how to become intelligent genius — 1 investigation

becoming an intelligent genius, as a phrase, is one of those phrases that gets less convincing the longer you look at it. i looked into it for forty minutes. the productivity bro had three courses on the topic. i bought one.

i’m typing this from the desk on a friday at 11:08am, while carla sits through a vendor walkthrough one floor up that is supposed to last twenty minutes and has, judging by her absence, not. the rest of the morning is, technically, available, if i don’t open the bank app or the wrong tab.

the question is the title. how to become intelligent genius. note the missing “an” — it was missing in the search bar that brought you here, and i’d like to honor it, because that small grammatical hole is the entire post, structurally. the phrase asks for two things at once. that’s already too many.

1. how to become intelligent genius, brief

the brief, said quickly, is that you cannot. the longer brief, said properly, is that the phrase wants two awards in one sentence and the english language has a quiet rule against that. “intelligent” is one piece of furniture. “genius” is another piece of furniture. you do not put both in the same small room. it gets crowded. someone, eventually, has to leave.

here is the thing my working pillar on confirmation bias as a daily habit keeps teaching me, post by post — most plans for becoming anything fail at the noun. people think the verb is the problem. it isn’t. the problem is the thing they are trying to become. nobody has ever, in the history of english, become an intelligent genius and stayed humble about it for ten consecutive minutes.

so the brief is this. dave laughs. carla pretends. the productivity bro labels himself. the notification stays mute. that is four pieces of evidence, none of which i ordered, all of which arrived inside the same forty-minute window on a friday morning. four witnesses against the phrase itself. the phrase is on trial, not me.

2. step one, dave called and laughed

step one of how to become intelligent genius is to tell exactly one trustworthy person that you are attempting it, and observe their face. i have done this, by accident, with dave. i did not mean to attempt anything. i had searched the phrase in the morning, the search bar was open, dave called about an unrelated insurance form, and the screen was visible.

dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. dave is the only person i know who can sustain a laugh past the natural human breath limit, and he did, twice. when he had recovered enough to speak, he said, kindly, “you are not the target audience for that course.” then he laughed for another minute and a half. the call ended itself, eventually, the way all dave calls end — without resolution, with affection.

the lesson, applied here, is that the people who know you well will not attend the funeral of your own pretensions, but they will laugh long enough that you bury them yourself. dave was, in his way, helping. he saved me ninety dollars on the second course. the first course had already been bought. that’s a different story, three steps down.

3. step two, carla pretended not to hear

step two is the colder witness, and it lives at the office. carla walked past the desk earlier in the week, after another meeting, when the search results were still visible on the second monitor, large enough that anyone with functional eyes could read them. carla has functional eyes. carla read the screen. carla kept walking.

her silence was, in this context, more devastating than dave’s nine minutes. carla pretends not to hear when there is something to hear. she will pause, look at the carpet, register the information, and then continue walking as if she had heard nothing — which is, around here, the highest tier of professional courtesy. i have, on the tally i keep running, received this courtesy from her four times this quarter. each one, statistically, has been deserved.

so the lesson of carla, applied to becoming intelligent genius, is that the people you respect at work will not engage with your search history. they will protect you from yourself by ignoring it, completely, and walking past at the same speed. that protection is a gift. the gift, in this case, was the silence. silence is an underrated form of feedback. it costs nothing and lasts.

4. step three, the productivity bro called himself one

step three is the loudest witness, and it lives online. the productivity bro on the platform i still have open in the seventeenth tab posted, this morning, at 1:23pm his time, a three-paragraph announcement that he is, in his own assessment, an intelligent genius. he used the phrase. he used it without irony. he used it in a font he had selected for the occasion.

i’d like to leave that there for a moment, because the moment is the entire post. a person who calls himself an intelligent genius online has, definitionally, lost the ability to be one. there is a small limitless plot in his thread where he argues otherwise, mentioning a pill he does not name and a regimen that includes cold water, and i read it twice, slowly, because the second read is when the sadness shows up.

the productivity bro is the warning label on the bottle. the bottle is the phrase. you are not supposed to drink from it. nobody who has ever become anything serious has labeled themselves while becoming. the labeling is, structurally, the abandonment of the becoming. that is also true, on a smaller scale, of newsletters. i am aware of how that sounds.

5. step four, the notification declined to comment

step four arrived without warning, the way step fours do. at 12:23pm, the notification appeared on the locked screen — one of those grey ones from the algorithm that knows my browsing better than my own mother — and it said, simply, “explore your interests.” that was the whole sentence. no link. no urgency. no suggestion. just an instruction, issued by software, to a person who had spent the morning typing how to become intelligent genius into a search bar.

i’d like to be clear that the notification did not comment on the phrase. it did not laugh, like dave. it did not pretend not to hear, like carla. it did not boast about itself, like the productivity bro. it just sat on the screen, polite and beige, and waited. the algorithm has, over the years, become a very calm presence in my life — calmer than most of the named people. that is not a compliment to the algorithm. it is a complaint about the people.

the notification, in this investigation, is the fourth witness. it is the witness that says nothing. it is also the witness whose silence is the most damning, because it is the silence of a system that knows me better than i know me, and even it had no follow-up. that absence of follow-up is, on reflection, the verdict of the morning. the algorithm thought about it and chose not to weigh in. that is the entire review.

6. verdict, the word genius does the work

the verdict, after one friday morning, four witnesses, and a notification that declined to weigh in, is that the word “genius” is doing the heavy lifting in the phrase, and “intelligent” is along for the ride. nobody who is genuinely intelligent attaches “genius” to themselves voluntarily. nobody who is genuinely a genius needs the adjective. the phrase is, in summary, a request to be both at once, and english says no, kindly, but firmly.

this whole investigation is shelved next to a sister piece on how a working idiot can investigate his own idiocy properly from inside the same desk and with the same battery. it is the same building, structurally — the genius wing and the idiot wing share a load-bearing wall, and that wall is the productivity bro, who lives in both wings simultaneously and pays rent in neither. the cross-cluster traffic between the two posts is the post itself, eventually. the idiot keeps showing up at the genius door.

the unopened mail pile, by the way, gained two more letters this morning while i was researching the phrase. one is from the bank. one is in serif font from somebody who knows my address. neither one of them is going to be opened by an intelligent genius today, because no such person is at this desk. there is, instead, a working idiot at this desk, with the phone holding at 23% as it always does at 12:23pm, regardless of starting point, and forty-seven tabs that say everything the post has already said, only worse.