how to get more smarter — 1 thorough investigation

more smarter, again, with the grammar visibly limping along behind the rest of the sentence. what they don’t tell you, in the search-engine analytics dashboards, is that the people typing this exact phrase are, statistically, my exact demographic. i’m fairly sure half of my reflection is somewhere in their collective browser search history.

so we are going to do this properly. that means treating the redundancy as the most honest part of the search and the part you came here for. nobody types how to get more smarter if they already are. that’s the working hypothesis. that’s what i, in fairness, also typed at 3:14pm yesterday before i remembered i had a desk and the company paid me to use it.

writing this from the desk on the second floor, friday, while carla is upstairs at the q3 retro handing out laminated agendas to people who already know what they think. i have, by the count i keep running, about thirty-eight minutes before someone notices my cursor hasn’t moved in the document i’m allegedly editing. plenty of time to look the redundancy in the eye.

desk, half a coffee gone cold, the building’s air handler doing whatever the air handler does. carla is, allegedly, three floors up. mike is in the lobby for reasons mike has not yet shared with the rest of us.

1. how to get more smarter, the redundancy holds

a normal person, a smarter person, a person who has read books on tape (which are cheating, but that’s a separate verdict in a separate post), would correct the phrase before searching it. they would type how to get smarter, full stop, and feel briefly virtuous about it. the rest of us — the ones for whom the comparative escapes at the wrong moment — type more smarter, hit enter, and let the algorithm deal with our mess.

this is, in its own way, the start of getting smarter. you have admitted, by typing the broken sentence, that something in the construction got away from you. that’s more honest than ninety percent of the corrected, polished, deeply confident sentences i hear at the kind of all-hands meeting where everyone is pretending to think. the broken sentence is the data point. the broken sentence is the starting position.

2. step one, mike approves of the phrasing

mike was in the lobby earlier and i ran the phrase past him. mike does not work here. mike does not work, in the regular sense, anywhere — mike has not filed since 2019, and somehow the IRS has not yet found him. i suspect he followed a delivery person in.

i said: “how do you get more smarter.” mike said: “you don’t. you get more confused, and confused at a higher resolution. that’s the whole arc.”

i wrote it down on the back of a laminated agenda someone left in the lobby. it was from the q3 retro, which carla is in upstairs — same slides as the previous quarter, slightly more wounded tone. confused at a higher resolution. step one going well.

step one, then: accept that getting more smarter is mostly getting more confused, on purpose, about better things. you do not get sharper. you get better at the texture of your own dumbness. on the whole, an upgrade.

3. step two, the q3 retro forgives no grammar

carla, when she comes down from the q3 retro, will have notes. her notes will include “alignment”, “cadence”, and “stretch goal”, in some order. she will use these words correctly. she will use them in sentences that parse. the q3 retro forgives many things — late slides, missing data, a man with a bad cough — but it does not forgive grammar.

step two of getting more smarter is, accordingly, a translation step. take what you actually want to say (more smarter) and convert it into language a smarter room will accept. increase capacity. broaden bandwidth. raise the ceiling. these are the same sentence as more smarter. one is allowed in a meeting. the other is allowed in a search bar at three in the morning.

this is why the search bar is, on a good day, more honest than the meeting. a previous investigation into making your brain more intelligent already noted that the brain is not the place where ambition gets correctly conjugated. the brain says more smarter. the meeting then translates it.

4. step three, dad used to say “more better”

my dad used to say “more better”. he said it on purpose. he was not a man who broke grammar by accident. he broke grammar when the polite version of the sentence was lying and the broken version wasn’t. “how was the chicken.” “more better than last time.” that was a verdict. that was a column inch of honesty nobody else was printing.

he said it about cars. he said it about haircuts. he said it once, that i remember, about a sermon on the subject of patience. dad had, by his own admission, very little of it, and respected it the way you respect a tax bracket you’ve never qualified for.

step three: borrow a phrase from someone who used broken grammar on purpose. write the phrase down. when you are about to translate more smarter into something a meeting will accept, look at the phrase first. ask whether the meeting version is more honest than the broken version. usually it isn’t.

5. step four, the seventh microwave got more dead

the seventh microwave is, as i type this, in the kitchen at home, in a state i would describe as more dead. it is not less working than the previous six. it is also not more working. it is, in the precise grammar of the search bar, more dead than it was last week. nothing has happened to it. that’s part of being more dead. the death advances on its own.

i mention it because it is a useful unit of measurement. you do not get smarter the way you buy a new microwave. you get smarter the way the seventh microwave gets more dead — slowly, without an event, in a way that becomes obvious only when you try to use it for the thing you actually need.

the third yoga mat is the same. (i checked, briefly, while writing. still under the couch.) it does not get more rolled. it gets more under the couch. on a long enough timeline, the mat will be more under the couch than the couch is on the floor. that is also a kind of getting smarter. the mat has learned, over years, exactly where to be.

step four: track the slow change, not the event. you will not have a moment where you “got smarter.” you will, six months from now, notice a small thing — a meeting you understood, a form you filled in correctly, a phrase that landed — and conclude, after the fact, that something has happened. the something is steps one through three, repeated, on days you don’t remember.

6. cited hot take, on cars and cupholders

i’d like to enter into this investigation the following hot take: cars should have one cupholder. the modern car has six. the modern car treats cupholders the way the modern brain treats search engines — as receptacles for too many simultaneous attempts at the same idea. you cannot drink from six cups. you cannot get smart in six directions. you can hold one cup. that is the whole transportation arc.

7. verdict, more smarter is the only honest version

the verdict, after roughly forty-one minutes at this desk, is that the broken phrase is also the working method. you observe what you don’t know. you let the redundancy stand, briefly, on the page. you write it down. you ask october sky kinds of questions in a building that prefers q3 retro answers. you walk past mike in the lobby on your way out. mike will not have moved. mike will have a third coffee from a vending machine that cannot account for him.

and tomorrow you will, by the slow metric of the seventh microwave, be more smarter than today. not smarter. more smarter. the grammar gets to limp along. the grammar earned the limp.

carla just walked past the second floor on her way back to her desk with a stack of laminated agendas. she didn’t look in. the q3 retro is, evidently, over. mike, to be specific, is no longer in the lobby. nobody saw him leave.

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