiene; it is a small private performance about being the kind of person who deserves the rest of the morning. the sauna at the gym is the same instinct, dressed up in cedar. i do not, in good conscience, get smarter in the sauna. i sit. i sweat. i think things i would not write down. then i go home and forget most of them by the time i open the fridge.

the productivity industry will tell you, with a straight face, that heat exposure raises BDNF and improves long-term cognition. the_algorithm has surfaced this claim to me, by my count, six separate times this month, in three different accents, on three different platforms. i’m fairly sure there is research, somewhere, possibly in a magazine i would not subscribe to, that says heat helps the brain. i’m equally sure there is research, on a different shelf, that says it does nothing. you can pick. you will, on whatever wednesday this finds you, pick the one that flatters whatever it is you already do.

the gym, for me, is a controlled experiment in confirmation, run on myself, by myself, with no peer review. i cannot, in any honest accounting, tell you it has made me smarter. i can tell you it has made me, on average, slightly less anxious for forty minutes after, which is a different metric, and a smaller one. a yellow cartoon family from springfield has a character who once said the gym was where he kept his pain. i think about this more than i should, mid-sit, on the upper bench, where the heat is, technically, the worst.

the seventh microwave is also the answer

i killed six microwaves before i learned to read the manual. the seventh is, currently, the longest-lived appliance in the apartment. it has been on the counter since february, which is, by the standards of my prior six, a record. that is not, by itself, evidence of intelligence. that is evidence that i finally, after one specific sunday in 2025, sat down with the booklet and read the section about metal.

here is the part that connects to the question. i did not get smarter at appliances. i got smarter at one appliance, by paying attention to it long enough to learn its small rules. the lesson, generalized, is that smart is local. smart does not arrive in a wave. smart shows up, one appliance at a time, after a specific cost has been paid. the cost, in the case of the microwave, was approximately four hundred dollars and one minor kitchen fire. i would not call this efficient. i would not call this scalable. i would call it true.

the productivity people sell a different story. they sell horizontal smart — the idea that one course, one habit, one ritual, will lift the whole field. it does not. it cannot. the brain works the way the kitchen works. you get smarter at the microwave. then, over years, if you’re paying attention, you get smarter at the toaster. by the time you get smarter at the dishwasher you are seventy and the dishwasher is laughing at you. that is the curve. it is not a chart you can post.

i’d link the broader cluster, on the family of small wiring errors that runs the show, here, because it explains why the horizontal-smart pitch keeps working on people who should know better. it works because we want it to. that’s the whole engine.

the q3 review will not test this

somewhere upstairs, on the third floor, in a room with worse lighting than ours, a slide is currently being read aloud about the q3 numbers. the slide will, on present trajectory, contain a chart that goes up on the left and a chart that goes down on the right and a sentence in twelve-point font that nobody will quote afterward. carla will, by 11:00am, return to the desk with a folder. the boss will, by lunch, be in the next meeting.

none of this will test, in any meaningful way, whether i have gotten smarter. the q3 review tests something else. it tests whether the people in the room can be in a room. that is, on its own, a real test. it is not, however, the test the question how can you get smarter is asking. the question is asking something quieter. the question is asking whether you, on a wednesday, between 9:00 and noon, with nobody watching the chair you are in, can do the unsexy thing.

the unsexy thing, today, is to stay with this paragraph for two more sentences before opening another tab. i have, by now, opened the tab. i have closed the tab. i have written this sentence as a small penalty. (this is the third yoga mat under the couch, in spirit — a piece of equipment i bought to become the kind of person who stays, and which has, on present evidence, been used as a mat for staying open another tab.)

this all rhymes, uncomfortably, with the cluster on the small lies you tell yourself before lunch. the connection is not subtle. saying i’m investigating how to get smarter, while opening a tab to a video about heat exposure, is in the same family as saying i’ll pick up the next call, while letting the man who calls go to voicemail. one is a liar in a sweater; the other is a liar in a slightly nicer sweater.

verdict, you can, the boss won’t ask

the verdict, after a morning of sitting with the question, is that how can you get smarter is mostly a permission problem. the capacity is, on average, already there. you can read. you have books. you have the slow podcasts and the fast ones, the audio you skip and the audio you save for a long walk you will not, this week, take. capacity is, frankly, oversupplied. permission is rationed.

permission is rationed by the room you’re in, by the people you eat lunch with, by the boss who is, today, in another meeting and will, on average, never ask whether you have gotten smarter. the boss, in any office, is not the obstacle. the boss is the proof that nobody is checking. the only person checking is you, in private, on a wednesday, with the airpod in the right ear and the cursor blinking inside a doc you are not, technically, supposed to be in.

so. you can. nobody in particular will stop you. nobody in particular will applaud either. the gym sauna will keep being the gym sauna. the seventh microwave will continue, against expectation, to function. carla will pass the desk by 11:00am with a different folder. the boss will, on present forecast, remain in another meeting until at least 12:30. the question keeps me at the desk. that, in the end, may be the only honest finding.

↑