how can i become smarter — 1 investigation

there is a question i ask myself in the supermarket aisle, somewhere between the parsley i refuse to buy and the seven microwaves i somehow already own: how can i become smarter than i was last week. the answer is presumably not in this particular aisle. i looked, on principle, anyway.

back at the workstation now, with a half-cooled coffee, on a tuesday morning that has agreed, so far, to behave. sarah is running the ten-thirty on the third floor, which means a clean stretch of about an hour before anyone notices the doc i’m meant to be in is the doc i’m not in. plenty of time to investigate the question without resolving it, which is, on most weeks, the whole job.

so. how can i become smarter. i typed it into the bar, like a normal human, the way a normal human asks an oracle that will mostly try to sell them an ad. the oracle returned the usual things. read more. sleep more. argue with people who disagree with you. eat fish. i nodded at most of these in the way the brain nods when it has no intention of doing any of them. there is a name for that nod, and i’ll get to it, because the nod is the entire investigation.

tab count, since you’ll ask: forty-seven. four are research. forty-three are alibi. the seventh microwave is humming, faintly, on the kitchen counter at home, which is the only place the question of being smarter has, historically, ever been answered, badly.

how can i become smarter, brief

here is the short version, before we ruin it with paragraphs. you become smarter by getting honest about the part of you that is already certain, before any new information has been allowed in the room. that part of you is, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists, the home team. the home team is loud. the home team has the better seats. the home team gets booed by nobody because the home team is, as a rule, the only team in the building. this is, near as i can tell, the whole problem. and it is also the whole problem of confirmation bias as a daily operating habit, which is the longer pillar version of this exact paragraph and which i have, in good faith, written elsewhere.

so the brief is: more reading does not fix this. more apps do not fix this. more subscriptions do not, with any reliability i’ve measured, fix this. the only thing that touches it is the small, unsexy practice of writing down the thing you do not want to be true, before you decide what is true. that’s the post. that’s the topic. but obviously we’re going to keep going, because if i stopped here it would not look like an investigation. it would look like a memo.

sarah seems to know the answer

sarah, who runs marathons and understands her own pension in a way i find borderline aggressive, walked past my desk on her way to the third floor with a notebook and a pen. an actual pen. i mention this because the pen, in this office, is now an artifact. most people are typing into a slack thread that someone will close before reading. sarah writes it down. sarah, when challenged, looks at the page, not at the ceiling. these are different intelligences, and only one of them survives a tuesday.

i asked her, in the corridor, before her meeting, what she would do if she wanted to become smarter. sarah said, without breaking stride, “i’d write down what i was wrong about last quarter.” then she went into the meeting. the meeting started on time. the meeting will end on time. every meeting could be a 3-line email, in my house, but in sarah’s house every meeting is a tool that arrives sharpened. these are different houses.

i thought about her answer for the rest of the morning. i did not write down what i was wrong about last quarter. i did, however, open a new tab to research how to write down what one was wrong about last quarter, which is, in the strictest possible sense, the dumbest possible response to her advice. the tab is now tab forty-eight. the tab is a monument to the species. the species is, again, us.

the stefan-type expert i found online

so naturally i looked for a guru. a person who had cracked it. a person with a podcast and a thumbnail in which their eyebrows are raised in a way that suggests they have access to information the rest of us do not. i found him within ninety seconds, which says less about the search and more about the supply.

he was a stefan-type expert — meaning he resembled, in tone and confidence, the actual stefan we have at the office, the data guy with the corner desk and the real plant, except this one had a ring light and a smaller forehead. he had a system. he had, in fact, three systems, available individually or as a bundle. he had a five-step framework. he had, on his sidebar, testimonials from men who claimed to have doubled their reading speed and halved their indecision in the same financial quarter. i watched eleven minutes of him with the volume on low because sarah was due back from the third floor and i did not want to be caught learning, on the company laptop, how to be smarter.

