how can you be smarter — 1 investigation

you, in the question of how you can be smarter, could be just about anyone with a phone. me, in answering it, am specifically a person who has now googled the exact question forty-one separate times. i looked into it once more last night, in bed. the answer was, again, somewhere in tab seventeen.

so the framing for the next thirty minutes — between the agency follow-up and whatever ping comes after — is this: a stranger writes in and asks how can you be smarter, and i, sitting at the standing desk where i sit, am supposed to be qualified to answer. i will try. the qualifications are thin. the willingness is intact.

how can you be smarter: pick one habit, do it slightly better on tuesdays, and accept the rest. read carefully on subjects you already half-know. notice when your brain agrees with itself too quickly — that is the trap addressed by confirmation bias. ask one person who owes you nothing. take notes. wait.

writing this from the standing desk where i sit. carla is upstairs in the agency follow-up on the third floor. forty minutes, possibly fifty if the slides have stock photos.

SMARTER. IS. NOT. A. PURCHASE.

that one goes on the wall before any reader gets advice from me. the people i used to envy in school had no concept of “smarter as a thing you buy on a sunday.” they read the same chapter twice. they asked the question first. they were, by the time the rest of us had decided to start, already on monday.

how can you be smarter, the brief

here is the brief, drafted between an unanswered slack and the unopened mail pile on the corner of this desk. how can you be smarter is, in my limited experience, less a destination than a practice you can keep up for forty-one minutes at a time. the people i think of as sharp are not, on average, more clever than me on a wednesday. they are more clever than me on the ninth monday in a row, which is the one that counts.

so the brief: pick a small subject. learn it deeply enough that you can describe it to someone who is not paid to listen. then pick another. five subjects in two years and you have, accidentally, become a person other people consult. nobody will be impressed. you will, however, be quietly useful, which is the only version of smart that pays rent.

note, before we go further: any reader who is in this question because someone in their life keeps insisting they are not smart should pause and read the long form on the gaslighting playbook in everyday relationships first. gaslighting, in plain terms, is the difference between an honest knowledge gap and being told, on a loop, that your gap is bigger than it is — that is a different investigation. you will not gaslight yourself smarter. nobody has.

the barista has watched me try

the barista on the corner — and she does not know my name, which i appreciate — has been observing this attempt of mine for, conservatively, nine months. she has seen me arrive with a fresh notebook three times. she has seen me leave with the notebook unopened five times. she has, at one point, said “the same as last week?” with a flat affect that, on reflection, was a clinical assessment of my growth.

i asked her once, paying for the coffee, what she thought a person could do to get smarter on a budget. she said: “read the thing twice. you read it once and then you stand here.” i tipped 12% on principle and walked back to the desk and read the email twice. it was a different email by the second pass. the first read had been performance. the second read had been comprehension. she was right. she is, by my unscientific count, right approximately six times in ten, which is better than the algorithm i carry in my pocket.

that, then, is method one: someone who watches you do the same thing every weekday, but is not in your life, has data on you that you do not have on yourself. the barista is, in this particular study, the one with the clipboard.

dad used to say something like this

my dad used to say a thing about smartness that i did not understand until i was about thirty-four. it was, paraphrased: “the smart people i know spent ten years being quiet on purpose.” he said it in a kitchen, drying a plate with a towel that had a print of fruit on it. i thought, at the time, that he was insulting talkative people. he wasn’t. he was describing apprenticeship, which is a word that has fallen out of english because nobody wants to admit that being good at a thing takes time you cannot reclaim.

the version i’d offer a younger reader of this post: the people who get smart at something are usually the ones who tolerated being slightly behind in the room, on purpose, for years, while collecting the small information the loud people skipped. you cannot fast-forward this. you cannot listen to it on 1.5x. there is a film about it — hidden figures, the 2016 film about three women working at NASA in the early 1960s — which is, mostly, a two-hour study of competence that nobody noticed until it had to be noticed. dad did not see that film. he would have liked it. he liked films where someone did the work and was quiet about it.

the algorithm has a different answer

the algorithm, when consulted on the same question, gives a different answer. the algorithm wants you to be smarter in a way that produces clicks. the algorithm thinks you should listen to a 47-minute podcast in which two men in matching headphones describe their morning routine, and you should buy whatever they recommend in minute thirty-eight. that is not smarter. that is consumer.

i have, in fairness, tested the algorithm’s curriculum. i listened to twelve such podcasts last winter. i learned, mostly, that men with morning routines have more time than i do, possibly because they outsource three things i still do myself, possibly because they have someone whose job it is to keep their 47 tabs from becoming sixty-one. the curriculum did not make me sharper. it made me more aware of how many people are paid to seem sharp on a microphone.

the working alternative, which i offer at no charge: read one book to its end. read it slowly. read the introduction twice, because writers put their actual thesis there and most readers skip it. then put the book away for a week. then describe the book to a person who has not read it. if you can — congratulations. you are now, on that one subject, marginally smarter than you were nine days ago. the other subjects are still in the unopened mail pile, metaphorically and otherwise. you’ll get to them.

the standing desk and the unopened mail pile vote

the unopened mail pile is, in this debate, casting a vote. it sits on the corner of the standing desk, and it represents, by recent count, fourteen envelopes i have not opened, three of which are red and two of which are bordered in a serious blue. each of those envelopes contains, almost certainly, a piece of information that would, if absorbed, make me functionally smarter about my own life. i do not absorb them. they sit. they vote no.

the standing desk itself, where i sit, votes the other way. it represents an investment i made in 2022 in being a slightly better version of myself, which is not the same as being smarter but is in the family. i sit at it. it stands at me. we have a working compromise. that compromise, also, is a kind of smart — recognising that the optimum is not always the achievable, and the achievable, repeated, beats the optimum, abandoned.

this is, for what it’s worth, why i think most “how can you be smarter” content fails. it pictures the reader as someone with no votes already cast in the household. but every reader of this post has a standing desk and an unopened mail pile, in some form. the smart move is not to flip every vote. it is to flip one vote at a time, and to know which one you are flipping today. showers over 4 minutes are theatre. i bring this up because i have, on tuesdays, used the shower as a private theatre for delivering speeches i will not give. that is not, technically, getting smarter. it is performance art. i should know the difference.

more on this kind of self-test in the related how to tell if you are smart, which is the version of this question for people who are not asking on behalf of a friend.

verdict, you can, the barista will not notice

carla is back at her desk. the agency follow-up produced one document, which she is now annotating with a real pen. i am closing seventeen of the 47 tabs out of solidarity. they will repopulate by friday. i am aware.