how do you get smarter — 1 thorough investigation

what they don’t tell you about getting smarter, in plain terms, is that everyone selling you the method is also quietly selling you the diagnosis. i bought both products, twice, from the productivity bro and his email funnel. neither package has shipped to my apartment. neither, i increasingly suspect, ever will.

the desk, a coffee on its second life, the rest of the morning ahead of me. carla is two floors up at the q3 review with the deck nobody opens twice. the cursor has not moved in eight minutes and i am calling that a sustainable pace.

so. how do you get smarter. you, plural. you, the search bar. you, the person reading this from a phone in a meeting you said yes to without checking the calendar. you is doing a lot of work in that question — pretending to be specific while addressing a crowd, which is, near as i can tell, the same trick most self-improvement runs on. the framing is the one i ran when i looked into the warm bath of always being correct last quarter: you ask the species a question, the species answers in a way that flatters the asker.

how do you get smarter: there is no clerk handing out intelligence in exchange for effort. the closest workable routine is four steps — apply mike’s two-beer test, close the 47 tabs running interference, audit the seventh appliance you killed, and put down the third yoga mat as a metaphor. patience is the part nobody sells.

YOU. ARE. NOT. THE. EXCEPTION.

the four steps i ran this week happened in an apartment that has hosted, since sunday, exactly one human visitor — mike, briefly, holding a bottle and a slightly puzzled expression about being here and not at the corner. mike does not normally enter the apartment. the bar was closed for a private event, the elevator brought him one floor too far, and that’s how you get smarter when you weren’t planning to: somebody walks into your kitchen by accident.

how do you get smarter, the short version

the short version, on how do you get smarter without buying anything, is this. you don’t get smarter the way you get a haircut. there is no chair. there is no mirror at the end. the verb is the trap, set by whoever wrote the search bar in 2003, who was not thinking about your tuesday.

what actually happens is that you become marginally less wrong, in narrow lanes, very slowly, often without noticing. there is no transaction. there is, instead, a long stretch of being mildly embarrassed by things you said in 2019. that’s the whole curriculum. there is no graduation. the simpsons got this right thirty seasons ago: nobody on that show has gotten smarter. they have, however, kept showing up, which is, on my accounting, eighty percent of it.

step one, mike’s two-beer test

step one is to ask the question to a man on his second beer and watch what he does with it. the two-beer state is, for mike, a state of unusual epistemic clarity. before two, mike is guarded. after three, mike is asleep. the window is narrow but reliable.

i asked mike, in my kitchen, the question: “how do you get smarter.” mike looked at it for a beat. mike said, without putting the bottle down, “you don’t. you just stop being confidently wrong about things you have no reason to have an opinion on. that is most of it.” mike then looked at my fridge, did not open it, and observed that my kitchen “feels like a place where decisions are postponed”. this was, in retrospect, also an answer.

i wrote mike’s sentence on the back of an envelope on the counter. the envelope is now under a magnet on the fridge. the envelope is, structurally, a post-it that costs more. mike has a system for taxes — has not filed since 2019. on the question of getting smarter, however, mike is eight pages ahead of every productivity newsletter i unsubscribed from this year.

step two, the 47 tabs, briefly closed

step two is to close the 47 tabs currently open in your browser. you will not do this. i did not do this. but the attempt is the lesson. the attempt forces you, briefly, to look at what’s in the tabs, and what’s in the tabs is the most accurate map of what you actually believe.

i counted. of forty-seven tabs, eleven were research for a position i decided was correct on sunday. nine were articles i opened and plan to read, which is, in tab form, the same lie i tell about books. seven were recipes for meals i will not cook because i live alone. four were items on a website i had to be logged into, which i was not, the only thing keeping me solvent right now. the rest were distractions distracting me from the original distraction.

the audit was the smartest thing i did all morning. closing the tabs would have been smarter. noticing the tabs, briefly, was the upgrade. that one is free. so is the follow-up: the tabs will be back by 11am in a slightly different configuration, and the species, in this case, is again us.

step three, the seventh microwave, again

step three is to look honestly at the seventh microwave. i killed seven microwaves between 2018 and last spring. seven. by the third, a smarter person would have started keeping a log. by the fifth, a smarter person would have considered whether the fault might lie with the operator. by the seventh, a smarter person would have, at minimum, googled “why do i keep killing microwaves” and read past the first two results. i did none of these. i bought a new one each time. that is the chart of how someone does not get smarter.

the smarter step was not reading more about microwaves. the smarter step was noticing i was killing them in roughly the same way each time — late at night, in a hurry, with something inside i should not have heated. the variable was the man pressing the buttons. you cannot read your way out of being the variable. you can only sit with the embarrassment until the next time you reach for a fork at 11pm and pause one second longer than you used to. one second is, on the curve, an actual unit. it is also the only one i have measurably gained.

the seventh microwave, if you are wondering, involved a metal lid i swore had been removed. it had not. the home team protecting the home record is the same mechanism — your brain was sure the lid was off because your brain wanted dinner and was tired of waiting. the lid did not care.

step four, the third yoga mat, again

step four is to confront the third yoga mat. it lives, currently, beneath the sofa, where it has lived since 2023. it has been unrolled exactly once. it is less a yoga mat now and more a long sleeping object. i suspect, on bad nights, that it has begun to evolve.

the third yoga mat is a metaphor and i’ll do something i don’t usually do, which is admit it out loud. it’s what happens when you decide to become a different kind of person by buying an object. the object will sit. the person will not change. the receipt will linger in your inbox for five years. you can repeat this indefinitely. each repetition feels, in the moment of purchase, like a step toward intelligence. each repetition is, in the data, a step toward a more cluttered floor.

so, on the yoga mat axis, how do you get smarter is to be honest that the yoga mat was never going to do it. the gym membership wasn’t either. the standing desk you sit at wasn’t either. you are not, structurally, going to be talked into a different life by an object you bought on a tuesday. the object is, generously, a prop. the upgrade requires a person, and the only person available, depressingly, is you.

verdict, smarter is a route i refuse to take

mike left around the third paragraph, with most of his second beer still in the bottle, citing the elevator. the envelope with his sentence is still on the fridge, slightly askew, under a magnet from a pizza place that closed in 2021.

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