his core thesis, stripped of the ring light, was this: smart people read more, sleep more, and journal. that was it. that was the framework. i had paid, mentally, for the bundle by minute eight and felt a small private grief at having done so. the man was not wrong. he was, in fact, technically correct, in the way a hospital bracelet is technically correct. it identifies you accurately and tells you nothing useful about whether you’ll get out of the building. frasier on mute on the breakroom tv would have been more instructive. frasier is, at minimum, a man who reads. frasier also, regularly, gets it wrong, which is the part the framework left out.

the subscriptions i audited and kept anyway

which brings me, by way of confession, to the audit. i did, at some point in the last six weeks, decide that the cheapest path to becoming smarter was to subscribe to things that smart people subscribed to. i am aware of how that sounds. i did it anyway. i have, at last count, six monthly charges associated with the project of becoming smarter. they are, in order of how guilty they make me feel:

one. a long-form magazine i do not read but whose unopened weekly email arrives with a confidence i find calming. two. a book summary service that distills books to ten minutes, on the assumption that the parts of the book that took the author three years are surplus. three. a meditation app whose streak counter is, currently, at one. four. a “deep focus” timer subscription, which i have never opened during deep focus. five. a language app whose owl, last i checked, was passive-aggressive. six. a podcast platform i pay extra for to remove the ads from podcasts i do not listen to.

i sat with the list for about four minutes. i then renewed all six. this is, on paper, indefensible. in my head, it was framed as “investing in myself”, which is the phrase the brain uses when it wants to keep paying for a feeling. the feeling, in this case, is that i am the kind of person who could, theoretically, on a weekend that hasn’t happened yet, sit down and finally read a long-form magazine. the kind of person who would, theoretically, finish the language app. the kind of person who would, theoretically, become smarter. the subscriptions are not making me smarter. the subscriptions are making me feel like the type of person who is becoming smarter, which is, at twelve dollars a month, a different product entirely.

THE. SUBSCRIPTION. IS. NOT. THE. BOOK.

the third yoga mat is part of the audit

full disclosure, in case you thought the subscriptions were the worst of it. there is a third yoga mat in this story. it is the third yoga mat because there were, technically, two before it, and we do not speak of them. the third one i bought during a phase i was calling, internally, “the year i become smarter and also more flexible”. the two have not, on inspection, turned out to be related. the mat lives, currently, under the couch, where it has lived since approximately week two of the project. its presence under there is, in the bookkeeping of self-improvement, the same line item as the magazine subscription. both are paid evidence that i intend to be a different person. neither is making me one.

this is the trap, and it is worth naming, because the trap is bigger than the mat. becoming smarter is, for most of us, mostly the purchase of objects and services that signal that becoming. the actual becoming, when it happens — and i have seen it, in sarah, in tom, in stefan, in three people on the internet who don’t sell anything — is quiet, embarrassing, and free. the actual becoming is sitting with the case against your own decision and not blinking. nobody sells that. there is no thumbnail for it. the man with the ring light cannot bundle it.

verdict, i can, technically, but i won’t

so the verdict, after the morning, after sarah’s meeting, after the man with the ring light, after the audit, after the mat under the couch. can i become smarter? i can, technically. the path is short and well-lit. write down the case against. read one book all the way through instead of six summaries. cancel four of the six subscriptions. attend fewer meetings. do the small, unsexy thing the home team in your head will, immediately, find a reason to skip. that is the whole curriculum. you do not need a bundle.

will i? almost certainly not, this week. partly because the home team is, by definition, undefeated. partly because the seventh microwave is, even now, on the counter at home, judging me silently, and i have other emergencies. partly because the only person who can verify whether any of this is working is the one running the experiment, which is, we should be honest, also the home team. the rear-view mirror is the only honest mirror in the house. and if you’d like a long, slower investigation by the same resident idiot of this newsletter into the broader project — yes, the idiot is the brand, yes, the brand is the entire problem — there is one. it has the same answer. it just takes longer to arrive.

sarah just walked back past the desk, notebook closed, pen clipped. she didn’t look at my screen. she didn’t have to. her meeting ended on time. mine, internally, is still going.

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