how can you get smart — 1 explainer, sort of

an explainer, sort of, on how exactly you go about getting smart, written by someone who, to be fair, manifestly is not. that is, near as i can tell from the search traffic, the genre i have quietly settled into for the foreseeable future. it pays in a different currency. dave remains unimpressed by the whole project.

so here we are. how can you get smart is, by the look of the queries, a thing several thousand people type into a box every month, hoping a sentence comes back that solves it. not “how can you get smarter”, note. that one is its own problem and i wrote about it next door, the comparative version, the gym membership of the question. this one drops the suffix. this one wants the verb to land. you don’t want incremental. you want arrival. you want the noun.

writing this from the desk on a quiet wednesday, around 10:38 in the morning, while carla is on the third floor for the all-hands and the muffin tray. that gives me, by the most generous estimate, the rest of the morning before anyone notices my browser has fourteen tabs about the verb “to get smart” and zero tabs about the spreadsheet i was sent at nine.

carla just walked past on her way to the elevator. she did not glance at the screen. that is either trust or the absence of curiosity. i’ll be the judge of which later.

how can you get smart, the short version

the verb is the trap. get implies a transaction. you go somewhere, you trade something, you come back smart. the way you get a coffee, or get a haircut, or get a refund from the airline if you spell the words right and don’t blink. you do not, as far as i can tell, get smart. you can, on a good week, get a little less stupid. those are not the same operation, and most of the people selling you the first one are running the second one quietly in the back room.

the longer version of “how can you get smart” is, as best i can summarize from a life of being adjacent to people who clearly did it: read past the point you wanted to stop, listen to a person finish a sentence even when you already wrote your reply, and refuse, at every available exit, the small voice in your head that says i basically already know this. you do not basically already know this. you’ve never basically already known anything in your life. that’s the topic.

i’m fairly sure there is a study, somewhere, possibly in a magazine that costs money, about how people who report being smart score lower on actual tests than people who report being unsure. i did not read the study. i, on receiving its summary, agreed with it on contact, which is, by the way, the foundational error of confirmation bias and the subject of an investigation already on the wall. i mention this so you can see the species at work. i am demonstrating it as i write this. that is, in fact, the only honest way to write about smart.

sarah seems to have done it without effort

sarah ran a marathon last spring. she did not train, by which i mean she trained for nine months in a quiet, methodical way and never mentioned it once at the office. she has a pension she actually understands. she knows what the percentages do and where the money goes and why one number going up means another one is, in some far-off year, also going up. i asked her, once, how she got smart about money. she looked at me like the question was already answering itself. “i read the form,” she said. “the whole form.” that was the entire conversation.

i have not, by my own honest count, ever read a whole form. i read forms the way i read terms and conditions, which is to say i scroll to the box, click it, and consent to being owned by a corporation. sarah does not consent to being owned by anyone. sarah reads the form. that is, when you sit with it, the entire mechanic. read the form. the whole form. i’m aware of how that sounds. it sounds like nothing. it is, in fact, the engine.

sarah is the mirror in this post. i bring her up not to flatter her, which she would hate, but because she is the only person in my life who appears to have done what the search query asks, and she did it by doing the smallest, most boring possible thing, repeatedly, without commentary. nobody clapped. she did not livestream it. she did not post a thread. she just kept reading the whole form. and then, one tuesday, she had a pension and a marathon and a calm i can describe but not produce.

the coffee shop method, allegedly

i tested a method this week, in good faith. the method was this: i would go to the coffee shop on the corner, the one with the bad jazz and the better light, sit down, open one of the books i have been pretending to have read, and not leave until i had finished a chapter. one chapter. that was the whole brief. how can you get smart? a chapter at a time, allegedly.

i did this on tuesday at 9:14am. the barista, who knows the order, did not say anything about my showing up at an unusual hour. she just slid the cup across and went back to whatever she does that is more interesting than my arrival. i sat in the back. i opened the book. i read three pages. i then, with the calm authority of a man who has decided he basically already knows this, closed the book and opened my phone instead.

the method, in other words, did not survive contact with me. the method survived for nine minutes. the book is, currently, in my bag, unopened, riding around with me to subsequent coffee shops as a kind of accessory. it is performing the role of book i am reading without performing the function. this is, on reflection, the entire problem with how i’m trying to get smart. i’m performing the role. the function is unstaffed.

