how to be super smart — 1 thorough investigation

being super smart is the kind of phrase a child uses, which is, on reflection, one of the signs of being super smart. a thorough investigation is, accordingly, underway. the child of the woman in 4B was the lead source.

monday, 11:47am. the boss is upstairs in a vendor walkthrough nobody asked to attend, and the boss extended a generic invite to the floor that i, with great sincerity and zero intention, declined by simply not opening the calendar. that gives me the rest of the morning to file the procedure, which is what we are calling this. the procedure for how to be super smart. underline super. that’s the part that’s doing the work.

the child, noted of this investigation, said it about a magnet. the magnet was on the fridge of the woman in 4B, who was babysitting at the time, and the child held the magnet up and said “look, i am super smart, i did this.” the doing was sticking the magnet to the fridge. that was the achievement. that was the entire system. i wrote it down on the back of an envelope from the unopened mail pile because it felt, somehow, like a thesis.

before i lay out the steps i want to flag that i have, in the past, engaged with this question more cynically. on the matter of confirmation bias by someone who is, allegedly, always right, i went on at a previous length about always being right. the procedure below, you will notice, leans heavily on the same machinery. that is not laziness. that is the machinery of being super smart, which is, in fact, the machinery of feeling super smart, which are different machines that share a casing.

step one of how to be super smart, the boss seems super, allegedly

the first step of how to be super smart is to identify a person who is, by some measure outside your own head, considered super smart. then watch them. take notes. do not ask them anything. asking would compromise the data.

i picked the boss — internally filed in the notebook as The_boss, with the underscore, which is the only liberty i take with the role. The_boss is, by org-chart proof alone, smarter than i am, in the sense that the org chart pays the boss more than it pays me. the boss has, on the desk on the third floor, three monitors and a small succulent that has, against all building odds, not died. the boss reads a newsletter about productivity at 7am. the boss has a standing meeting on wednesdays called “alignment” which is, near as i can tell, where the boss aligns. i have watched the boss, from the second floor, walk past the elevator with what looks like purpose. that is the data.

here is what i learned. the boss is not doing anything different from what i’m doing. the boss is just doing it on the third floor and saying it out loud while doing it. the boss says “i’m going to grab a coffee” instead of grabbing a coffee silently. the boss says “let me think about this” instead of thinking about this silently. the boss says “good question” before answering a question that was, at best, fine. the smart, in this case, is the audio track. the smart, looked at from the second floor without sound, is a person walking around with a mug.

this is, i’m fairly sure, also the structure of every movie about a smart person. there is always a scene in a beautiful mind where the math gets visualized and you, the viewer, understand nothing about the math, but the music tells you the math is profound. the music is doing the smart. the math is, technically, a prop. that’s the boss, on the third floor, with the alignment meeting. the alignment meeting is the music. nobody in the room is mathing. they’re just there for the soundtrack.

step two, productivity bro is super, online

the second step in how to be super smart is to consult the public square. the public square, in 2026, is a feed. the feed has an algorithm. the algorithm has a man on it, with a desk-setup behind him, telling you the morning routine.

this is productivity bro. productivity bro is online from approximately 5am, which is, in productivity bro’s own framing, a sign of being super smart. productivity bro reads 47 tabs worth of newsletters before the rest of us have stopped pretending to brush our teeth. productivity bro has a chart. productivity bro is, structurally, what i would be if i had been raised by a man who owned a kettlebell. and yet. and yet, productivity bro keeps making videos. the videos are about how to make videos. the system is the system. the system is selling the system.

i watched productivity bro for, by my honest count, 23 minutes on a saturday i had set aside to do nothing. productivity bro told me to wake up earlier, do cold exposure, eat a specific number of grams of protein, and journal in a specific notebook he had, helpfully, linked. productivity bro did not, at any point, do anything that would be recognizable as thinking. productivity bro was, the whole time, performing the absence of confusion. that is not smart. that is set design. limitless understood this. the pill in that movie was a pill. it was honest about being a pill. productivity bro is a pill that is also a man, which is, at minimum, two professions.

here is the hot take, in the calm sense. every meeting could be a 3-line email. and every productivity video could be a one-line caption, which is: “wake up, do the thing, stop.” that’s the procedure. the rest is decor. the decor is the product. the product is the procedure.

