how to be smarter than everyone — 1 explainer, sort of
how to be smarter than everyone — 1 explainer, sort of
being smarter than everyone is the goal of, supposedly, no one. an explainer, sort of, on the topic suggests it is the goal of, in fact, everyone. mike has the goal. mike is also seven beers in. mike has the goal more loudly now.
it is 7:42am on a thursday. carla took the elevator up to the all-hands on the third floor and the doors did the slow, sad close they do. i pressed the close-door button anyway. it is, i’m fairly sure, decoration. that’s already a bias and we haven’t started.
i open a draft on the laptop. i have, by an accounting i no longer trust, the rest of the morning. the focus_kw of this post is the kind of thing a person types into a search bar at 2:14pm on a vending-machine break and then closes the tab before anyone walks past. i closed it. i opened it again. that’s the species.
how to be smarter than everyone, brief
so. the brief. the phrase how to be smarter than everyone contains, on inspection, a small bomb. the bomb is the word “everyone”. everyone is, by population, eight billion people, of whom a meaningful number are doing things you cannot do, in languages you do not speak, with hands you do not have. you are not going to outscore them. you are going to outscore the four people in your group chat, on a good week, when one of them has the flu.
this is, fundamentally, a cognitive shortcut where the brain treats your existing belief as the home team. the home team being, in this case, the pleasing belief that you, specifically, can rise above eight billion individuals if you read the right substack. you cannot. nobody can. the substack knows. the substack is selling subscriptions.
i did look it up, briefly, in a window i kept narrow in case the elevator pinged. the smart-ranking literature, near as i can tell, mostly says: smarter is local, smarter is contextual, smarter is “smarter than the room you happen to be in, at 11:47am, on a topic that came up because someone forgot to bring the printout”. that last one isn’t a quote. that’s me, paraphrasing the room.
step one, the elevator is the wrong room
i ran into mike in the elevator on monday, which is impossible because mike does not work here. mike was, by his own account, “in the building for reasons”. mike was holding a smoothie. mike does not drink smoothies. i did not ask. one of the great underrated skills of being marginally smart is not asking. (the algorithm, separately, has been pushing me hamstring stretches for three weeks. i don’t have the hamstring. i have the algorithm.)
mike said, in the elevator, between floors two and three: “everybody wants to be smarter than everybody. nobody wants to be smarter than themselves last week. that’s the trick of it.” mike then drank the smoothie like a man performing penance. the doors opened. mike got out on a floor that, near as i can tell, has no offices.
this is the first step. everyone is the wrong target. last week’s you is the right target. last week’s you is reachable. last week’s you was, on tuesday, certain that the chicken in the fridge was fine. last week’s you was wrong. you can outscore last week’s you by a margin of one chicken. that’s a unit of measurement. that’s a win.
step two, mike has rejected the premise
mike, separately, has rejected the premise of the question. mike does not want to be smarter than everyone. mike wants to be left alone with a beer and the television muted. mike has not filed his taxes since 2019 on the principle that the system has not asked him in a tone he respects. this is, on a long enough horizon, possibly smarter than what most of us are doing, which is paying on time and resenting it.
i raise this not to recommend mike’s tax strategy. i raise this because mike’s whole life is a counterargument to the premise of the focus keyword. you can spend the next ten years trying to be smarter than everyone, or you can, like mike, define the game so narrowly that “everyone” doesn’t even apply. mike has narrowed the game to: the corner bar, the second beer, the muted television. mike is, within that game, undefeated.
the version of this for the rest of us is harder. you have to pick the game. (this is what good books on the topic point at, i think. i’m fairly sure there is a chapter, in a book i borrowed and never returned, that says exactly this in a way i wish i could quote without admitting to the borrow.) the game is not “be smarter than everyone”. the game is “be the right kind of smart for the rooms you are actually in this week”, and the rooms are smaller than your aspiration about them.
