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.
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I started thinking of this post when I read a recent article "Read to Forget", on Hacker News. It's very short and I highly recommend it. HN discussion here.
This is one of my tricks. Memorizing stuff is laborious and time-consuming, and although I've read and tried to practice the memory training techniques that "mega-memory" people use (memory palaces, spaced repetition, encoding, etc.) - they still are a lot of work and ultimately I find that:
1. Knowing that information exists, and where to find it, and how it fits in with what you already know, is much more important than memorizing everything you need to know in today's careers.
I'm not proposing the stupid idea that "I don't need to know anything, I can Google it". That doesn't make you smart, it makes you a monkey that can press keys on a keyboard. There is no unique value to a person whose only marketable skill is typing words into search boxes or AI prompts.
I am specifically calling out that you must first learn of the information, and what it is - you must read it and understand it. You must remember that this information exists, and you must spend some time thinking about how it fits in with what you already know (more on this later). You can Google for it later, maybe, but stuff disappears off the web all the time, and querying for a very specific article 10 years later is often hard if you don't remember the exact title or author, so if you think you might ever need to come back to something, then I suggest downloading it or using a bookmark manager.
In researching this post, I also found this article, which has been removed from Medium (use a bookmark manager!) but shares a similar sentiment.
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I have been blessed in my professional life to work with people that are as smart or smarter than me. I listen to them and watch what they do and try to figure out what I can learn from them to improve myself.
I used to work at Amazon with a very unique person who was incredibly smart - he was the kind of person who was usually the smartest person in any room, and we were often in rooms with lots of really smart people. I heard several people describe him as "scary smart". He was so smart that it was intimidating to most people, and I think he cultivated that a little bit.
It was amazing and occasionally frustrating to work with him because you could almost never surprise him. You'd have what you thought was a brilliant idea and discuss it with him and he'd immediately start pointing out edge cases and things you probably needed to consider to flesh out the idea. Not criticism, but he seemed to be able to instantaneously analyze anything that hit him cold. But the crazy thing was that he would dive right to the heart of the issue in question, and deliver a pithy one-liner that cleverly summed it up, maybe in a metaphor or maybe just as a funny way of restating the problem. Then one day it hit me that he had refined one of my tricks, but raised it to an art form:
2. Think a lot, pick apart problems, anticipate the questions that need to be asked about your ideas, but most importantly, pre-compute your answers and keep them at the ready.
I work in high tech. One of the ways that we make software fast is that when there is information that we use a lot, we keep it very near at hand to where it's needed. Stuff that isn't used very often, frequently gets moved to places that are cheaper to store it, but slower. We call this "caching". The insight here is that you can do it, too. He raised it to an art form by not only having thought of a lot of ideas before, and picked them apart, and figured out the problems at the core, but also used his wit and sense of humor to turn all that into a one-liner. Amazing dude.
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A lot of people aren't honest with themselves, or just never consider whether they are telling themselves what they want to hear/believe, rather than what actually is.
Most people act surprised when someone critiques their work. I'm not talking about someone who is just putting you down, but I'm talking about someone who gives you the precious gift of telling you that you could have done better, or that your idea isn't really that great, and precisely what was sub-optimal about your work. They are not trying to tear you down; they are helping you.
In school, the teacher didn't give you a mediocre grade because they didn't like you, they gave you a mediocre grade when you deserved it because your work could have been better. But the really good teachers also gave you the special gift of writing down short notes about what was missing or below expectations about your work.
I love this kind of feedback. It's hard to hear sometimes, because we often get our egos wrapped up in what we produce, but if you can, you should try to set your ego aside and listen carefully because if someone is telling you that in good faith, then you have an opportunity to learn how to improve yourself and your work!
The trick is to:
3. Be open enough to accept critical feedback about your work or ideas, and force yourself to look at it as a gift, not a punishment or torment. Set aside your ego for a moment and think about what the person said, try to step outside yourself and look at your work through their eyes.
This is very hard to do, and I don't see a lot of people that do this. But the most extraordinary people I've ever worked with all shared this trait. I used to work with a guy at Microsoft, who was crazy smart - the kind of smart like winning math contests and awards, and being respected as a peer by the big name thought leaders in the field. This guy was very confident, so confident that at first you thought his confidence was just ego. But it wasn't. I rarely was able to poke holes in his ideas, but we could be having a passionate arg discussion, and if I was truly right and remained calm enough to explain myself, the whole conversation would turn on a dime - I'd make my point, and then he would stop, think for a moment, and then be like "yes, you're right". The first time it happened I realized that I had invested my ego in the discussion, but he hadn't. We were both passionate about getting to the truth, but he didn't feel the need to be right, he just had the confidence of almost always being so. When confronted with evidence to the contrary, he just accepted it and incorporated it into his work and everything was fine. There just wasn't any ego there.
4. Self-reflect honestly
I think about my behavior, the things I said, the ideas I have, and I always assume that I might be wrong. I attack my own ideas like a debater might attack their opponent's ideas - I know that if my idea is actually good that it will withstand everything I can throw at it. And if it can't, then ideas are free, and I can go make another one. If I said something that I wish I could have said differently, then I try to learn from it, and if I caused harm, I go back and apologize and try to fix it and make amends.
My entire value is not wrapped up in any single idea or opinion I have, or any single conversation, meeting, paper or other work product. If I did something and it sucked or was mediocre, then I am honest with myself about it and try to pick apart where I went wrong so that I can avoid making the same mistake again.
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I debated with myself about whether to throw this one in here, because it's controversial. However I think it's controversial more because of how I phrase it than what I mean:
5. Laziness is the mother of invention
Many years ago my ex-wife (wife at the time) gave her son (my stepson) a chore to do in the yard, that involved a lot of manual labor. He didn't want to do it and ended up getting in trouble because it took him way longer than it should have and the results required his mom to go back and finish up parts of the task. He ended up getting yelled at.
I pulled him aside and gave him this advice: "Many of us are lazy and don't want to do jobs that suck. But occasionally you're going to have to do jobs that suck. But you can make the job suck a lot less (and appear a lot less lazy because you'll be less reluctant to start) if you spend 30 seconds thinking about the job first, and figure out two things: (1) what is the outcome that I need to hit to make the person who assigned me the job, not be unhappy with me, and (2) are there any ways that I can reduce the amount of time or effort I have to put into the job, while still achieving the outcome.
I shortened this to "It's ok to be lazy, but be creatively lazy, and use your smarts to figure out how to achieve your outcome while minimizing effort".
The actual task he had to do was something related to moving rocks or something, and my suggestion to him was that instead of carrying the heavy rocks one at a time, he could think, look in the garage, and realize that we had a wheelbarrow that could help.
Over time, I've shortened it even more to my catch phrase "laziness is the mother of invention", mainly because it's a humorous twist on an old aphorism.
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Anyway, that's enough for today's bit of wisdom; I hope it helps you or at least entertained you for a few minutes.