god, I just want to get smarter

notes on rewilding my brain

There’s a whole spectrum of “smartness” out there, and a thousand definitions of it. Book-smart, street-smart, style-smart, creative-smart, smartass-smart, and so on. But if I were to really break it down, here’s what smartness means to me at a meta level: the ability to acquire, compress and apply information in a way that maximises your future freedom of action in a complex environment.

I feel like this is a little controversial, especially because we live in a world that more or less measures smartness by “getting the right answer”. But allow me to explain myself.

We’re bombarded with a million sightless bits of data every single day. It sits on our radar like dust on our clothes, and inevitably you end up inhaling some of it. But you cannot remember it all. A smart person, on the other hand, is curious and open-minded in reception, but simultaneously selective about what they choose to acquire. And then they compress that information. Not memorise, compress. They find the underlying rules, strip away the details to see the bones, and recognise when seemingly disparate concepts share the same functional pattern.

This takes me back to the evergreen concept of chefs versus cooks. A cook takes a recipe they’ve been exposed to and dutifully follows it to create a great, if predictable, dish. A chef breaks it down to its absolute first principles. And from there, they puzzle out plausible pathways that could lead to a shit dish or a trailblazing one, but was entirely born from their unique reasoning process. And because they have the compressed principle, they can cook anything, even if they don’t have the exact ingredients listed in the recipe. They can adapt.

There’s also a third part to the definition that I think is important: the reality of a complex environment. If the world were static (like a factory assembly line), you wouldn’t need to be smart; you would just need to be obedient. Smartness is only necessary because the world changes.

But, really, both of these elements are downstream of the core objective of becoming smarter: maximising your future freedom of action.

The Human Condition, 1933 by Rene Magritte

Every time you use the information in your head to make a decision, you change your circumstances. Some decisions constrict your circumstances, leaving you with only one or two things you can do next. Other decisions throw the gates wide open to a variety of choices you can make thereafter. So smartness means being able to consistently identify and select the decisions that keep your list of available future actions as long as possible. It is the strategic avoidance of dead ends.

I’m choosing to define it like this because I think we tend to confuse being well-read with being smart. And of course, that’s one facet of it. Being well-read and well-educated is like having this massive hard drive of facts, narratives, histories and the like. Smartness is the processing layer that lets you select from and use information in that hard drive to process reality, often in split seconds.

When people ask you, “how did you come up with that so quickly?”, this is what’s happening. Smartness emerges from what you do with what you’re well-read about.

Care about being good at things

I think caring about being good at something, at the quality of being good, matters. For one, it allows you to expose yourself to the outer and inner mechanics of that thing. The indifferent person glazes over details, allowing their mental models to remain low-resolution. The person who cares about being good is open to 10x more data, because they become naturally curious about what makes something good (and not in the moral sense).

Unfortunately or fortunately, caring is a prerequisite for becoming smarter. If I’m not forever thirsting to crack open the world around me, it’s—in my opinion—almost impossible to gather the data I need to become smarter.

The flip side of this: I also have to be okay with being bad at things. If I don’t care about being good at something, a mistake becomes just an annoyance. I ignore it, blame someone else, or move on. But when I do care, it’s a rather painful signal that I’m lacking information, or that my internal model of something is wrong. It forces me to debug my thinking, learn more, apply knowledge in different ways.

This, put simply, is how you get good. Smartness is often the byproduct of your struggle for quality.

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I wrote about the need to care more in:

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Set a long-form inquiry, not a goal

The way I see it, a goal filters information out. It’s pretty easy to imagine: is this going to help me reach my goal? No? Discard. In doing so, I’ll probably end up losing information that was otherwise valuable, and confining myself to that hyperspecialisation. To borrow James Carse’s framework, a goal is a finite game, and you play simply to achieve that goal. Once you do, you feel lost, or immediately find a new goal to attach yourself to.

Instead, setting an inquiry lets information in. You chase a broad understanding rather than a narrow script, but are still defined by a few guardrails that help you not drown in a sea of information. This is a game played for the purpose of continuing the play, i.e. getting smarter. Since an inquiry technically has no end state, you can keep acquiring and assessing information that expands your knowledge of that topic.

The way I like to frame an inquiry is to pick a question so expansive I could spend months circling it (and that’s the point).