step three, the notification interrupted the supering

the third step of how to be super smart is to remove distractions. this is, on every list, item number one, two, or three. it is also, on every list, the step that nobody completes, because the list itself was delivered through the distraction.

i was in the middle of writing this section, calmly, on a monday, on the second floor, with the boss safely in the vendor walkthrough, when the notification arrived. the notification was from an app i do not remember installing, telling me a man whose name i do not recognize had liked a comment i did not write on a post i was, apparently, tagged in by mistake. the notification took, by stopwatch, eleven seconds to read and twenty-seven minutes to recover from. i opened a tab. i closed the tab. i opened a different tab. i forgot why. i ate two crackers from the desk drawer. i remembered why. i closed all the tabs except the four i was actually using and the eleven i had decided were “research”. the eleven are still open.

this is the entire architecture of how to be super smart, as practiced. it is not a series of steps. it is a series of interruptions, between which steps are notionally happening. the procedure is the recovery. the recovery is the procedure. (i am aware of how that sounds.)

mike, who has not filed since 2019, has, in his own way, solved this. mike does not have notifications on. mike’s phone is on a dresser at home, charging. mike is, currently, at the corner bar at 3:14pm on a wednesday, drinking. mike has, by any honest measure, less interruption than productivity bro, which makes mike, by the procedure outlined here, more super smart than productivity bro. mike does not have a chart. mike has a stool. mike is winning.

step four, the wall of insults audit was super

the fourth step of how to be super smart is to seek feedback. the feedback step is, on every list, the step that smart people are said to be unusually willing to do. they are, supposedly, hungry for it. they want the criticism. they grow.

i decided, in the spirit of the investigation, to audit my wall of insults. the wall of insults is, technically, a folder on my laptop with screenshots of every cruel thing anyone has ever said to me online. it is a digital wall, in a digital folder, on the same machine that runs the spreadsheet. i opened it. i looked at it. i scrolled, slowly, the way you scroll through a yearbook of a school you did not attend.

here is what the audit revealed. of the seventy-three insults in the folder, sixty-eight were from accounts with cartoon avatars and zero followers, four were from people i had genuinely wronged in the comment section of a separate post, and one was from a man i went to school with who said, in a single sentence, something so accurate it knocked the wind out of me. that one is bookmarked. that one is, in the procedure, the only useful one. and yet. the folder still contains all seventy-three. i have, by retention alone, voted that the cartoon avatars matter as much as the man from school. that is not feedback hunger. that is feedback hoarding. the smart move would be to delete sixty-eight and read the one. i have not done it. i will not do it. it is monday and i have, optimistically, the rest of the morning. the folder will outlive the morning.

this part of the procedure, in fairness, also describes stupid. on the matter of stupid as a concept and a self-applied label, i have offered a more general theory in the longer essay on the word stupid itself. the wall of insults audit is the same theory in microcosm. the audit is smart. the audit happening once a year, in a folder you refuse to delete, is the rest of us.

verdict, super is a prefix that adds nothing

here is where the investigation lands. the word super, in front of smart, does not modify smart. it modifies the speaker. smart is a measurable enough thing — there are tests, there are scores, there are people in white coats with clipboards who can rank you on a curve. super smart is the version of smart that you say about yourself, in a video, with a desk-setup behind you, at 5am. super smart is what the child of the woman in 4B said about a magnet. those are the two known users of the phrase. there is no third category. the third category does not, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists, exist.

so the procedure for how to be super smart, after a thorough investigation, conducted on a monday, on the second floor, between 9:42am and noon, mostly without interruption, is as follows. one: notice when you reach for the prefix. two: ask, with the calm of a man at a desk on a monday, what the prefix is doing. three: in nine cases out of ten, the prefix is doing the work that smart was supposed to do, and smart is sitting in the back row, in the costume, eating crackers. four: take the prefix off. five: see what’s left. that’s the procedure. the procedure is short. the procedure is, by the count of the procedure, super smart.

i’d add a sixth step but the boss just texted the floor about a follow-up to the vendor walkthrough and i need to relocate to a tab that looks more relevant. the seventh microwave, by the way, is humming on a counter at home, perfectly normal, like it didn’t kill the six before it. that’s not the topic. that’s just the soundtrack.

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