how do you become smarter — 1 fairly sure investigation

you become smarter, the listicle insisted in bullet point three, by reading genuinely hard books on a regular schedule. i went out and bought exactly one. i now listen to it on tape during the commute, which dave has formally informed me counts as cheating. i do not consider this cheating. i do consider this, technically, listening.

at the desk, 10:14am, wednesday. carla is in the procurement training on the third floor, two coffees deep by the look of it. the spreadsheet i should be in is minimized. the spreadsheet i am in pretends to be the same spreadsheet.

so the question for the morning, before the procurement training lets out, is how do you become smarter when the brain you brought to the project is the same brain that has, on file, killed appliances and bought yoga equipment as an act of self-improvement. how do you become smarter in the apartment you already live in, with the friends you already have, with the work email you already do not answer. that is the investigation. the answer, foreshadowed for the impatient, is mostly: you don’t, the algorithm decides — but the steps along the way are, in their own way, instructive.

how do you become smarter: you don’t, exactly, on purpose. you let chatgpt screen the inputs, copy a competent friend’s quiet schedule, audit the wall of insults you keep in a folder, and let the third yoga mat watch you not use it. the appearance of smarter follows about a month later. it shows up in shorter emails, not louder takes.

before we get into the steps, the disclaimer the entire confirmation bias pillar rests on: a brain that grades its own homework cannot, by definition, become smarter on its own report card. you can fake the upgrade for years. i have. so the steps below are calibrated against an external machine and a competent person, neither of which i invented. the desk is the only honest piece of furniture in the room.

how do you become smarter, brief

the brief version of how do you become smarter is that the question itself is the trap. the question wants a five-step plan and a podcast at one-and-a-half speed. the answer wants you to do less of the thing you currently do, which in my case is opening the bank app, closing the bank app, and counting that as financial literacy.

becoming smarter, looked at honestly from a desk, is a subtraction problem dressed as an addition problem. the listicles want you to add — add a journal, add a cold shower, add eleven minutes of breathing exercises invented by a man whose linkedin photo i do not trust. the desk wants you to subtract — subtract two of the seventeen tabs you have open, subtract one of the four group chats you have muted but still scroll, subtract the meeting that, by my honest count, could be a 3-line email.

there is a separate piece on making the actual organ smarter if you want the brain-as-hardware angle. this one is about the operating habits. they are different posts because they are different problems. the brain is the chassis. the habits are who’s driving. on the comparable problem of how i, specifically, make this brain smarter, the answer involves more naps than productivity bro would condone. that is a different note in a different drawer.

step one, the chatgpt filter explained

step one is the chatgpt filter. it is the only step in this list that i have actually implemented, and that is because it requires almost nothing of me. the_algorithm does the heavy lifting. i am, in this arrangement, the supervisor of a more diligent intern.

here is the setup. every email that lands in my personal inbox goes through a screen. the screen reads it. the screen decides whether it deserves the next two minutes of my attention. the screen, which is to say chatgpt, is operating on a prompt i wrote one tuesday at 11:47pm and have not edited since. the prompt is three sentences. it is, somehow, more disciplined than i am.

becoming smarter, in this corner of the operation, looks like this: i used to read every email and reply to none. now i read three emails and reply to one. the math is the same number of replies. the difference is the four hours i did not spend feeling like i was about to reply. that is the unit of becoming smarter, properly measured. it is hours-not-spent-feeling-bad, divided by total hours. you minimize the denominator’s emotional load. you call it productivity. nobody can tell.

i do not, for the record, tell anyone the screen exists. when sarah asks how i finally got back to her, i say “i set aside time on tuesday.” this is true. i set aside the time. the time was three minutes. the screen did the rest.

step two, sarah’s quiet method

step two is to find a sarah and copy her without telling her you are copying her. sarah is, in this telling, the friend you have who has decided, without announcement, what her week looks like, and then does it. she runs marathons not as a personality but as a schedule. she has a 401k-equivalent she has explained to me twice and i have failed to understand both times.

