how can i become a smarter person — i opened 47 tabs

the question of becoming a smarter person felt urgent enough that i opened forty-seven tabs about it. then i forgot which tab had the answer and started a new search. somewhere on tab thirty-one there is, i’m told, a five-step plan.

writing this from a workstation that, strictly speaking, was assigned for other tasks. carla pulled the door behind her at 11:34 for a compliance refresher.

so the question on the table is the one in the headline: how can i become a smarter person. not a smart person. a smarter one. the comparative form. a small upgrade from where i currently sit, which is on a chair the company would prefer i used differently. i typed it slowly. i hit enter. by the eighth result, the screen and i had a small disagreement about what scrolling is for.

how can i become a smarter person: probably you cannot brute-force it by reading more, opening more tabs, or buying a different journal. smarter, in the practical sense, means choosing fewer things to think about, more carefully. less input, slower input, and one notebook you actually open. i’m fairly certain of this from the desk.

FORTY. SEVEN. TABS. ZERO. ANSWERS.

how can i become a smarter person, the short version

the short version, as far as the morning’s work allows, is that becoming a smarter person is mostly about doing less of the thing you currently do, which in my case is opening tabs in good faith and abandoning them in worse faith. how can i become a smarter person if my baseline behavior is collecting browser tabs the way some people collect souvenir spoons? i cannot. that is the answer. you can write it on a napkin if you have one.

the academic literature, what little i pretended to read this morning, suggests that smarter people choose what to ignore. they have, as a group, decided in advance which questions are worth a tuesday. i decide each morning. each morning is its own small parliament, and the parliament is poorly run. there’s a piece i once skimmed about confirmation bias definition psychology, which is the technical name for the part of my brain that opens a tab to disagree with it and closes it before it gets to the disagreeing part.

the 47 tabs i opened in good faith

at 9:51 i opened tab one. it was a list called “seven habits of smarter people.” by habit two, i had opened tab two, a different list, this one promising nine habits. nine is more than seven, and i am, in tabs as in life, drawn to the larger number.

by tab six i had stopped reading habits and started reading comments under habits. by tab eleven i was on a forum where a man named, possibly, glenn argued that smarter people drink black coffee, no exceptions. by tab nineteen, a productivity system invented by a man who, by tab twenty, i learned had recently divorced. by tab thirty-one a five-step plan appeared and dissolved. by tab forty i was deep into a different question: how do squirrels remember where they bury things. squirrels remember 80%. that is, allegedly, better than me.

at tab forty-seven, the standing desk creaked, which it does on tuesdays around ten, and i looked up. an hour. no notes. a folder named “smarter” on the desktop, empty for forty-three minutes. the folder, in a sense, was the most honest part of the morning. someone, somewhere, has studied this audit pattern — i cannot find the citation.

sarah is already there, allegedly

i thought, somewhere around tab thirty-three, about sarah. sarah runs marathons not as a personality but as a schedule. she does not post them. she finished one in october, ate a bagel, and went home. sarah has a 401k-equivalent she has explained to me twice and i have failed to understand both times. she listens to podcasts at one-and-a-half speed because, as she once said in a sentence that haunts me, “the regular speed is for people who have time.”

sarah has answered the question of how can i become a smarter person by simply not asking it. she does the things. she goes to bed at a time. she keeps one paper notebook with a pen attached by a small loop she bought separately. half-full of useful sentences. i looked at it once. the sentences were normal; the consistency was alien.

i texted her at tab thirty-eight. her reply, in four minutes: “close the tabs. pick one thing. write it down. do it for thirty days. text me on day thirty-one.” no second message. no exclamation point. i opened tab forty-eight, which was an article about why people don’t take advice from competent friends. the research, in summary: because.

sarah is not my boss. sarah has never been my boss. sarah is, in the technical sense, a mirror that runs marathons and does not post them. you can see, in a mirror like that, exactly the shape of what you are not doing.

productivity bro tweeted about this exact thing

i pivoted, naturally, away from sarah and toward the internet, where things are easier. productivity bro. the eternal villain. he had posted, an hour earlier, a thread of fourteen ways to become smarter before noon. fourteen. before noon. by the time i finished reading the thread, it was already noon. the thread had defeated itself, structurally.

his checklist included: cold shower, journaling, twenty pages, meditating eleven minutes (eleven, not ten, because eleven sounds researched), lemon water, planning in three blocks, identifying the one thing, eliminating the three things, breathing in a particular pattern, walking before food, food before screens, screens before people, people before bed, and — i swear i did not invent this — “journaling again.” he journaled twice. for safety.

i hovered over the like button. i pressed it. i unpressed it. then the_notification arrived, from a different application entirely, and i flicked it away with a movement that was, at the time, athletic.

the steps i did not take

here is what i did not do this morning, in the order i did not do them. i did not close the tabs. i did not pick one thing. i did not write it down. i did not start the thirty days. i did not text sarah on what would have been day thirty-one, because there was no day one.

i did, however, read about my own confirmation bias definition, briefly, which is a small theft of effort, because reading about a bias is not the same as fixing it. i nodded at the screen. the screen did not nod back.

and yet. and yet. i did one thing productivity bro would not approve of and sarah would. i closed five tabs. five of forty-seven. eleven percent. a smarter person would have closed forty-seven; a stupid person would have closed zero. on the cousin question of overestimating your own brain, there’s the dunning-kruger effect, the academic name for “thinking you understand a thing because you read four sentences about it.” i fit the description.

verdict, the question keeps the question alive

the verdict, after the morning’s work, is this. how can i become a smarter person? mostly by stopping the search. the search is the trap. the search is what convinced me i was working when i was, more accurately, scrolling.

i did not solve the question. i did, however, narrow it. the pillar piece on confirmation bias is the closest thing i have to a working theory of my own brain, which is the brain in question, which is the brain that has to do the smartening. i recommend you read it before you open another tab on this topic. i recommend it the way a man at the bar recommends another drink: with no authority, but with feeling.

carla is back from the compliance refresher. i hear the elevator. four minutes is, in the smarter-person economy, a generous closing window.

stop opening tabs. text sarah on day one. close the folder named “smarter” or fill it. the standing desk creaks, the unopened mail pile leans, and the question — how can i become a smarter person — survives the morning intact, because the question is a tab in itself, and i am, as established, bad at closing tabs.