how can i be smarter — 1 thorough investigation

on roughly forty percent of weekday mornings i set, very seriously, the goal of becoming a smarter version of myself, with great intent and a fresh notebook. what they don’t tell you is that the goal-setting itself is, structurally, the bulk of the entire project. by the next morning, predictably, i have moved on to something different and less measurable.

at the desk. carla is upstairs in the agency review, third floor, somewhere around handout three of seven. i have, optimistically, until 11:30am.

so today’s investigation is how can i be smarter, asked sincerely, by a person who has, in the last hour, microwaved the wrong mug. the question gets asked roughly twice a week, usually before coffee, and each time the answer evaporates by lunch. that is, possibly, the answer. but we’ll go the long way around, because the long way is the post.

how can i be smarter — the honest brief: pick one narrow thing you already half-do, and do it slightly more on purpose, in the apartment, alone. the verb “be” does too much work. you don’t become smarter as a state. you do a thoughtful thing monday and a fork-in-the-microwave thing wednesday. average out slowly.

SMARTER. IS. NOT. A. SUBSCRIPTION.

that goes on the page before we keep going. the cluster pillar on confirmation bias covers why my brain keeps grading itself favourably on the days it sets the goal — same brain administering the test, same audience clapping. there is a longer version of this exact spiral elsewhere on the site, drafted at this same desk, that documented one previous attempt and ended, predictably, with no closed tabs and a cold coffee.

1. how can i be smarter, brief

here is the brief version of how can i be smarter, written before carla returns from the third floor and the day reverts to vendor reconciliations. you do not need a course. you do not need a pill. you need, mostly, to pick one tiny thing — replying to one email per morning before opening any tab, say, or refusing to render an opinion in a meeting before the third minute — and then do that single thing on purpose, for a week, in a place with no witnesses. the apartment counts. the desk, briefly, also counts. the bar, surprisingly, does not, although i’ll get to that.

the trick people miss is that the question how can i be smarter almost always gets answered with a public performance — buy the audiobook, post the morning routine, mention to mom on sunday that you are reading more. those are answers to a different question. the real question, asked alone, requires no announcement. and that is, as it happens, the test.

2. the verb “be” is doing too much

look at the question again. how can i be smarter. the verb is be. that’s a state verb. you “are” or you “aren’t”. the question wants a static answer, which is the wrong shape for a brain that, on any given friday at 10:48am, can be wonderful with email and catastrophic with a microwave inside thirty minutes.

if i swap the verb to act, the question opens up. how can i act smarter, this hour, on this email, with this person. that’s tractable. that’s a small task. you can fail it and recover. be, by contrast, demands a permanent renovation, which is why the answers people give to it tend to involve cold showers and habits stacked on habits, all of which collapse when the boiler breaks.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, that says state verbs are responsible for at least 30% of new year’s resolutions failing. i have not located the study. i did, however, locate four cold pizzas in the fridge, which is a different kind of evidence.

3. chatgpt drafted a be-version i ignored

last sunday, in the apartment, between the unopened mail pile and a cold coffee, i asked chatgpt the question directly, because that’s what one does at 10pm when the night has run out of company. i typed: how can i be smarter. it produced a five-bullet answer involving habit stacking, sleep hygiene, and a recommendation to read longer books. it was, structurally, fine. it was not, in any way, an answer i could use.

the answer assumed i was a different person — one with a kindle, one who completed habit chains, one for whom 11:02am was not a mood. it answered a generic version of the question. the question i asked was specific. those two questions are different questions. chatgpt cannot tell, yet, which one i’m asking, because the platform has no way of knowing that the third yoga mat is still under the couch, possibly evolving, and that the seventh microwave is, indisputably, the seventh.

i closed the tab. the algorithm then served me three videos of people building sheds. neither version of the answer made me smarter. only one of them made me, briefly, want to build a shed.

4. the apartment is the right place to be

this is, possibly, the central finding. the apartment, despite being where most of my dumber moves happen, is also the only place i have ever genuinely thought a thing through. not the bar. not the desk. not the corner of the supermarket where the cereal lives. the apartment, alone, on a sunday, with the standing desk where i sit, with the kettle whining, with the certified-letter drawer i pretend not to see — that is the room where being smarter, briefly, has occurred.

this is also where plants are silent landlords, the take that has been rattling around my head for two weeks, which feels true at 11:02am and even truer at 8:54am. brenda the dead plant, on the windowsill, is silent and judgmental. she charges nothing. she is, in a way, the ideal teacher. she does not interrupt. she does not, like chatgpt, generate five bullets. she just sits there, browning, until i notice.

the apartment-as-classroom hypothesis is not flattering. it implies that the office, with its meetings and lighting, is structurally bad for thinking. that is, possibly, the most useful thing this investigation will produce. carla is in the agency review on the third floor. carla, in this respect, has my sympathy. nobody gets smarter on the third floor. the third floor is for handouts.

5. the third yoga mat is being, technically

here is a thought experiment on the verb be. the third yoga mat, currently rolled up under the couch, is, technically, being a yoga mat. it has not been rolled out in fourteen months. it has not, in any meaningful sense, performed yoga-mat duties. but it is, by definition, still a yoga mat. the noun holds. the verb holds. nothing is being asked of either.

this is the trap of how can i be smarter. you can be smart, technically, all day, by sitting under a couch and not being tested. the trouble starts when somebody asks you to do a thing — write the email, draft the brief, explain the chart — and the smart, like the yoga mat, has to come out of storage. the 2014 film “the theory of everything” covers a man who used his smart on actual problems for several decades; i, by contrast, have used mine, this morning, on whether to reply to a meeting invite.

the test of being smarter is whether the noun survives a real demand on it. mine, mostly, does not. mine prefers to remain a noun. mine is, in this sense, exactly the third yoga mat. i’m aware of how that sounds.

6. verdict, being is enough, smarter is greedy

the agency review just ended. carla is at her desk, opening a printed handout, frowning at the second page. mike, separately, sent a one-line text that said “corner, six?” — to which i’ll answer yes around 5:55, by which time the question of being smarter will have, again, evaporated.

mike, who continues to keep a tax situation pending from sometime around 2019, has given me, across three separate evenings at the corner of the bar, better answers to the be-smarter question than the algorithm did — mostly by saying nothing and ordering a second drink. that is, in its own way, a method.