i texted sarah, at 10:18, about the question of the morning. her reply, in four minutes, no exclamation point, no second message: “close the tabs. pick one thing. write it for thirty days. text me on day thirty-one.” 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, the exact shape of what you are not doing.

the method, copied without permission: choose one habit. do it without telling the internet. report the results to one person, not a feed. that is, by my count, three rules. sarah follows them. i follow them in the way a man follows a recipe — i read it, i nod, i make a different dinner, i text sarah. the texting is the closest i get. it is not nothing. on the question of why we read smart advice and do dumb things anyway, the academic name is in the destination link. the bar name is “because.”

step three, the wall of insults audit

step three is the wall of insults audit, which sounds dramatic but is, in execution, a tuesday afternoon with a cup of office coffee. the wall of insults lives, technically, in a folder on the laptop, with screenshots of every cruel thing anyone has ever said to me online, and a few said in person that i typed up afterward like a court reporter taking notes for myself.

(it is digital. it has always been digital. forget what other posts have implied about printing them out and pinning them. that was a metaphor. the wall is a folder. moving on.)

the audit, performed honestly: i open the folder. i read the insults. i sort them into two piles. pile one is the strangers who were, on inspection, obviously unwell when they typed it. pile two is the three or four insults a year that landed because they were, against my preferences, accurate. the audit becomes a smarter-person exercise the moment you admit pile two exists.

the rule, in the smarter-person economy: you become slightly less stupid every time you move an insult from pile one to pile two. you become noticeably stupider every time you move one in the other direction. i do both. the ratio is what’s at stake. last quarter, the ratio went the right way for the first time in eighteen months. i did not announce this. i would have, in a previous life, posted about it.

step four, the third yoga mat watches

step four is the third yoga mat. the third yoga mat lives, currently, under the couch in the apartment, half unrolled, possibly evolving. i bought it in a moment of certainty about who i was about to become. that moment, in retrospect, was the high water mark of my self-deception for the calendar year. the mat has been under the couch since.

the mat is, in this investigation, the witness. it watches, from beneath the couch, every smarter-sounding decision i announce in the apartment and then quietly do not execute. it watched me say, in 2023, that i was going to “read more this year.” it watched me, six weeks later, listen to a film about an idiot abroad on a flight while pretending it was research for a different post. (it was not. it was a film. it remains a film.)

here is the rule the mat enforces: any plan to become smarter that you announce out loud to another human, before you have done it for thirty days, is a plan that the mat will absorb the same way it has absorbed the others. say nothing. do the thing. let the mat collect dust on the announcement you did not make. that is, structurally, what step two of sarah’s method also says, but the mat says it without judgement, which is the only voice i can stand on a wednesday morning before the second coffee.

verdict, you don’t, the algorithm decides

the verdict, after the four steps and one defensive pulpit, is that you do not, in any active sense, become smarter. the algorithm becomes smarter about you. the screen learns which emails to forward. sarah keeps not posting her marathons. the wall of insults gets sorted on a tuesday afternoon. the third yoga mat continues its quiet career as a witness. and somewhere in the middle of all that, six months in, an external observer notices that your emails are shorter, your meetings are fewer, and your bank app gets opened on the same day as your rent. they call this becoming smarter. you know better. it is mostly the algorithm.

nobody who has actually become smarter announces it. they have stopped using a phrase that used to live in their email. they have a shorter answer to “how was your weekend.” that’s the data. the rest is, with respect, productivity bro selling you a course on a thread.

the standing desk creaked, which it does on wednesdays around 11. the procurement training is wrapping. carla will pass the desk in approximately four minutes. the investigation, such as it is, gets folded back into the spreadsheet i am pretending to be in. the steps remain. the mat remains. the wall remains. and the question — how do you become smarter — survives the morning intact, mostly because the question is, itself, a tab i refuse to close.

the screen has triaged eleven emails since i started this. it replied to two. i have read zero. that is, technically, the system working.