What is Intelligence?

When it comes to this topic, a lot of people like brining up IQ and other fancy metrics of meassuring one’s ability to solve problems and adapt to new enviroments. But really, when people talk about wanting to become smart, that’s not what they mean.

Becoming Smart

What most people actually mean by this is that they want to be able to sound interesting, to be able to sound like they are well educated but not too nerdy at the same time. There’s a few ways to achieve this, so let’s talk about those!

1. The School System

You could spend 20 years going through the school system and getting yourself a degree. If you manage to pay attention during every class for hours a day for more than 20 years, you might be able to bring some of your learned knowledge up in conversation! If you found yourself re-reading that sentence and thought “What a waste of time!”, you’d be correct! In today’s world, a PHD certainly doesnt guarantee you landing a job anymore. And it for sure wont make you seem more interesting either.

2. The 80/20 Rule

Also called the “Pareto Principle”, this rule suggests that by putting in 20% of possible effort into learning a skill, may that be software engineering or gardening, will reward you with 80% of all the possible knowledge and expertise you could have aquired. Sounds like a damn good deal, and it is. So lets use it!

3. Reading

Reading is a shockingly effective way of gaining knowledge - IF you are able to keep it. Most people read a book and forget most character’s names a few seconds after closing it. In order to be able to pick-up and remember all the valuable knowledge you’ve gained, you gotta use it. There’s 2 Ways of doing this:

1. Use it

Quite self-explanatory, go use your knowledge! If you learned how to correctly play a specific opening in chess, then go and play it!

2. Pretend to use it

Some things you sadly can’t always do. If you learned how to fix a borken tire, I wouldn’t exactly reccomend poking a hole into one of your tires for the sake of practicing how to fix one. In these cases, simply imagine that you are using the skill or peice of knowledge that you just learned and you’ll be able to achieve quite similar, if not equal results.

Combining the 80/20 Principle & Reading

Now, this is quite simple. Pick a skill, may that be playing chess or software engineering, then search for books about the topic. For the next few days, try to consume as much knowledge about this skill as possible. Whenever you gained knowledge, use it or pretend to be using it and try to remember it.

Note: To simply be able to bring things up in conversations, you don’t necesarily need to focus on a “skill” either, you can inform yourself about quite literally anything and pretend to be in a situation where you need to apply whatever you learned.

If all done correctly, you should be able to learn about at least 2 interesting topics per month. Thats 24 new areas of “expertise” per year, not bad.

Inspired by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5OJJD3Eytk&t=4s