how do i become smarter — 1 explainer, sort of

an explainer, sort of, on becoming smarter would benefit from a person who has done it. i am not that person. i am, however, someone who has read a lot of explainers, which feels close enough on a slow afternoon.

writing this on a wednesday, 10:38am, parked at the work desk with a cooling mug. carla is upstairs in the all-hands on the third floor and a slide deck nobody will reread. i have, give or take a stretch, the rest of the morning before anyone notices what tab i’m in.

so the question. how do i become smarter. typed into a search bar, presumably, in a moment that felt private. i type things like that into search bars too. i typed one yesterday about how to know if your fridge is fine and the answer turned out to be: it isn’t, throw the chicken out. the search bar is, on most days, the only honest mirror i own. it sees what i ask. it asks nothing back.

the answer is small. the four steps below are, with the same energy, also small. that is the secret of the topic. small is the topic.

this is, in the textbook sense, a longtail of the broader pillar. the pillar is the confirmation bias pillar, because the main thing keeping me from getting smarter, on most days, is a brain that already decided the answer in the shower. you can’t outsmart yourself with the same brain that’s smuggling the verdict in. that’s the trap. the steps below are not, technically, an escape from the trap. the steps are a way to notice the trap, which, as a practical matter, is most of the available win.

step one, dave called and asked the wrong question

dave called on tuesday at 9:47am, because dave called on tuesday at 9:47am. that is the slot. dave’s first ring is for an answer he already has. dave’s second ring is for an answer he wants you to disagree with so he can argue about it. i picked up on the second ring. that’s already, by my own rules, a tactical failure.

dave’s question, near as i can reconstruct it: “how do i make you smarter? you keep buying the same yoga mat.” dave was, technically, not asking how to make me smarter. dave was reporting on the yoga mat. (the third yoga mat is on the apartment floor, evolving slowly under the couch since 2023. dave is right about the mat. dave is wrong about the framing.)

here is what i learned, on the call, while staring at the apartment ceiling on the speakerphone: becoming smarter does not begin with a better answer. it begins with a less stupid question. dave did not ask “how do i become smarter”. dave asked “how do i make you smarter”, which is a different post entirely, and not one i’m writing today. the question you type is the question you’ll get an answer to. the question you should have typed is, on most mornings, two words shorter.

so step one. before you ask how do i become smarter, ask why i want to. if the answer is “to win an argument with dave”, you do not need to be smarter. you need a different friend. the longer version of becoming a smarter person covers this in a different angle. i’m summarizing, here, for the people on lunch.

step two, mom answered it, anyway

then mom called. mom called twenty minutes after dave, because the universe has a billing department and it does not stagger invoices. mom does not know dave called. mom knows. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.

mom asked, on the line: “are you eating real food. are you sleeping. are you reading anything that isn’t on a phone.” three questions. a stack. a stack delivered with the calm of a woman who has, with no university degree on the matter, the cleanest theory of intelligence i have ever encountered.

step two, then, is mom’s framework, which i’m crediting because a working definition of cognitive bias is also, secretly, mom’s framework with a longer coat on. real food. real sleep. real reading. three inputs. the brain runs on those. it does not run on hot takes, podcasts at 2x, or the fourteen newsletters you signed up for in march and have not opened.

i told mom i’d been eating ice cream for breakfast. mom was quiet. i defended myself in the proper voice. “ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk.” mom did not respond to the hot take. mom said, “your father used to say that. then he had a stroke.” this is, on reflection, the difference between mom’s epistemology and mine. mom updates on outcomes. i hold the take.

step three, chatgpt drafted a response

i hung up with mom and, in a move that is, technically, the dumbest possible response to a conversation about getting smarter, i opened ChatGPT and asked it to draft a thoughtful reply to mom. (in my defense, i was already late for nothing.) the algorithm produced six paragraphs about gratitude, intergenerational dialogue, and “the importance of presence”. none of them sounded like me. all of them sounded like a man who would not be late to call his mother back.

step three is the painful one. the algorithm cannot make you smarter. the algorithm can make you sound smarter for ninety seconds, after which any human who knows you will tilt their head and ask what’s wrong. the algorithm is, on this topic, like a borrowed tie. it fits. it isn’t yours. people clock the difference faster than you’d like.

i didn’t send the ChatGPT response to mom. i sent her a voice memo that said “thanks. i’ll try.” she sent back a thumbs up. that was the conversation. the version with six paragraphs would have ended with mom asking my sister if i was on something. (the algorithm has cost me, by my honest accounting, exactly nothing — but it has cost me close calls i did not see at the time.)

step four, the 23% phone battery cut me off

by the end of the morning the phone was at 23%, which is, in this house, the canonical state of the phone. i was, at that point, in a tab spiral about malcolm in the middle, which i had opened, fairly sure, as research for the post on whether tv siblings get smarter as the show goes on. the answer is no, they do not, and the show is better for it. the tab was open. the battery was draining. the explainer was, in theory, being written.

step four is the cheapest one and also the truest. becoming smarter is, in part, a battery problem. mike, at the corner bar, has been operating on this principle for years without naming it. mike’s tax situation, last refreshed sometime in 2019, is a battery management plan dressed as a personality. mike does not waste monday’s charge on a problem that will, with sufficient ignoring, become someone else’s eventually. mike’s epistemology is sound, even if the irs would not, on the record, agree. the brain has finite charge in a day. the people who get measurably smarter in a year are the ones who don’t spend the morning’s charge on outrage tabs and the algorithm’s spaghetti wall. they save it. they aim it. they then use it on one thing. i, by contrast, aim my charge at forty things and arrive at evening with a phone at 8% and an opinion about a sitcom from 2002.

the workaround is small. before lunch, do one thing on purpose. not three. one. that one thing, done with the morning’s charge, is the smartest you’ll be that day. the rest is maintenance, dave-calls, and the seventh microwave humming in the kitchen — the seventh, yes, this is the seventh i have killed, and that is also a separate post, already written, behind a different tab.

verdict, how do i become smarter on a tuesday — a battery problem

so here is where we land. becoming smarter, as a project, is not a course you buy or a book you finish on the kindle. it is a series of small, slightly boring choices about what you let into your head and how long you wait before answering. it looks, in practice, exactly like dave calling, mom calling, the algorithm offering, the battery dying, and you choosing one of those four to take seriously by lunchtime. that’s the project. the project is not glamorous. the project is, frankly, the same project as not being a person who is, in any technical sense, stupid — and the route there, on most mornings, is the same. less noise. fewer takes. one slow paragraph instead of forty fast ones. nobody clicks an article on a stupid guy slowing down. nobody clicks this one either, probably. that’s also the point.

i did not become smarter this morning. i did, however, take the call from dave, take the call from mom, refuse the algorithm’s draft, and clock the battery at 23%. that is, by the metric proposed in this post, four out of four. i’m calling it a passing grade because nobody can prove otherwise.

carla cruised by the desk. she did not stop. she had the look of a woman who has been in a meeting long enough to have developed a parallel inner life. the cursor was in the right document. that is, on most days, the most i can ask of myself.

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