The 10 Dumbest Ways to Try to Get Smart

Cover Photo by Jack Hamilton on Unsplash

Don’t fall prey to them

Oh, the things I’ve tried in order to become smarter! I never considered myself smart, so I kept doing things that were meant to make me smarter but were actually making me dumber.

I read tons of articles about how to get smarter. I read books by so-called experts. I implemented some of the stuff, but I didn’t feel any smarter. When I compared myself to my genius friends, I still felt very average. I even paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend seminars that didn’t make me smarter. But hey, they did a great job of making me poorer!

Sounds familiar?

The truth is, some ways to get smarter just aren’t working. Or, they’re so contextual that to apply them for yourself, well, you have to change everything about your life. And that’s not so smart. Build on top of who you are, not on top of something you’re not and will never be. That’s what I call good advice.

Today, I came across this piece that promises you’ll get smarter using four smart ways you can do on autopilot. If I didn’t see that it was published by the great Niklas Göke, I would have dismissed the piece entirely.

Nik is one of the smartest people I know, so I gave it a read. It’s great stuff. But you know how many times I’ve read a nice headline like that, only to be disappointed?

Right, too many.

Anyway, his piece inspired me to write about bad ways to try to get smarter. Because, as you know, not every way is created equal!


Read books overly smart people read

I used to follow really smart people’s recommended books list. Think Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and (don’t judge me) Tai Lopez. I’d buy the books they told me to buy. I’d try to read them, and to be honest, feel really dumb when I didn’t understand them.

Look at Tai’s list:

Look at #2, #3, #6, #7, and #8. These books are just too smart for me. I have to build previous knowledge before any of this makes sense to me.

The problem is that we try to learn things that are too advanced for us. We waste valuable time trying to understand the content as opposed to getting the knowledge you can currently already assimilate.


Hang out with people who have too much advice to give

We all know people who are quick to give advice on any topic. In reality, it’s usually the quiet ones who have the best advice to give. Not only that, but the best advice you’ll ever get will rarely come from a fact someone tells you, but rather in the form of a great question that makes you think.

Don’t seek advice from people. Seek people who will make you think and find the answers for yourself.


Sign up for courses you never even start

With so many courses available online, it’s easy to just sign up for a few cheap ones and think they’ll change your life. No course will ever change your life unless you act on the lessons you learn. Courses by themselves are worthless.

I published a course a few months ago. 5 percent of students never started. Over 50 percent of students didn’t get beyond a quarter of the content. Only 13 percent of the students finished the course.

This is a very common problem. I once read that on average, only 7 percent of students who enroll in online courses finish them. That’s low!


Build a library of books you’ll never read

Oh man, I’m still guilty of that. I have tons of books from best-selling authors that are supposed to be excellent, yet I’ve never read them. Unread books don’t make me smarter, they make me poorer. Thankfully, books are pretty cheap.

Instead of buying books in bulk, I should probably consider reading summaries on fourminutebooks.com.


Spend thousands on education you’ll never use

This goes both for traditional education and continued education, like expensive seminars. I spent $10,000 on one of Tony Robbin’s business-related seminars and never actually acted on the things I’ve learned. It’s not his fault I didn’t follow through.

Likewise, I hear about some of my friends in the USA who spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a degree, yet they make a pitiful salary. They end up changing fields after a few years anyway.

Think very carefully about how you spend your money on education. A lot of it is free online and is better than what you’d pay for anyway. You pay for prestige and accountability, that’s about it.


Ask average friends for advice

“Oh, I know someone who writes on Medium, I should ask them for advice about how to succeed on there!” Ok, but have they really had any success?

I’m a big advocate for a good mentor, but they’re hard to find, so most of the time, we settle for the next best person we can find. That person is often quite average.

Always recognize who you should seek advice from.


Memorize facts you can lookup

Ugh… that’s school all over again! :)

The reason I didn’t do that well in school wasn’t that I wasn’t smart, it’s because I didn’t care for memorizing needless facts. I know people who can tell me all the different species of rats and all their properties. They’re electricians and lift drivers. That knowledge is 100 percent useless to them.

I guess it makes for fun dinner parties! :)


Watch documentaries about things you won’t ever act on

I love a good documentary, but there are only so many that are on a topic you’ll ever do anything about. I used to think that smart people watched documentaries, so I watched them to become like them.

Well, that didn’t quite work.


Do like your Instagram gods

I never got the obsession with Instagram influencers. They post the best version of themselves, it’s not reality. When you try to replicate the perfect life of an influencer, you are replicating an illusion. And when you see that you can’t do it, you get discouraged.

For the most part, famous people are no smarter than you are.


Sign up for every free webinar you can find

Ha! I used to do that so much. After I realized that all free webinars are about getting you to pay for a ridiculously expensive product at the end, I realized the aim is never to educate, it’s to make money.

And while some information is very good, I rarely trust the intentions of the person running them.

Again, free webinars don’t make you smarter, they make you poorer.


Everything you need to know

Don’t try these ways to get smarter, they’ll only waste your time and money:

  • Read books overly smart people read

  • Hang out with people who have too much advice to give

  • Sign up for courses you never even start

  • Build a library of books you’ll never read

  • Spend thousands on education you’ll never use

  • Ask average friends for advice

  • Memorize facts you can lookup

  • Watch documentaries about things you won’t ever act on

  • Do like your Instagram gods

  • Sign up for every free webinar you can find

With all that said, just have fun with your learning. No one needs to be as smart as Bill Gates or Elon Musk.

You are smart enough, my friend.