how to look smarter — 1 fairly sure investigation

looking smarter, considered as a small home project, is cheaper than actually being smarter and tends to ship faster too. i’m fairly sure roughly half the productivity bro’s tweets are quietly the first project posing convincingly as the second. i went out and bought a serious pair of glasses. they did not, in the end, help me at all.

the desk is the desk, the mug is the second mug of the morning, and the q3 review is upstairs on the third floor without me, which is the entire arrangement i have negotiated with my own life. carla is in it. i am here, in a chair that has begun to lean about thirteen degrees to the left, learning how to look smarter from the inside of a body that mostly is not. i have, by some optimistic count, the rest of the morning before someone scrolls past the desk and asks why the document is open.

the angle of this one is narrow on purpose. not how to BE smarter — that is the pillar, and the pillar lives next door, where the conversation is harder. this is the lighter, faster cousin. how to look smarter. the apparent thing. the costume. the lean. the prop. the small set of moves an unimpressive man can make at his desk, on a tuesday, when the whole building is asking quietly whether he is, in fact, the man for the part. the answer is no. the part is still available.

how to look smarter, brief

the brief is short because the topic is short. looking smarter is a costume. the costume has five pieces. you do not need to own all five at once. you only need the one that fits whatever room you have walked into, which is something the more expensive guides on this topic do not say, because then they could not sell you the other four pieces.

looking smarter is, in the cleaner cases, a real thing. a man who pauses before he answers a question often gets credit for thinking, even when what he is doing is recovering. a person who carries a notebook gets credit for writing things down, even when the notebook is empty. the world is generous, mostly, to people who appear to be in charge of themselves. this is the entire grift, and it is not a small one. before we go any further, you can read the longer piece on how confirmation bias quietly rewards the people who are already winning, which explains, in better words than i have, why the costume tends to work even on the people who designed the costume.

i should also say what this is not. it is not how to be smarter. that is a different post for a different week. there is a sister piece on whether you can actually make the brain in your head do better work, written by the same idiot at a slightly more hopeful hour. this one is the cosmetic version. lighting and angles. one mug. one prop. one good silence.

step one, sarah does it without trying

sarah does not work in this building. sarah runs marathons on weekends and understands her pension on weekdays, and the pension she understands is the kind that has rules in it nobody read out loud. sarah, by every accidental measure, looks smarter than i do, and she does this without owning a single prop from the list.

i ran into sarah on saturday outside the bagel place. i was holding a bagel. she was holding nothing, which is the first move. people who hold nothing look smarter than people who hold things. i did not know this until that moment. i looked down at my bagel and felt, for a second, like a man holding evidence.

sarah said three things in a row. the things were short. each one was followed by a small pause i now understand was deliberate, although i don’t think she would call it that. she would call it “thinking before talking.” she would be right. i went home and tried it on a phone call with dave. dave said “are you mad at me.” the pause does not work everywhere. the pause needs the right room. sarah lives in the right room. i live in mine, which has a chair that leans.

the lesson from sarah, as i wrote it on a sticky note that is still on the side of the monitor, is that the cheapest way to look smarter is to want to look smarter less. this is, i’m aware, the kind of sentence the productivity bro types into a tweet at eleven on a sunday. i’m sorry. it’s still true. some of his tweets are right. that’s the worst thing about him.

step two, the 23% phone battery looks busy

my phone, by long-standing arrangement, lives at twenty-three percent. it has lived at twenty-three percent for what feels like four years. i do not know why. nobody i have asked knows why. the battery is, i suspect, on its own private project that has nothing to do with me.

twenty-three percent, it turns out, looks smarter than ninety percent. a man whose phone is at twenty-three percent looks like a man who has been using his phone for important things since six in the morning. a man whose phone is at ninety percent looks like a man who charged it last night and then sat very still. the truth is closer to the second man, in my case, but the appearance is the first one, and the appearance is the entire job.

i tested this on tuesday. i took the phone to the meeting i was not supposed to be in but had, by accident, been added to. i put it face down on the table. i flipped it over once, looked at it as if a number had moved, and flipped it back. nobody asked me a question for the next fourteen minutes. they asked the man with the laptop. the man with the laptop had to answer. i had a phone with a serious-looking battery percentage. that is the entire physics of the room.

i do not, as i note here, recommend killing your battery on purpose. the algorithm gives you the percentage you deserve, on its own schedule. you cannot game it. you can only learn to use whatever number it has assigned you that morning. mine is twenty-three. i have made peace with twenty-three. twenty-three has made peace with me.

