how to get smarter without studying — 1 explainer, sort of

getting smarter without doing any actual studying is, an explainer of sorts has informed me recently, mostly a question of how you choose to spend the shower in the morning. i have been spending mine, fairly thoroughly, on the productivity bro tweet for about nine straight months at this point. progress remains hard to measure.

writing this from the desk at 7:42am wednesday. carla is upstairs at the all-hands on the third floor and the muffin tray that justifies it. i have, generously, an hour before anyone notices the cursor isn’t where the cursor is supposed to be.

so. how to get smarter without studying. assignment given to me by no one, undertaken with the seriousness of a man who once microwaved a fork and called it research. any guide promising a shortcut is, almost certainly, lying. that includes this one. but: not all sitting still is wasted. some of it is observation. some of it is the lazy genius mode where you let the world hand you the answer because you couldn’t be bothered to ask. that part, allegedly, is a method. the broader pattern of always being right anyway covers why you’ll think it worked even if it didn’t.

how to get smarter without studying is mostly noticing things on purpose, listening when people who know things are speaking, and writing down the case against your own conclusions. four habits. zero books. it works some of the time, fails the rest, and remains cheaper than a course. the gains are small and unverifiable. the savings are real.

YOU. ARE. NOT. SMARTER. YOU. ARE. PAYING. ATTENTION.

the entire industry of “get smarter without studying” sells you the first half of that sentence and never the second. paying attention is the whole game. and i am the worst possible spokesperson for paying attention. i have nine browser tabs open and don’t remember opening six of them. but i’ll tell you what i’ve collected by sitting still in a few non-studying postures and watching the world miss its own punchlines.

step one, mike’s two-beer method, on how to get smarter without studying

the first thing i learned about getting smarter without studying, i learned from mike, on a friday, at the corner. mike does not study. mike has, by his own admission, not opened a book since the late nineties. mike has, however, been right about more things than seems statistically possible for a man who reads only the labels on bottles.

mike’s method is simple. mike listens. mike orders a beer, sits at the bar, and lets the room tell him what it knows. by his second beer, mike has absorbed the headline of every conversation within a ten-foot radius. by his third, mike could deliver, off the top of his head, a small dossier on three different industries he has never worked in. mike has not filed since 2019, which i mention only because it suggests the absorption is, technically, selective.

i asked mike once how he does it. mike said: “i don’t do anything. i just sit.” i asked him to elaborate. mike said: “people give it away. you have to be the kind of person nobody minds talking near.” mike then ordered another. that was the end of the lesson, and it cost the price of one beer.

i have, since, tried it. i sit. i listen. i fail at the second step within ninety seconds. but on the rare occasions i hold the line for an entire conversation, i learn real things — about which of my coworkers actually understands the thing they pretend to understand in the meeting on the third floor.

step two, productivity_bro’s anti-method, applied as a filter

step two is what i call the productivity_bro filter. a separate investigation about confidence outpacing competence covers the dunning kruger effect angle of all of this — productivity bro is the avatar of it. it works like this. every morning, somewhere on the internet, a man with a thread, a face, and a microphone of varying quality is telling you how to optimize the next sixteen hours of your life. he is selling a course. he is also, to be specific, an idiot. but he is a useful idiot, because whatever he is telling you to do, the smart move is, almost without exception, the opposite.

productivity bro says wake up at 4:30am. the answer is to sleep until your body says enough. he says read fifty books a year. the answer is to read three and remember them. he says journal every morning. the answer is to look out a window and let the morning run on its own. he is wrong with such consistency that he functions, in practice, as a compass — you point yourself away from his arrow and arrive somewhere reasonable.

this is, i would argue, a form of getting smarter without studying. you outsource the studying to him. he reads the books, attends the seminars, makes the videos. you watch ninety seconds, note the recommendation, do the inverse. i’d take that trade every day of the week.

step three, the airpod that still works listens harder

step three is the airpod step. i own a pair of airpods. one of them has not held a charge since the spring of 2024. the other one works fine. i have, instead of replacing the broken one, learned to live with monaural existence. and what i discovered, somewhere around month four of half-listening, is that the working airpod listens harder than both of them used to.

i don’t mean technically. i mean: when you can only listen with one ear, the bare ear picks up everything else. the room. the sigh of the radiator. the stranger at the next table explaining a tax loophole he heard about from a brother-in-law. the colleague three desks over who is, very quietly, on a job interview disguised as a “doctor’s appointment”. information arrives. for free. you just had one ear available.

this is, i’ll admit, a long way around to “pay attention”. but step three is specifically about not closing yourself off. you have to leave a port open. one airpod. one ear. the other half is yours, but the world’s invited.

step four, the wip 2022 list is the lesson, not the project

and step four is the WIP 2022 list. it’s a document on my hard drive, last modified february twelfth 2022, containing seventeen things i was, at the time, about to start. i did not start any of them. it sits, like the third yoga mat, in a place i can see it but never reach for it.

here is the lesson. the list is, itself, the curriculum. each item represents a thing i thought i was going to learn or do or become, and a year later, two, three, i didn’t. that’s pure, unflattering data about who i actually am versus who i thought i was. looking at the list is studying yourself, which is the only studying that ever pays back. you are learning what you actually pick up when no one’s making you.

the unopened mail pile, on the kitchen counter, is doing the same job. the pile is the lesson. the lesson is i don’t handle them. i adjust around the pile. that’s a person revealing themselves to themselves, no books required.

i would be remiss not to mention the movie method, as a sub-step of step three. you find a film about a person doing the thing you don’t know how to do. you watch it. you learn forty percent of nothing and twenty percent of something real, and that twenty percent stays. october sky taught me more about quiet competence and showing up than any productivity podcast ever has, and it did it in two hours, on a sunday i was supposed to be doing something else.

verdict, without studying is a study itself

here’s the verdict on how to get smarter without studying, delivered from the desk on a thursday morning. it works in a small, unmeasurable way. no books, no courses, no productivity stack. you sit still, listen, look at your own evidence honestly, and treat self-help thought leaders as a compass that points the wrong way on purpose. it costs nothing. it pays in tiny installments. at the end of a year you will be, possibly, three percent better at understanding the world, and zero percent richer.

that, in this economy, is a deal i’d take again. i’m taking it now, on the company’s clock, which is the entire premise.

11:47am note: carla just walked past, slowed, and walked on. cursor swapped, document switched, posture restored. the morning held. the meeting on the third floor evidently has another forty minutes. i, by the count i keep running, have most of those forty minutes still available.

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