how to become a smart person — 1 thorough investigation

becoming a smart person is, a thorough investigation strongly suggests, mostly a question of long-term consistency over time. i have been consistently inconsistent for roughly thirty-one straight years now. the consistency of the inconsistency itself is, in a strange way, its own quiet achievement worth noting on a resume somewhere.

i’m at the desk on a friday at 8:14am, which is the second-best moment of any week to look at a question of this size, the best being the moment immediately after lunch on a tuesday, which i missed. carla is one floor up in an all-hands that the calendar tagged as “75 minutes max” and which has, of course, slipped past the seventy-five with no signal of returning. the_boss is in the same room, presumably nodding at the same slide carla is nodding at, which means my floor is empty in the useful way.

the question on the page is the small one, “how to become a smart person,” and the answer i’d like to defend, before the all-hands ends, is that the question itself is doing something the askers have not noticed. it is not asking how to acquire smarter. it is asking how to be sorted into a category. those are different sentences.

1. how to become a smart person, brief

here is what i think the search is really doing, and you can underline this part. the phrase “smart person” is two words doing two different jobs. “smart” is the adjective the school report card used. “person” is the larger category the report card was trying to sort. when somebody types “how to become a smart person” into a browser, what they are asking, mostly, is “how do i graduate from the category of person who has to ask, into the category of person who already knows.”

that is a categorization request. it is not an accumulation request. accumulation is what the pillar on the warm bath of always being correct describes from the other side, where the person who already feels smart simply collects evidence that confirms it. the askers want into that bath. the bath, however, is not the answer. the bath is, mostly, a temperature you got used to.

the brief, written honestly, is that becoming a smart person is less like building muscle and more like getting reclassified at a benefits office. somebody, somewhere, decides which line you stand in. you can stand differently. the line, however, is not yours to redraw.

2. step one, the_boss is in another meeting, becoming

step one, by my reading, is to notice that the people who are already smart persons in the eyes of any given room are usually in another meeting at the moment the question is being asked. the_boss is, statistically, in another meeting roughly seventy percent of any given working week. nobody, in our office, has ever caught the_boss being not-yet-smart in front of an audience. that is not because the_boss is uniformly brilliant. it is because the_boss is uniformly elsewhere.

becoming is, in office terms, mostly a logistics problem. the smart person is the person whose presence is required only for the part of the conversation that confirms the conclusion. the dumb person, by contrast, is the one available all morning for the messy part. i have been available all morning for the messy part of every meeting i have ever been invited to, which is one of the reasons my categorization has not, so far, shifted.

i would like to note, while the all-hands runs long, that the working theory on more smarter not being less smart applies sideways here. you cannot grammar your way into a category. you can, however, schedule your way into one. the_boss has, in the last calendar year, attended three meetings i was also invited to. the rest of the time, the_boss was, by document trail, “becoming.” nobody asked what was being become.

3. step two, the subscription audit was step zero

the second step, which is actually the first step in chronological terms, is the subscription audit i ran on a tuesday in march and have, in the four months since, refused to discuss with anyone except, briefly, mike. the subscription audit is the moment a person looks at the recurring monthly charges on a card statement and accepts, in a clean light, what they have been paying to be told.

here is what the audit produced. eleven active subscriptions. four i remembered signing up for. three i suspected. four i had no reasonable account of. one of those four was a meditation app i had not opened since the trial week in 2022 and which had been quietly extracting nine dollars and ninety-nine cents per month, every month, for what amounted, by my own log, to zero minutes of meditation. the app’s theory, presumably, was that becoming a smart person involved paying for the option of becoming a calm one.

i’d like to note, to be specific about this and no further, that the audit produced a feeling closer to embarrassment than to fury. the apps were not, in any meaningful sense, scamming. i was, in some meaningful sense, paying for the category. i was paying nine dollars a month to remain on the list of people who own access to a meditation app. category membership is, increasingly, a recurring charge.

4. step three, the seventh microwave is a person, briefly

the third step requires admitting something the previous SMART posts have only circled. the seventh microwave, in the kitchen at home, is the closest thing in my life to a person whose smart-status is settled. it knows what it is. it does its one job. it does not ask, on a friday morning, how to become a more useful appliance. it heats. it stops heating when the door opens. it has, on a few occasions, surprised me by working when i did not expect it to. that is its entire personality, and its categorization is secure.

i would like to enter into the record a hot take that has been forming around this. ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. i’d defend that take from any chair, including this one. the relevance is that the seventh microwave does not care, in any direction, about the categorization of ice cream as breakfast or non-breakfast. the microwave heats whatever is placed inside it for the duration that is dialed. the categorization is mine. the heat is its. the smart person, in the analogy, is the appliance that does the small job and lets the categorization land where it lands.

this is, in its way, the same insight delivered, at considerably greater length, by a man whose seinfeld show is mostly about smart people having opinions about nothing, which i have rewatched at least four times in the last two years and which has done more for my smart-person classification than any course advertised in the sidebar of any browser. the show contains no advice. the show simply observes. observation, it turns out, is closer to smart than instruction is.

5. step four, the third yoga mat is a person too

the fourth step, and the one i would defend last in court, is to extend the categorization courtesy to the third yoga mat currently rolled under my couch from 2023, possibly evolving. the mat has, by any measurement, achieved less in life than i have, and yet its category is settled. it is a yoga mat. it is the third one. it sits where it sits. nobody has, in the last eighteen months, asked the mat how to become a smarter mat, because the question is absurd. mats, like microwaves, do not graduate.

the analogy, if you will allow it, is that the search “how to become a smart person” is the human version of the mat asking how to become a more competent mat. the mat is already a mat. the mat does mat. the question is being asked from inside the answer. that is, possibly, the most generous thing i can say about the search. the people typing it are already a person. they are, by any reasonable definition, smart enough to type. the typing is the proof.

i would also like to note, since the all-hands is now running into its fortieth overrun minute, that mike, who has not filed since 2019, has never asked the question. mike, by any official measure, is not a smart person. mike’s tax accountant, when one is eventually appointed by a court, will agree. mike, however, runs a system. the system is, on paper, broken. the system, in practice, has kept mike in the same apartment for eleven years. that is more than i can claim, and i file annually like a person.

6. verdict, becoming a person is enough

so. the verdict, four steps in, with the all-hands now in its forty-third overrun minute and the_boss presumably nodding through the closing slide, is that “how to become a smart person” is a question whose honest answer disappoints the asker and reassures everyone else. you do not become a smart person. you become a person, and other persons, on a friday, decide whether to file you under “smart” or “the other thing” based on criteria nobody, including them, can fully articulate.

the smarter move, on a friday morning while the all-hands runs long, is to stop trying to graduate. graduate from what. into what. the_boss is in another meeting. the seventh microwave is heating, very slowly, the leftovers of the meal i should have eaten last night. the third yoga mat is, by any measure, more settled in its category than i am in mine. and i, the asker, am writing this down at 8:47am on a friday, which is the small evidence i can produce that the category, whatever it ends up being, is at least active.