how to be a smarter person — 1 thorough investigation

being a smarter person sounds, said out loud, like a thing you’d put on a vision board. i made a vision board once. the vision was vague. what they don’t tell you is the board was the smartest part of the project.

monday. 9:42am. carla disappeared into the q3 review on the third floor about eleven minutes ago, which gives me, generously, an hour and change before anyone notices the cursor in this document is not, technically, in the document i was assigned. so we investigate. we investigate the question of how to be a smarter person, posed earnestly by people who are, frankly, smart enough to be googling it, which is already a clue.

here is the part that no how-to admits up front. “smarter” is a comparative. it implies a baseline. the baseline, in almost every case, is the version of yourself who lived in this same kitchen six months ago and made worse choices about the same five things. you are not competing with einstein. you are competing with last-may you. last-may you was, on the kitchen ledger i keep without admitting to it, a person who killed a microwave on a tuesday by overestimating its tolerance for foil. last-may me, in fact. the cognitive trap of always-being-right is the load-bearing wall of last-may me. moving on.

how to be a smarter person, brief

brief, because brief is the test. if you cannot say it in a paragraph, you do not, yet, know it. that is itself a smart-person heuristic, one i’m fairly sure i read somewhere serious, possibly in a magazine that puts a man on a horse on the cover. anyway.

the brief version of how to be a smarter person is this. you stop trying to be smarter than other people, because that is a moving target with a salary cap, and you start trying to be smarter than the version of you that existed last quarter. that is a fixed target. that target cannot move. that target lives in the email archive, in the receipts folder, in the small list of regrets you keep without realizing you’re keeping it. you compete with that target. you, generally, win. it is the only competition rigged in your favor, and people, somehow, refuse to enter it.

the related question — the broader project of upgrading your own thinking — is the version i’d point my friends at if my friends were the kind of people who asked me anything. they are not. that’s also information.

step one, the category ‘person’ is doing too much

“a smarter person” is two words pretending to be one idea. “smarter” is the work. “person” is the trap. the moment you append “person” to the goal, you have made it about identity, and identity is the most expensive way to buy a habit.

i know this because i have, twice, attempted to become “a runner”. both times i bought shoes. neither time i ran. the shoes were a costume for the role of person-who-runs. the running, which is the actual thing, was deferred indefinitely while i sat with the shoes and thought about the kind of person i now was. mom called on a sunday. she asked how the running was going. i said good. i said it had been a building week. mom, who has known me forty years and counting, said “oh, that’s nice” in the tone she uses when she is filing a thing for later.

“a smarter person” works the same way. you don’t need to become a smarter person. you need to make a smarter decision, this morning, about the one thing in front of you. the smarter decision compounds. the identity, if it ever shows up, shows up afterward, uninvited, like a cousin at a wedding.

step two, the q3 review didn’t ask

here is something the q3 review will teach you, if you let it. the q3 review is, on paper, a meeting where smart people gather to evaluate a quarter and decide what to do about the next one. in practice the q3 review is a stage, lit harshly, on which seventeen people perform their own intelligence at one another for two hours and forty minutes. the smart move, contrary to the staging, is not to perform. the smart move is to watch what happens to the room when nobody performs for thirty seconds. that information is free. that information is, in fact, the only useful information in the room.

i have been in the q3 review exactly twice. the first time i talked. the second time i did not talk and i learned more in the not-talking than i learned in the talking, by a factor i would estimate at maybe eleven to one. i’m not in the q3 review today. carla is. carla will return at lunch and i will ask her one careful question and she will answer it without realizing she is answering it. that is also a smart-person move. the smart-person move is to find the one person in the room who is paying attention, and to ask them, later, in the corridor, what they noticed. nobody asks. that’s the bug. that’s the opportunity.

step three, the algorithm as person-evidence

here is a thing i tested on myself, with no controls, on a thursday in march. i opened my phone and i looked at the last hour of feed. i asked, of every video, the question: did this make me smarter, or did this make me feel smarter. those are not the same question. i timed it. fifty-eight minutes of content. one video, on a generous reading, made me smarter. the rest made me feel smarter, which is a different and cheaper sensation that the brain is happy to substitute when the real thing is unavailable.

that is the algorithm doing its job. the algorithm does not want me to be smarter. the algorithm wants me to feel smarter so that i will return tomorrow for another small dose of feeling. it has discovered that the feeling and the substance are interchangeable, on the chart, in terms of revenue. they are not interchangeable in terms of, say, my actual life, but my actual life is not on the chart.

