how to be very smart — 1 thorough investigation

being very smart and being very tired produce, as it turns out, very similar facial expressions in the wild. what they don’t tell you, anywhere in the literature, is which of the two i happen to be doing on any given afternoon. carla, walking briskly past my work area, has a guess on the matter. she has not shared it.

desk. 12:38pm on a friday. carla is on the third floor for a vendor walkthrough. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of lunch and a thirty-five-minute buffer before anyone notices the cursor isn’t where the spreadsheet wants it.

so the project today, if you can call sitting still a project, is to figure out how to be very smart. not smart. very smart. there is a gap between the two that the entire self-improvement aisle tries to sell you a ladder for. i have walked the aisle. i have priced the ladder. i remain at floor level.

1. how to be very smart, brief

there is a version of how to be very smart that involves books, sleep, cold water, a journal, and a man on a podcast louder than his own thesis. i have owned a piece of each. the books are stacked. the sleep is theoretical. the cold water lasted four mornings. the journal has three entries, one of which is a grocery list.

this is not, i should say, a piece of my own running investigation into being right before the data arrives, although it shares an apartment with that one. this one is narrower. this one is about the gap between smart and very smart, which is one little adverb wide and somehow contains an entire industry.

the brief version: you cannot, by any clean route i have tested, become very smart on purpose. you can become marginally less foolish on a tuesday, before lunch, if conditions are right. that is the whole offer. anyone selling more is selling the ladder.

2. step one, the word “very” is the issue

the first thing i’d like noted, plainly, is that the word very is the one carrying the post on its back. remove it — how to be smart — and you have a different problem, with a different aisle. very is doing what very always does in writing: doing very little, while loudly insisting it is doing a lot.

i was told once, by a writing teacher whose advice i still hear in elevators, that very is a word a careful writer cuts on sight. very tired becomes exhausted. very angry becomes furious. very smart becomes — and here is where the trick stops working — what, exactly. genius? masterful? both of those are, on the page, the word very wearing a coat. you have changed the suit. you have not changed the man.

so the search for how to be very smart is, partly, a search for a coat. the man inside the coat is who we already are, which is, in my apartment, a person who once tried to microwave a fork and considered the resulting flash a form of insight.

3. step two, very is a word i was told to avoid

and yet here we are, putting very in the title. there is a reason. very smart is what people search for at 11:47am on a wednesday when smart, on its own, no longer feels like enough. nobody types how to be moderately competent into the bar. they type very. they type it because baseline intelligence has stopped being impressive even to the person operating it.

this is the human condition expressed through the search bar, which is, on bad days, a more honest diary than any journal. you do not search for what you have. you search for the more. very is the idiot version of progress, where the same idiot, plus an adverb, is presented as a different idiot. nobody is fooled, except the person who searched. that person is, this afternoon, me.

i looked up the etymology of very on a tab i kept small. it turns out very used to mean true. as in, the very man, the true man. somewhere along the way, the meaning slid sideways, and now very is the sticker we put on a thing to insist it is the real version. very smart, by this reading, is just truly smart, which leaves me, on this thursday, wondering whether truly applies.

4. step three, the unopened mail pile is very ignored

here is where the project of how to be very smart meets the apartment, which is where the project always loses. on the kitchen counter, in a small architectural feature i call the unopened mail pile, are nine envelopes, three of them red, one in a serif font so confident it could only be the taxman. a very smart person, by any honest definition, would open the red ones. a very smart person would not, as i am doing right now, address them in a post on the internet while ignoring them on the actual surface in their actual home.

this is the thing the books on the shelf, and the man on the podcast, do not address. you can become, on the page, very smart about anything. you can read a book about taxes. you can take notes. you can buy a second book. and the unopened mail pile, two rooms over, will continue to grow at exactly the rate it was already growing, because the intelligence in the book has not, by any mechanism i have observed, traveled into the kitchen.

this is what i mean by plants are silent landlords. the pile of mail is a silent landlord too. you do not pay it any mind, and eventually it shows up as a letter you cannot ignore. brenda, the dead plant on my windowsill from 2022, is a silent landlord with no further demands. the mail pile is a silent landlord with a billing cycle. very smart, in any practical sense, would mean settling up with both. i have not, as of this paragraph, settled up with either.

5. step four, the third yoga mat is very rolled

under my couch, since 2023, in a state of preserved hopefulness, lives the third yoga mat. it is rolled. it has always been rolled. it was intended to be unrolled, walked on, sweated at, and eventually replaced by a fourth, which would be a smarter version of the third. the third is, by the count i keep on a sticky note, the very item that was going to make me very smart about my body.

here is the working theory. an object you bought to fix a thing about yourself is, every day it remains unused, a daily report card on what you actually do. the report card is the rolled mat. the report card is the standing desk on which you sit, in the lower position, because standing turned out to be a posture for other people.

so the fourth step is to look, briefly, at every rolled object in the room and ask which was supposed to make you a slightly different person. these objects are not your failure. they are the receipt of a transaction in which you bought, in good faith, an upgrade you did not install. that is most of an honest audit, by the count that matters.

6. verdict, very smart is mostly very

so here is the verdict, served plainly. very smart is not a property of the brain so much as a property of the adverb. you can, on a wednesday, with coffee, briefly catch yourself doing a smart thing. you cannot, by any method i have field-tested, do it on demand. the on-demand version is the one they sell. the on-purpose version is the one they cannot.

i thought about all of this once during a movie called pi, in which a man stares at numbers until the numbers stare back. the man in that movie is, on paper, very smart. he also has a headache the size of a small country. there is something in there about the trade. nobody mentions the trade in the results.

so if you came here for the steps, the four above are the steps, and they end at the kitchen counter, with the red envelopes, where the smartest move available is the one i am, again, declining to make. the apartment is the pile. the pile is the test. i am, on this thursday, scoring a generous c-minus.

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