how to get smarter in 5 minutes — (a thorough investigation)

getting smarter in five clean minutes is, frankly, the kind of promise that should send any reasonable person running for the door. instead, predictably, it sent me clicking with both hands. a thorough investigation immediately followed the click. four of those allotted five minutes were spent looking for the close-tab button on the page.

i’m typing this from the desk on a monday at 3:51pm, while carla sits through an annual planning meeting on the third floor that was billed as forty-five minutes and has, unsurprisingly, become its own afternoon. the lunch hour is, technically, available, if i don’t open the bank app and don’t reread the unopened mail pile too closely.

the question on the page is the title. how to get smarter in 5 minutes. i’d like to answer it like a person who has tried, in earnest, more than once, and the answer kept arriving in the wrong currency. the currency the page advertised was minutes. the currency the page actually charged was dignity, which converts poorly.

1. how to get smarter in 5 minutes, brief

the brief, said honestly, is that you cannot, and the page knows you cannot, and the page is selling you the cannot. five minutes is the length of a song you don’t like, played twice. nobody has ever, in the history of recorded clocks, become smarter in the length of a song you don’t like, played twice. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, about exactly this.

here is the thing my working pillar on confirmation bias as a daily habit keeps proving, post by post — the people who buy five-minute solutions are buying the five minutes, not the solution. the five minutes are real. the solution is a backdrop. you spend the time. the time goes. the smarter does not arrive. the receipt is for the time, not the smarter, and the receipt is non-refundable.

so the brief is this. one minute of clicking on a page that wants your address. two minutes of reading three paragraphs that all say the same thing in different fonts. one minute of dave calling at the wrong moment. one minute of mom calling earlier than usual, because mothers know. five minutes, accounted for, audited, and, by the count i keep running, structurally wasted.

2. the take i defend in five minutes flat

the take is HT30, and i’d like to enter it into the record now, while the lunch hour is still mine and carla’s meeting still has thirty minutes of safety in it. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. i’d defend that take, today, in five clean minutes, against a panel of people in vests, and i’d take questions afterward.

here is what nobody on the get-smarter podcasts will say out loud. there are categories of knowledge a person is better off not pursuing on a monday lunch break. the exact balance on a credit card. the precise number of letters in serif font waiting in the unopened mail pile. the year the wip 2022 list was last updated, which is, in the small log kept here, 2022. each of those facts, fully known, would cost more in calm than the knowing would return in usefulness. that is, i submit, not stupidity. that is a budget decision.

the productivity bro on the platform i still have open in the eleventh tab has, this morning, posted a thread arguing that becoming smarter in five-minute increments is a daily compounding habit. he used a chart. the chart had no axis labels. i’d like to point out, for the panel, that an unlabeled chart is, definitionally, a feeling. the feeling is that he is correct. the chart is not the evidence. the chart is the announcement that evidence exists somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, and we should believe it on his behalf.

i looked it up, in the loose way i look things up — the dictionary said “smart” is a word that means several incompatible things and shrugs. that is the dictionary admitting defeat. when the dictionary shrugs, the case is closed. you cannot become a thing the dictionary itself cannot pin down, in five minutes, on a monday, at lunch, with carla one floor up and the bank app sealed in its own folder.

3. dave called during minute two

dave, of course, called. dave does not call randomly. dave calls when the screen is at its most embarrassing, which is a small gift he doesn’t know he gives. the page was open. the headline was visible. the timer i had set, foolishly, for five minutes was at three minutes and forty-one seconds. the phone rang. the timer kept going. that is, structurally, the post.

dave, in case the cluster is new to you, is the kind of friend who picks up on the second ring and says “what did you do” before you’ve said anything, and the kind of friend who calls on a monday lunch when he senses, somehow, that you are about to lose a small amount of money to a webpage. he also says i owe him three hundred dollars, which we will absolutely not be discussing today. on tuesday, possibly. not today.

dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it, against my own five-minute timer, which had long since given up. dave’s laugh is, on reflection, the most reliable smart-detector in my life. when dave laughs at a thing, the thing is not the smarter version of you. when dave laughs and then, after a pause, laughs again, the thing is, in fact, the dumber version. dave laughed twice. the page closed itself out of professional embarrassment.

