how to be a smarter — 1 thorough investigation

being a smarter, the search bar suggested with confidence, helpfully filling in the rest of the blank i had not yet finished typing. a thorough investigation followed, briefly, on the same browser tab. i did not finish the sentence. the sentence, on reflection, was perhaps the actual test all along.

i’m at my desk on a wednesday at 3:14pm, drafting this between sarah’s two-screen monitor setup and the empty chair carla left at the q3 review on the third floor. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning, plus whatever cushion the budget item before lunch buys me. it’s enough.

i typed the phrase in because i wanted to know what other people who type “how to be a smarter” into a search bar are looking for, since they cannot, by the structure of the words alone, be looking for the same thing. a smarter what. a smarter person. a smarter home. a smarter dog. a smarter dishwasher. the dishwasher already judges me from inside its own cabinet, and i would not insult it further by asking it to upgrade.

i’m taking the keyword at face value, which is the polite thing to do for a search bar that is, in some sense, a colleague. the whole architecture of being right anyway already does this for me on most weekdays, so today i thought i’d extend the courtesy to grammar. “how to be a smarter” is a grammatical orphan. it asks you to fill in the blank yourself. that’s a kind of intelligence test, when you think about it. i did not pass it. i typed it back into a different search bar to see if it would tell me what i meant.

it did not. it offered me, instead, a film called limitless, which is about a man who takes a pill and becomes a smarter, briefly, before things go badly. that is the closest the internet got to answering my actual question. a movie. about a pill. that the protagonist regrets. the universe declined to comment further.

1. how to be a smarter, the missing noun

so let’s stay with the gap a moment. how to be a smarter what. the question is, technically, the answer. you cannot be a smarter in the abstract — being a smarter is a comparative without a referent, like being a taller alone in a room with no furniture. you have to be smarter than something. or smarter at something. or smarter for someone, which is a sadder version of the same problem.

i’m not the first person to notice this. but i am, going by the small evidence available to anyone monitoring my browser history, the first person to do an investigation about it from a desk at 1:38pm while pretending to update a spreadsheet. that has to be worth something. it has to be worth at least a paragraph.

A SMARTER. WHAT. A SMARTER WHAT.

let me say something here, and you can write it on the back of the agenda. the noun matters more than the adjective. a smarter person is a project. a smarter dog is a dog. a smarter spreadsheet is a different spreadsheet. the adjective alone is just a wish. wishes do not, in my experience, run on a wednesday.

2. step one, sarah does this without the noun

sarah is in the cubicle to my left and she is, objectively, a smarter. she does not say so. she does not have to. she runs marathons on the weekend, she has a pension that she understands, she opens her mail on the day it arrives and acts on whichever envelope deserves acting on. when i ask her what i should do about the q3 review carla is currently in, she says “go to the q3 review”, which is correct, and i don’t, which is also a kind of correct, just a different one.

step one of “how to be a smarter,” then, is to look at sarah and notice that the noun she fills in is “a person who reads things on time.” that’s the entire first step. you don’t have to copy it. you just have to notice it. noticing is, depressingly, eighty percent of the work. for a deeper version of this i’d point you at how to be smarter, four steps drafted at this same desk, which has the same problem and a different number of steps.

3. step two, accept the kw as written

step two is the brave step. it is to accept “how to be a smarter” as written and to refuse to fix it. i’m doing it right now. i typed it without flinching. i put it in the title. the meta_title says “how to be a smarter — 1 thorough investigation” and i did not edit the missing noun out of it because the missing noun is the post. the noun is what i’m investigating. you cannot fix the question and then claim to have answered it. that is a different post. probably a better one. but a different one.

i am aware of how that sounds. i am aware that “leave the typo in for thematic purposes” is the kind of decision a person makes when they do not have a smarter editor in the room. carla is in the q3 review on the third floor. sarah is on a call. the editor in this room is me, sitting next to a microwave that was, in a previous chapter of my life, on fire. i’ll be the judge of what’s relevant.

4. step three, the seventh microwave has no noun either

step three involves the microwave. the seventh one, technically. i killed the previous six in a sequence i would describe as “investigative” if i were being kind to myself, which today i am, because it’s wednesday and i’m in charge of the framing. the seventh microwave is on the kitchen counter at home and it works. it is, by definition, smarter than the previous six, because it is alive. that is the only metric a microwave can lose.

i bring it up because the microwave is also a noun without a comparative. nobody asks how to be a smarter microwave. nobody googles that. but if they did, the answer would be “do not have a fork inside you”, which is, in fact, the entire wisdom of the kitchen reduced to one sentence. you can have that one for free. it scales. it applies, in spirit, to most decisions.

5. step four, the third yoga mat as noun substitute

step four is the third yoga mat. this is the mat that has been under the couch since 2023. it is, possibly, evolving. when i think about being a smarter person — and i do, regularly, around 2 am when the apartment is quiet — i think about the mat. i bought it because i decided that a smarter person owns a yoga mat. i did not, at any point, decide that a smarter person uses a yoga mat. those are two different decisions. i made the cheaper one. the mat is a noun substitute. the mat is the noun the keyword is missing. a smarter mat-owner. that is what i am. i’m fine with it.

i’m not saying “buy a yoga mat” is a productivity tip. i am saying that filling the missing noun with a physical object you can place under furniture is, structurally, the same move as filling it with a verb you can perform on a tuesday. one of them costs less in regret, depending on the tuesday. mike, who last filed taxes in 2019 and considers the taxman a pen-pal, is in his own way a smarter — a smarter risk-tolerator, perhaps. the noun is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

6. verdict, a smarter what is none of our business

here is the verdict, presented to you, the reader, the search-bar typist, the person who arrived at this post from a query that was missing a noun and is now, somehow, deeper into the missing noun than when they started.

“how to be a smarter” is not a question with an answer. it is a sentence with a hole in it. the hole is the work. you fill it. i cannot fill it for you. sarah cannot fill it for you, although she would do a better job than i would. the search bar cannot fill it, although it tried, briefly, with a stefan-type expert in a vest who did not turn up in the results but is, i feel, somewhere just off-screen, ready to recommend a wine pairing for ambition.

the answer to “how to be a smarter” is a sentence you finish yourself, on a wednesday, at 9:14am, while carla is in the q3 review and sarah is on a call and the seventh microwave is, blessedly, intact at home. that’s the noun. the noun is your own life, which is, regrettably, the only thing the keyword can plausibly mean.

also: beach vacations are punishment with sand. that’s a separate ruling, but it belongs in the investigation. it’s the kind of thing a smarter person already knows, and a person who is being a smarter, present continuous, ongoing, is in the middle of figuring out. i’m in the middle. i admit it. the agenda i’m writing on is curling at the edges.

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