step three, the seventh microwave looks expensive

the seventh microwave is, by any honest accounting, the cheapest one in the store. it was on the bottom shelf with a sticker that said “open box, slight dent, fully functional.” i bought it for ninety dollars after dave laughed at me about the previous six in a way i no longer hear consciously. the microwave has a small dent on the side, which faces the wall. you cannot see the dent from anywhere a guest would stand.

from the angle most guests stand at, the microwave looks expensive. it has a brushed metal door. the buttons are flush with the panel. it makes a noise when it finishes that is one note instead of three. these are all features the higher models also have, which is part of why the lower model exists. somewhere, a designer was told to make the cheap one look like the expensive one from across the kitchen, and the designer did the job. i have benefited. the microwave has benefited. nobody has been hurt except, technically, my last six microwaves.

the lesson, which i did not pay for and am happy to pass on, is that looking smarter and looking expensive are the same trick from different angles. you pick the thing that faces the room. you turn the dent toward the wall. the dent is still there. the dent is none of the room’s business. for the broader version of “the dent is none of the room’s business,” i recommend a quick trip through the post on what we mean when we say the brain is biased toward what it wants to see, which explains why most people, most of the time, will refuse to walk around to the back of the microwave.

i have referenced microwaves in pop culture exactly once before, in conversation with mike, when we agreed that the microwave in the office break room from the long-running paper company sitcom was the most realistic prop in television, because nobody on that show ever cleaned it. the microwave was on screen for nine seasons and remained, throughout, a small, polite disgrace. that is the level of realism i am chasing in my own kitchen, and i am, on the seventh attempt, finally there.

step four, the apartment looks tidy from one angle

the apartment is not tidy. the apartment has a couch with a third yoga mat under it, a coffee table with a pile of unopened mail i have agreed not to engage with, and a kitchen counter that holds, at any given time, between four and eleven items i have decided to think about later. the apartment is, in the honest version, an exhibit.

and yet. from one specific angle, near the door, looking diagonally toward the window, the apartment looks tidy. there is a single armchair in frame. there is a lamp. there is a plant that, against expectations, is alive. the angle does not include the couch. the angle does not include the counter. the angle does not include the mail. the angle includes only the parts of the apartment that have, by accident, agreed to behave today.

this is the angle the camera is on for video calls. the camera knows. the camera has been positioned, over months of small adjustments, to the exact spot where the apartment looks like the apartment of a man who does the dishes. i do not, on the whole, do the dishes. but on the call, i appear to live somewhere where the dishes are done. the call is forty minutes. the call ends. the dishes resume their position. the angle holds.

this is the entire trick of looking smarter at home. you do not clean the room. you clean one corner of the room, and you point the camera at the corner. the room does what rooms do. the corner does the talking. carla figured this out years ago, which is why her video calls always look like she lives in a magazine. she lives, i happen to know, in a perfectly ordinary apartment with the same noisy dishwasher i have. she just owns one good lamp, and she points it the right way. i bought a lamp last month. it is the wrong lamp. it is on order to be returned. the new one will, i’m fairly sure, fix everything.

verdict, looking is the entire job

so here is the verdict, after sarah’s three short sentences, after the twenty-three percent battery, after the dent on the microwave that faces the wall, after the angle by the door that includes the lamp and excludes the mail. the verdict is that looking smarter is a real skill, and it is, on most days, more useful than being smarter, and the only people who will tell you otherwise are the ones who already are.

i’m not proud of this. i am not proud of any of it. i would like to be the man who is so deeply smart that the costume is unnecessary. that man does not need a thirteen-degree chair, a phone at twenty-three percent, a microwave with a hidden dent, or a lamp pointed at one specific corner of his apartment. that man can stand in a beige hallway under a flickering light and still look like he runs the place. that man, in my own private model of the universe, is don draper from the long-running advertising drama set in the nineteen-sixties, who, it should be said, was also faking it, just at a higher production budget than mine.

plants are silent landlords. mine does not pay rent and yet judges me from the corner of the apartment with the patience of an institution. the plant looks smarter than i do, by every measure i can think of, and the plant has done nothing to earn this except continue to be alive in low light. some people are like this. some plants are like this. the world rewards the appearance of competence with such consistency that you can build a whole career on it, which most of the people you have heard of did. i’m fairly sure there’s a study on this somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, possibly told to me by a man at the bar with a beard who seemed sure.

if you want to know whether the costume actually fools its own wearer, which is the harder question, see the cross-cluster post on the well-known effect named after two researchers, where the man in the costume forgets he is in a costume. the dunning piece is the darker version of this one. this one is the lighter cousin. they share a kitchen.

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