i would like that one in the file plainly. the role is not the function. wearing the t-shirt is not running the marathon. owning the book is not reading the book. having forty-seven tabs open about a topic is not understanding the topic. (yes, i still have 47 tabs open. yes, four of them are about getting smart. no, i have not finished any of them.) the role is not the function. the algorithm, on a particularly unkind day, will sell you the role and bill you for the function. you will pay both invoices and end up with neither.

the seventh microwave taught me something

i killed my seventh microwave in march. (i am not going to explain how. there is a separate post about that. it is already on the wall.) what i want to say here is that the seventh microwave, sitting in the kitchen with its little internal smell, taught me something about the verb “to get smart” that no book has yet managed.

the lesson was: i do, in fact, learn things. just very slowly, and only after a fire. i now know, with the certainty of a man who has paid in cash, that you do not put metal in the box. i did not know this in 2017. i knew it intellectually, the way one knows that the sun is far away, but i did not know it operationally. now i know it operationally. it took, by my count, six microwaves to install the knowledge. that is, if you do the math, the most expensive single sentence in my apartment.

this is, possibly, how getting smart actually works for me. not by reading. not by sitting at a coffee shop with a book that stays closed. by doing a thing badly, six times, until the seventh time the universe sends a small fire and the lesson, finally, lands. the question how can you get smart may be, for some of us, just the polite version of the question how many microwaves do you have to kill. i do not love this answer. i’m reporting it.

the third yoga mat watched it happen

under the couch, currently, lives the third yoga mat. it has been there since 2023. it has been watching all of this. the mat, if it could file a report, would describe a man who, in pursuit of getting smart, has bought three different physical objects representing self-improvement and used precisely none of them past the first weekend. the air fryer. the good knife. the standing desk i use sitting down. the yoga mat is, in this lineup, the most patient witness. it has the longest service record. it has seen the most.

i think, sometimes, about what the third yoga mat would say if you asked it how can you get smart. the mat, of course, would say nothing. but if it could speak, i suspect it would say, in the slow voice of an object that has watched a lot of dust gather: you already bought the smart. you forgot to do the smart.

this is, frankly, what i think is happening in the search box. people typing “how can you get smart” are not, on the whole, looking for a syllabus. they are looking for the part where the buying counts. the buying does not count. the buying is the receipt. the function is the unrolling. the function is the morning, six minutes, on the mat. the function is unstaffed in a lot of apartments. mine especially.

the deeper point is that getting smart, the absolute version, the noun-state, the one without -er, requires the one ingredient i find hardest to apply: showing up to the boring middle of a thing without a story about it. sarah does this. she reads the whole form. she does not narrate the reading. there’s no thread, no caption, no mood lighting. that is the rare and expensive bit. the bit that doesn’t post.

verdict, getting is the cost, smart is the bill

so here is where i land. the question how can you get smart contains a hidden contract. the contract says: there is a transaction by which you, the asker, will move from your current condition to a labeled, completed state. you will get smart the way you get a coat from a hanger. it does not work like that. nothing in the universe works like that, except possibly hot water and even that bills you in the end.

what does work, as far as i can see from the desk, on a wednesday, between meetings i’m not in: you read past the point you wanted to stop. you let people sharper than you finish their sentences. you read the whole form. you sit at the coffee shop and you do not close the book at page three. you kill, where unavoidable, only as many microwaves as the lesson requires, and you take the lesson when it arrives, even if it arrives in smoke. and you do not, under any circumstances, narrate the doing. the narration is the trap. the narration is the role pretending to be the function. the narration, as i’m performing it right now, in this very paragraph, in real time, in a post about getting smart that i wrote instead of reading, is the entire shape of the problem.

the comparative is honest. smarter is a direction. smart, the absolute, the destination, is a thing other people get to call you, sometimes, briefly, after the fact, in your absence. you do not get to install it. you cannot order it from a website. and the people who appear to have it are, on closer inspection, mostly people who never tried to get it. they were doing the boring thing the whole time. seinfeld‘s entire premise was a man who never got smart and was, somehow, around very smart people. that’s, structurally, my situation, except sarah is the cast and the cameras are off.

if you want a working map of the biases that keep getting in the way of all of this — the home-team brain, the heckler-evidence ejection, the tabs that prove what you already thought — that one’s its own investigation, and it’s, frankly, where most of these search queries should have started.

carla is back from the third floor. she dropped a stapler on her desk like it had wronged her personally. i think the all-hands ran long. i’m closing this tab and pretending the spreadsheet is open.

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