how to know you are smart — 5 tests, 1 sauna

knowing you are smart is, supposedly, a feeling more than a fact. i had it once at twenty-two and have spent every year since chasing it back into the room. mom says it’ll come back eventually. dave says it never left him. dave still owes me three hundred dollars.

friday, 11:23am, second monitor showing a spreadsheet i have not touched since standup. the boss is in a sprint retro on the fourth floor that he scheduled, then re-scheduled, then forgot he had moved. i have, by the rhythm of his calendar, until lunch.

so the search bar handed me how to know you are smart at 11:23am on a friday, and the cursor blinked the way cursors do when the asker has nothing prepared. the question is not new. dave first asked it of a waiter in 2014, who panicked, refilled our waters, and never came back. nobody, in my circle of three, has settled it.

how to know you are smart: mostly you can’t, not from inside the brain doing the asking. the practical signs show up in small choices nobody is grading — pausing before a strong opinion, sitting with not-knowing, asking a clearer question than the argument deserved, and noticing when the answer stops mattering more than the asking.

SMART. IS. NOT. THE. SCORE. IT’S. THE. STOP.

i need that on the page before we move. people sure they are smart usually treat smart like a number — measured once in a school basement, framed in 2008, brought up over a third drink. the brain’s habit of only logging evidence that flatters it turns the question into a slot machine. you keep pulling. it keeps paying out the answer you wanted.

how to know you are smart, briefly

brief version: you stop checking. that is the post if you are skimming, and i respect the skim. the long version is me arguing with that sentence from five rooms, with two witnesses, neither qualified.

the catch i keep tripping over: the brain doing the checking is the same brain being checked. mine, on a wednesday morning, decides i’m a quietly clever man with a working microwave. by friday afternoon it has revised the verdict and decided i should not be operating cutlery without supervision. you keep filing both, because the only court available is the one inside your skull.

this is the same engine that runs the broader category of the everyday glitches in how the brain processes its own information. once you notice the engine, the question shifts. it stops being am i smart. it becomes am i grading honestly.

the sauna theory of clarity

the only room in my life with no screen, no notification, no algorithm at all, is the gym sauna. i bought the gym membership in 2021 with the intent of becoming someone who lifts weights. i became, instead, someone who sits in dry heat for fifteen minutes twice a week and tells himself, on the way out, that the heat counts as exercise. it does not. it does, however, produce thinking.

the sauna thinking is slower than desk thinking and more honest than both. the wooden bench creaks. an older man two seats down breathes loudly. the heat removes the layer of performance the brain wears at the desk. last week it told me, plainly, that the third yoga mat under my couch was not a piece of furniture but a small monument to a person i no longer am. i let the sentence sit. then the heat carried it off.

mike’s bar version of the same theory

mike, at the corner bar, runs a parallel theory and refuses to call it a theory. mike (who, by his own filing system, has not voluntarily met the tax authority since 2019) considers himself a fair judge of brains. his version of the sauna test is the third drink. mike believes the brain produces its truest sentence in the middle of the third beer — after the day’s defenses come down, before the night’s defenses come up.

i asked mike how to know you are smart. he thought about it for the length of a long pour. he said, “you stop trying to win the conversation. you start trying to understand it. it’s a different muscle. most guys never grow it.” mike said this without a single jargon word, which is more than i can usually manage at the desk.

then mike, mid-glass, cited a hot take by someone he refused to name. the person had argued that the spoon is a smaller bowl. redundant. mike disagreed, vigorously, on the grounds that the spoon also has a handle. i did not weigh in. the wisdom of not weighing in, mike said later, was either smart or cowardly, and the difference between the two was a question for some other friday. probably this one.

the notification that interrupted me

so i am at the desk, mid-paragraph, mid-sauna-theory, and the notification arrives. a push from a meditation app i signed up for during a 2 am revelation in 2023 and have not opened since the welcome screen. the push reads: “your mind is asking for two minutes. give it the time.” the app, which i pay $7.99 a month for the privilege of ignoring, is now coaching me on attention from inside the device that just broke mine.

i sat with it. then i swiped it away. then i opened the app, briefly, to see if i could cancel. the cancel button was three menus deep, behind a survey, behind a confirmation, behind a screen offering me two months free if i stayed. i did not cancel. the notification, in seventeen seconds, had won the round it had picked itself. the brain that can be interrupted by a push it pays for is not, on the public scoreboard, doing well.

the seventh microwave taught me something

the seventh microwave, on the counter, has outlasted three of its predecessors combined. the previous six failed for reasons less about the appliance and more about the operator. forks, mostly. one fork, specifically, fused to the turntable in 2022 in a way the manufacturer’s helpline described, after a long pause, as not consistent with normal use.

i learned, between the sixth and the seventh, the most useful thing i have ever learned about my own brain. the brain confidently believes, every time, that the fork incident was a one-off. the brain is wrong every time. the seventh microwave is alive only because i stopped trusting the brain on this single point. that small distrust has, by the appliance’s own evidence, produced a measurably smarter outcome. i’m not saying i’m right. but i’m not not saying it.

verdict — you know when you stop asking

for a longer-form portrait of a man whose certainty about his own brain collapses on contact with the world, see karl pilkington’s bewildered tour through countries he did not want to visit in an idiot abroad, which is, in my private theory, the best long-form documentation we have of how knowing-you-are-smart and being-smart are, often, two unrelated jobs. abroad is the test. the idiot is the carry-on.

the boss is back from the sprint retro, walking past my desk holding a printout, looking at it the way you look at a receipt you do not remember signing. i’ll close this tab and pretend the spreadsheet has been the active window since 9:30. it has not. the spreadsheet has been waiting, patiently.

↑