Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2025

How to be Smart

I am a smart person.  I'm writing this to tell you tricks that I've figured out how to be a smart person. Note that smart and successful are orthogonal concepts.  Being smart makes it much easier for you to be successful, but there is a lot more to success than smartness- there's work ethic, willingness to take (smart) risks, interpersonal skills, and a lot of luck (opportunity, circumstances, and so forth).  Being smart makes it easier to reduce the luck factor. What is smart? Smart partly is intelligence, whatever that is.  And I have a lot of that, but that is a gift from God, or genetics and environment if you don't believe, so I didn't earn that, and I can't improve that.  Yes, I know that you can practice and actually improve your performance on IQ tests, but I don't think that really makes you smarter in any way that really counts. Smart is also an approach to life.  That's mainly what I'm going to talk about. --- I started thinking of this p...