so the smarter-person move is, simply, to count. count the videos that taught you a thing. count the videos that made you feel taught. report the ratio to nobody, because nobody will care, but the ratio will, over time, change you. mine has gone from one-in-twenty to one-in-twelve since i started keeping it. that is, statistically, almost nothing. it is, in lived terms, a different kind of evening.

step four, the seventh microwave is person-shaped

i have killed seven microwaves. this is the seventh i have killed, although technically the seventh is still alive and i killed the prior six, which is the kind of pedantry a smart-person blog would point out, and i’m pointing it out, so consider that note registered. the seventh microwave is, in fact, a different microwave from the one i had in march, which was a different microwave from the one i had the previous november. the lineage is chronicled in the kitchen drawer, by receipt.

here is what the seventh microwave taught me about smartness. each microwave i killed, i killed in roughly the same way. fork-adjacent decision. confidence misapplied. flash. small smell. quiet ride to the bin. the smart move was, after the third microwave, to stop. i did not stop. the smart move was, after the fourth microwave, to put a small post-it on the appliance reading “no metal, you idiot”. i did not do that either. i did, eventually, after the sixth, write the post-it. the seventh microwave is the first one that has survived for longer than nine months. the post-it is the entire intervention. the post-it cost forty cents. the microwaves cost, cumulatively, more than a small flight to a country i would not have visited.

the lesson is not buy fewer microwaves. the lesson is: the smart-person move is the one i resisted six microwaves longer than was reasonable. and the reason i resisted it was that the post-it would have been admitting i was, on this one issue, the kind of person who needs a post-it. i was. i am. i wrote the post-it. the post-it is on the microwave. the microwave is alive. that is the entire arc.

step five, the hot take that pays its rent

since we are taking inventory of smart-person moves, here is one i hold dear. mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese. that is a take. it earns its keep. i offer it because the smart-person move, in any room, is to hold one or two takes that are slightly indefensible and to be willing to defend them anyway, with care, while remaining open to being shown wrong. the takes are not the point. the willingness is the point. people who hold no takes are not, in my experience, smarter. they are quieter. those are different.

i think about the women who calculated trajectories at nasa with chalk and slide rules and i think: those people held takes. they held them quietly, with arithmetic, and they were right enough of the time to put a man in space and bring him back. nobody is asking me to put a man in space. but the standard, locally, applies.

step six, what i do, mostly, on thursdays

here is the practice. on a good thursday, mid-morning, while carla is in some meeting on a higher floor, i write down two things. the first is the decision i’m about to make. the second is the case against making it. the case against is allowed to be three words long. it usually is. but the act of writing it is the entire intervention. i was taught a version of this by a stefan-type expert at work, years ago, who ran what he called a “pre-mortem” before any project. stefan got a corner office. i got a smaller microwave bill. both, in their way, are wins.

i have been doing this, off and on, for eight months. i have skipped it, on a fair tally, more days than i have done it. but on the days i have done it, i have not, to my knowledge, killed a microwave, sent a regrettable email, or bought a yoga mat. that is not a miracle. that is a forty-cent post-it, scaled.

verdict, the personhood is the bias

so here is where we land. how to be a smarter person is, on inspection, a bad question. it asks you to upgrade an identity when the actual lever is a sequence of small, boring, mostly private decisions made between coffees, before meetings, in the thirty seconds you would otherwise have given to feeling already-correct. you don’t get smarter all at once. you get a quarter-percent smarter on a thursday, lose two percent of it on a sunday, get a quarter back on a wednesday. the trend, if you keep it, is up. the trend is not visible to you. the trend is visible only in retrospect, and only in the things you did not buy, the meetings you did not talk in, the takes you held back when the room would have rewarded you for the take.

i’d point you at one more thing, which is the long defence of being called a fool when you mean it as a posture, because the cousin word here is fool, and a smarter person tends to look, from the outside, exactly like the kind of fool who knows it. the fool is not the opposite of smart. the fool is what smart looks like before the credit clears. travel, like a how-to article, promises you’ll come back upgraded. mostly you come back tired and with photos. neither the trip nor the post-it will make you smarter. but the post-it, taken together with five other small post-its, will, over a year, make last-may you look like a different person, which is the entire job.

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