For example, “why do some civilisations collapse suddenly, and some over time?” is one that’s been rattling around in my brain for some time now. The great thing about an inquiry like this is that I don’t feel restricted to one domain or medium. I could glean information about it from a non-fiction book, a podcast, a fantasy novel, even a conversation with an economist friend. I could approach it from any angle: economics, sociology, linguistics, history, anthropology and the likes. In doing so, I’ve learnt far more about each of these domains than I would have, had I set myself a goal to, say, “finish a history textbook about ancient civilisations”.

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I wrote about how to ask questions that yield more questions, here:

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Interrogate your curiosity bottlenecks

In systems theory, the output of a system is always limited by its tightest bottleneck. I find that that’s the case with getting smarter, too.

Take it from me: as an academic overachiever, I realised super early in life that there’s a lot of societal weight appended to being smart. As whatever I was studying got harder and deeper, I’d find myself shrinking from asking questions, reluctant to show that I knew much less than I projected. I would steer conversations back to the safe, narrow islands of knowledge where I felt secure. Every interaction felt like some sort of insidious test I had to pass to be certified Still Smart. It was exhausting.

In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious what was going on. My intellectual growth was throttled to near zero because the input channel—admitting ignorance, asking questions—was welded shut by my own fear of looking less than. Overcoming this took a whole lot of interrogation that I won’t go into here, but I essentially taught myself to see feeling ‘stupid’ about something as a sensation of new information entering my consciousness for the first time. And that’s a good thing, right?

So I find it really helpful to ask myself: what keeps me from going deeper? It might not be that you’re not intelligent. It might also not be that you’re distracted. In my experience, it could be shame (“I should already know this”), fear of irrelevance (“this isn’t monetisable”), or fragmentation (“I have no scaffolding”). Figuring out what the real blocker is, and fixing that, unlocks nerd-flow.

Sometimes our sense of identity gets in the way. As a creative, I’ve often thought I’d be terrible at math or science (despite this being canonically not true during school). But a lot of this is just narrative, stories all the way down. It limits your freedom of action to a much smaller fraction of reality. So if you’re thinking “I’m not the kind of person who…”, the follow up question is: why not?

Turn off the mental autocorrect

My iPhone has been doing this annoying thing where it auto-completes my sentences to someone based on a sentence I’ve previously used that started with the same sequence of words. I think our brains tend to do that a lot, too. It’s called epistemic closure: you hear a concept and your brain auto-completes it using a heuristic you might have learnt maybe 5, 10 years ago. This prevents me from being blindsided from changes in the environment. But in this case, that’s exactly what I want to feel.

Interruptions are a distraction from learning, and autocorrect is an interruption. It forces me to think or say things that are not novel to me. It presumes based on previous knowledge and thoughts, and leads to the illusion of depth. And while this rehashing and regurgitating is temptingly easy (hence why our brains default to it), to probe at the cliffs edges of my knowledge, I need to turn off the tendency to gloss over gaps with stuff I already apparently know.

Construct knowledge as you go

There’s a psychological trap called the Collector’s Fallacy: the feeling that “to know about a thing is the same as knowing the thing”. I think many of us fall right into the trap of collecting knowledge, guided into its murky depths by Sirens like exquisitely designed note-taking systems and journals. What we really want to be doing, on the other hand, is constructing knowledge.

It’s an inherently human thing. When you construct knowledge, you think deeply about the meaning of the information—not the information itself—and how it relates to what you already know. There’s the slight “pain” of synthesising a complex idea that signals to your brain that, hey, this looks like it’s actually worth keeping and recalling. Those “Explain it to me like I’m 5” work so incredibly well for a reason: learning isn’t about how many times you look at the information; it’s about how many times you force yourself to build it from scratch. From this essay by Andrew Harker on using your mind the right way:

If you’ve ever completed a commonplace notebook, Obsidian file, or Notion dashboard, yet still have found yourself constantly needing to reference information that you wish you knew (or working harder to understand the best use of the strategy than simply using it), you’ve experienced the core of the modern issue: creating repositories of information do little to help you know information, because the most important skill necessary—thinking—is something that is up to the learner, not the strategy.

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I think what I’m trying to say, overall, is that smartness can move from being a badge of honour to a stance towards reality. On an individual level, we don’t know how much more our brain can do until we actively engage with it. I find that realm of possibility deliciously exciting.