how to become really smart — 1 thorough investigation

becoming really smart is the kind of long-term project a person tends to start with great enthusiasm and abandon roughly four days in, every time. i have started it, by my own loose count, fourteen separate times now. what nobody on the podcast mentions, ever, is that the abandonment is, structurally, part of the method itself.

i’m typing this from the desk on a thursday at 9:08am, with carla parked in some all-hands meeting on the third floor that was supposed to be twenty minutes and has, by all visible signs, become forty. that is the rest of my morning, and i intend to use it correctly. the other tab open, just so we’re transparent, is one of forty-seven.

the question on the table is the title. how to become really smart. i’d like to answer it like a person who has tried, and i have, fourteen documented times. the answer kept arriving in the wrong order, which is the part nobody warns you about.

1. how to become really smart, brief

the brief, written out properly, is shorter than the title suggests. i’ll show you. then we’ll talk about why the four steps that follow are, in order, a small humiliation and then three larger ones.

here is the thing my working definition of cognitive bias has taught me, slowly: most plans for how to become really smart fail because they assume the becoming is the main event. it is not. the main event is what you do during the inevitable abandonment, which is where the actual learning happens, if any happens at all. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine.

i’ve also got the other half of the receipt — i’ve been collecting it, reluctantly, in a pillar piece on confirmation bias as a daily habit, where a man who already thought he was right keeps proving it to himself in increasingly creative ways. that man is me, in case the framing was unclear. it is always me.

so the brief is this. read what you finish. believe people who can find your apartment. trust the equipment that still functions. stop when your battery says stop. that is the entire investigation, said quickly. the slower version is below, with names attached.

2. step one, “really” is doing too much

the first step in any plan for how to become really smart is to look, calmly, at the word “really” and notice how much weight it is being asked to carry. a person can become smart. that is doable, in pockets, on certain mornings. “really” smart is a different building entirely, with security at the door and somebody important in the lobby.

my running theory, at this desk, on this thursday, is that the adverb is doing the entire job of the sentence. drop “really” and the project becomes feasible. add it back and you’ve signed up for a continuing education program with no end date and one airpod.

i looked it up, in the loose way i look things up — the dictionary said “really” is an intensifier, which sounds like a small piece of audio equipment from the 1970s. an intensifier is not a method. it’s a request. a request, made by you, of you, to be more than you currently are. that is a hard request to fulfill before lunch.

3. step two, mike has visited and confirmed

step two requires a witness, and i happen to have one. mike has been to the apartment. mike does not visit anyone, which makes the visit data. he came over once, looked at the books on the shelf, looked at the books on the floor next to the shelf, and said, in his way, “you are reading at most eleven percent of these.” his exact phrasing was kinder. his accuracy was not.

mike, for the unfamiliar, holds court at a bar called the corner — a corner bar of the sort cheers built a whole network show on, only with worse lighting and a man who has not filed since 2019. mike’s system for taxes is to wait until a letter in serif font becomes a letter in cardboard. he has visited my apartment exactly once, which is once more than most adults i know.

the lesson of mike, applied to how to become really smart, is that you should believe people who can find where you live. they tend to know what is inside. they have stood in the room. they have seen the books. they have, in mike’s case, named a number. eleven percent. i have not contested it. i have, however, read three more chapters since, which moves the number, conservatively, to twelve.

4. step three, the airpod that still works confirms too

step three is equipment-based. i own one functional airpod. it is the right one — anatomically, not morally. the left one died on a tuesday in a way the warranty did not recognize. i have been listening to the world in mono for, by my reckoning, eleven months, and the world has been, against expectations, fine.

the airpod that still works is, in this investigation, my second witness. it confirms a thing that mike confirmed earlier — that becoming really smart is, in part, a question of working with what is functional, rather than mourning what is not. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford. mono has its own dignity. the podcast still talks. half of it goes into the right ear. the rest goes, presumably, into the room.

here is what nobody on the smart-becoming podcasts tells you. you can listen to a brilliant conversation with one ear and absorb a meaningful percentage of it. you cannot, by contrast, become really smart with both ears closed because you got annoyed about the dead airpod. the equipment that still works wins. the equipment that does not is for a tuesday, later, when the mood improves.

5. step four, the 23% battery cuts the becoming short

step four is the one that finally gets honest. the 23% phone battery is, in this apartment, a permanent condition. the battery sits there, on its slow descent, telling me that the becoming has a deadline written into the hardware. i have, at any moment, between forty minutes and ninety of becoming, depending on whether anything else is open. if the question of how to become smart in 1 day is on the table, my slower investigation into becoming a smarter person argues, persuasively, that the day in question is rationed by the same battery.

the 23% number is not a metaphor. it is what the phone says when i pick it up at 1:11pm, every day, regardless of starting point. somehow. the hot take cited around here, the one mike disputes loudly, is that cereal is soup with conditions, and i’d defend it from any chair, but the more applicable hot take, today, is that smart-feeling has a battery percentage too. it sits at 23. it never charges fully.

so the fourth step, the practical one, is to do the becoming inside the percentage you have. read until the screen darkens. listen to the one airpod until it cuts out. close the tabs you can close. leave the unread ones open as a vow. then stop. the stopping is the step, not the giving up. there is a difference, and the difference is the entire post.

6. verdict, “really” is the entire concession

the verdict, after fourteen attempts and one carefully recorded thursday, is that “really” is the entire concession a person can make to the project. you can become smart. you cannot become really smart, on the open market, without conceding that the adverb is the part you keep losing. mike confirmed it from inside the apartment. the airpod confirmed it from inside the right ear. the battery confirmed it from inside the device. that is three witnesses, which is enough for a small jury.

if you’d like a longer audit of the brain side of this — the one with charts i don’t draw — there’s a sister piece on making the brain itself a touch smarter, which arrives at a similar concession by a different route. it also runs into the battery issue, eventually. they all do.

cross-cluster, for anyone keeping a map: this whole investigation sits in a quiet conversation with the dunning-kruger curve we don’t admit we live on, where the effect we keep blaming on others is the same effect that lets us start the becoming, fourteen times, with full conviction. dunning was, in his polite way, talking about us. not them. us, with one airpod, at 23%, on a thursday.