4. mom was on the line during minute three

mom called at 11:58am, which is two minutes early for a lunch-hour call and exactly when the page was promising me, on a fresh tab, the second of three “rapid cognition exercises.” i answered because mom calls on sundays and any day that isn’t sunday means mom knows something i don’t, and the mom-knowing-something category has, historically, a perfect prediction rate.

“why do you sound weird,” she said, twelve seconds in. i said no reason. she said “what are you reading.” i said nothing. she said okay. then she said, on her way to hanging up, “stop trying to get smart in your lunch hour. eat the sandwich.” she knew. she always knows. it is her power. it cannot be defeated. i have, by my own quiet log, tried.

mom’s intervention is the second witness in this investigation, and the more devastating one. dave laughs from nine hundred miles away. mom calls from the same kitchen she has called from since 1996, and her timing is, every time, the timing of a woman who can hear a webpage open through telephone wires. the woman has never owned a smartphone. the woman knows when a smartphone is doing something stupid. it is not science. it is a higher branch of it.

5. the algorithm timed me at minute four

the algorithm — the soft, beige presence that has been watching the browser since whenever i agreed to be watched, which i don’t remember doing but apparently did — chimed in at minute four. a notification appeared, polite and lowercase, that said “based on your reading, you might also like.” the suggested article was titled “10 ways to feel smarter in 30 seconds.” the algorithm had, in essence, lowered the offer.

i’d like to log that for the panel. five minutes, the original promise, had failed me. the algorithm, watching, had quietly proposed a thirty-second product as an upgrade path. the math is upside down. you cannot get smarter faster by reducing the time. the time is not the bottleneck. the smarter is. the smarter is, in this room, also the wallet. the algorithm wasn’t trying to help. it was trying to recoup.

this is the moment, in any honest investigation, where the anchor a person sets at the start of a search finally shows itself. the original anchor was five minutes. the algorithm shifted it to thirty seconds. once you accept the shift, the next offer can be three seconds, and you’ll feel, oddly, that it’s a deal. that is how anchoring works on a person who has already paid in attention. the page knows. the algorithm knows. mom knew before either of them did.

and there’s the cross-cluster question, the one that arrives whenever a five-minute promise meets a real lunch. the line between the smarter project and the openly stupid one is thinner than the page wants you to believe — the kind of line you only see when the timer runs out and the chart is still unlabeled. that whole conversation is shelved, properly, in the working investigation on why the word stupid keeps doing the heavy lifting in english, where the same five minutes get spent in a different aisle of the same store, and the bill comes out, weirdly, the same.

6. i rest my case, ignorance is therapy

so. the verdict, after a monday lunch hour, four witnesses, and one timer that gave up at three minutes and forty-one seconds, is that getting smarter in five minutes is not a method. it is a marketing budget with a stopwatch attached. dave laughed. mom called. the algorithm proposed a discount. the chart on the page had no axes. the wip 2022 list, by the way, gained one line during the writing of this post — “look up that page again, decide nothing.” the line will not be acted on. that is also part of the method.

i remembered, somewhere around minute four, a 2 am revelation i’d written down a few months ago in the notebook on the kitchen counter: “you cannot rush your way out of a slow problem, you can only rush your way into a faster one.” the notebook was right. the 2 am version of me was, on this question, smarter than the 3:51pm version of me, which is itself a finding worth flagging.

the funniest part — the part i’d recommend to anyone reading this on their own monday lunch — is that the page closed itself. i didn’t close it. i was reading, the timer ran out, dave laughed, mom hung up, the algorithm pinged, and somewhere in the cross-traffic the tab simply gave up and disappeared. that is the most honest five-minute experience the internet has ever delivered me, and it was delivered, technically, by accident. it is a film moment, very limitless without the pill, only with worse posture and a sandwich i never ate.