step three, tom is in the everyone, in his volvo
tom — uni, then suburb, then the volvo — is in the everyone you would, if you were honest, like to be smarter than. tom drives a car with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. tom’s pension is the kind of pension you can describe without flinching. tom mentioned, last summer, an “asset allocation” with the casualness of a man buying milk. i did not know what an asset allocation was. i nodded. i later asked the laptop. the laptop knew. i still don’t, really, in the bones.
am i smarter than tom? no. am i smarter than tom about specific things? in a small, sad, undignified way, yes. i can name every the social network deleted scene. i can recite the structure of a confirmation bias loop, for people who use the term casually, in two sentences. i know which day the bins go out without consulting an app. tom does not know any of this. tom does not need to. tom has a calendar. tom has the volvo. tom has won.
this is step three of the how to be smarter than everyone protocol, which i am, for clarity, inventing as i go: concede the everyone. tom is in there. tom is in there with his volvo. you are not going to remove tom from the everyone. you can, however, be a kind of expert in the small-square footage of your own life that tom has, voluntarily, opted out of having opinions about. that’s your zone. defend it.
step four, productivity bro tweeted the hierarchy
productivity bro, online, on a wednesday, posted a thread titled “the 9 habits of people smarter than everyone”. it had a graphic. the graphic was a pyramid. at the top of the pyramid was, allegedly, a person who reads two books a week, sleeps eight hours, drinks only water, and “compounds”. at the bottom of the pyramid were, by implication, people like me, with 47 tabs open and a phone at 23% battery and a yoga mat under the couch since 2023.
the graphic, like all such graphics, made me feel briefly bad and then briefly competitive. that’s the trick. the trick is that the trick feels like motivation. the notification arrived right on cue, mid-scroll, telling me a friend i don’t see anymore had reacted to a post i don’t remember writing. the algorithm has, by the count i keep running, read me. the algorithm is, near as i can tell, where productivity bro lives, rent-free.
here is the hot take, on the topic of one of productivity bro’s pillars. water is the most overrated drink. there. i said it. coffee is achievement. tea is wet leaves. water is, fundamentally, what you drink when the achievement runs out. productivity bro will, of course, disagree, because productivity bro is invested. i’m fairly sure there is a study on this, somewhere a journal i don’t pay for, that shows hydration discourse is mostly vibes. i did not read the study. i agreed with it on contact. that’s the species, again.
i had to say it. some people will tell you they “are reading more this year”. they are reading the same three paragraphs of seven different books. their 47 tabs are also reading them. it’s a draw. it has always been a draw. the books are not doing the work. the books are a fence around the chair.
verdict, smarter than everyone is the loneliest goal
here is where we land.
the goal of being smarter than everyone is, on inspection, the loneliest possible goal. if you reached it, by some miracle of compounding and supplements, you would have nobody to talk to. you would be in the elevator alone, with your smoothie, on the wrong floor. you’d be mike. mike does not feel smart. mike feels, on a good night, comfortable, which is harder.
the practical move, instead, is the unglamorous one. read what interests you, slowly. try, in small ways, to upgrade the brain you already have rather than build a new one. defend the small zone where you are an expert, even if the zone is “every season of an old sitcom” or “which day the bins go out”. be slightly less wrong than last week’s you, on a topic of last week’s you’s choosing. that’s the whole productivity system. you can have it for free.
i’m not saying i’m right. but i’m not not saying it.
this is, if you want a cross-reference, the same shape as a meditation on what the word “dumb” actually does to a sentence when you use it — the word “dumb” expands until it covers people who are, on closer inspection, just busy. “smarter than everyone” expands until it covers people who are, on closer inspection, just luckier with rooms. the categories do most of the lying. you supply the rest.
12:38pm. carla returned from the third floor with a folder and a face. the elevator dinged. i closed the tab. she did not say anything. she rarely does. i’d rather be smarter than yesterday me, who, at 9:42am, thought he could finish this before the all-hands ended.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
resident commentator on the seven-beer elevator interview with mike, conducted between floors two and three
P.S. the smoothie mike was holding, near as i can tell, was raspberry. mike does not eat raspberries. i’m logging it under the wip 2022 list, as item nine, “things mike does for reasons”.
