Digest: What Ten Things Should I Do Everyday To Become Smarter?

Brendon Lemon answered on Quora:

1. Write every day - Maybe it’s a journal, maybe it’s a blog, hell, maybe it’s answering Quora questions! The point is that writing forces you to articulate your thoughts, forecast the future, explain the past, and generally refine your ideas and values. Many, many intelligent people through history had a practice of writing every day, including Da Vinci.

2. Read things you disagree with - Read news articles that you don’t like and don’t agree with. Now figure out why. Put pressure on your values and ideas, challenge yourself.

3. Read philosophy - Don’t just read Buzzfeed articles, read some real and dense works of intellectual merit. Start with the classics of the western canon: Locke, Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, The Federalist Papers, and roll forward from there. Reading these works will give you greater context to the world you live in. It will also help you learn and understand what a mind working out and communicating heavy ideas looks like.

4. Exercise - Studies show that physical fitness is associated with higher intelligence. So spend some time each day exercising and getting your heart rate up, it’ll pay dividends in I.Q.

5. Eat right - Just like exercise, good diet is associate with higher I.Q. So much so that it actually alarmed the researchers.

6. Get good sleep - The jury might still be out on whether or not good sleep can increase I.Q., but it certainly is clear that sleep deprivation decreases normal I.Q. So keep your sleep schedule regular, and get that shuteye.

7. Learn a new language - You don’t need to study hardcore every day, but taking a few minutes to listen to a podcast in a foreign language or translating a news article from one language into another is a great way to exercise this muscle.

8. Engage in real discussion in real life - Not online, not on Facebook, not on Twitter. In real life. In your real, waking life, find people who are interested in the same topics you are and talk with them about them. Find out what you agree on and why, and what you disagree on and why. Let go of the idea of “being right” and instead focus on just exploring ideas.

9. Let go of being right - Is this something you can “do?” Yeah, you can. Remind yourself that becoming intelligent isn’t a zero sum game. Having intelligence means the ability to consider questions and problems from multiple perspectives, sometimes even realizing that some things have paradoxically true answers. Just explore.

10. Seek the next challenge - What’s one of the most consistent things about world-class high performers? It’s that they find their edge and then work to push it outward. Push your edge a little bit every day. If you get even .5% better daily you’ll be more than 150% more effective within a year.






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