What Is The Endgame For Getting Smarter?
There’s a lot of media out there about getting smarter or being smart or the glory and advantages of intelligence. Things like ‘my brain after X amount of hours doing leetcode’ or ‘your brain after reading books’.
And?
So what?
Two important questions I seek to engage when it comes to exploding your brains all over the place. What is the goal for exercising your brain? The goal for exercising your body is simple, to get in shape, shape being whatever you define it as but within a window of shapeness most people would agree with. Also, exercise is for health, better blood circulation, sexiness, longevity, sports, life insurance, less injuries and on and on we go.
But exercising your brain? Getting smarter, learning more, making more connections, what is the goal here? It should be simple, but it’s not so simple.
The word smart itself means quick-witted. Speed is of the essence when it comes to who is smart or not. There’s a SmarterEveryDay Youtube channel with 11 million subscribers. It’s full of simple little science information, not a guide on how to actually get smarter. It should be InformationEveryDay. Information by itself does nothing.
Is there any benefit to getting smarter?
First off, you can and can’t get smarter. Your raw intellectual power is what it is. The way your brain is wired, your strengths and weaknesses, appear to be what they are and there’s little changing that. You can’t go back in time and change how you were raised and what love and nutrition you had access to.
You can get smarter if you figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are and play to your strengths. For myself, I discovered I am a visuospatial person. I’m naturally great at things like reading maps, configuring the dishes in my dishwasher to maximize space, packing a bag or car, stacking a pallet, remembering how to drive somewhere and learning by seeing others do something. I can rotate shapes in my mind and math and science come easy to me IF I learn them visually and see the big picture. I believe this is why I enjoy Richard Feynman’s physics textbook because he seemed to be a highly visual thinker.
For you, getting smarter can be as simple as learning what strengths you have. For reference, the strengths I’m referring to are as follows:
Visuospatial
Linguistic
Musical
Logical/Mathematical
Kinesthetic
Intrapersonal
Interpersonal
If you can figure out which are best strengths and weaknesses, you can at least utilize the intelligence you already possess and not waste time with things you have no talent with.
So let’s say you can now learn things 3x as effectively from before. Now you can play to your strengths and explode your grammar abilities, chess abilities, business ideas, communication tactics, writing style, reading style, math and science learning, cooking, exercise and so on. You reach your mental peak.
What is the endgame? You could die at any time, what then is the endgame? It’s the same endgame as being in shape.
You maximize your ability to experience life in the present.
That’s it. There’s no long-term gain or goal. To merely use your brain better day by day is its own reward. Who knows what will happen to future you, but if future you is spending time using his/her brain at capacity instead of doing nothing, that’s going to lead to something, even if it’s nothing more than increasing your intelligence by 1%. 1% improvements increase considerably over time. If you have are at 100% and increase by 1% daily within a month you’ll be at 130%
Of course there is no want to quantify actual increases in mental ability like that in a literal sense, but symbolically I hope you get the point: each day you’ll be experiencing at 130% of your previous 100%. Meaning, if you figure out how to use your linguistic strengths, any time you come across something that is stumping you, you attempt to learn how someone with a strong linguistic sense learns and then apply that same technique.
To give another example, I learned from a guy on Youtube with spatial abilities that when he learns another language he draws each word and it helps him remember it better. I noticed for myself when I used Duolingo I always did well when I saw a picture of something, like a restaurant, and had to translate, than if I saw the word and had to translate the word. One method felt absurdly easy and the other felt like my memory wasn’t working. Since there are no visual dictionaries, or visual grammar books, or visual this and that, I have to come up with my own and you may have to come up with your own.
There isn’t anything else to this, it’s either figure out your strengths and master your ability to use those strengths so you can maximize each day you need intelligence (should be every day) or you stay the same, possibly slowly decaying through misuse, abuse, or disuse.
