Name: becoming smart is easy, actually
Uploaded: 2024-06-26T13:15:04.000Z
Duration: 7 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

In most of the world, you're told that it takes 12 years of school plus 4 years of college plus 6 years of graduate school to become smart, but what you actually become is homeless.

But on the bright side, when you make a Reddit post about how you can't get a job, you can do it in perfect English.

If you haven't guessed by the title, becoming smart is actually very easy, even if you think your genetics make you dumb.

If you compare yourself to every other animal, you're actually pretty overpowered.

When people like you and me say we want to get smarter, it means a bunch of things.

We want to learn useful skills, ideally skills that make money.

We want to be good at solving problems, hopefully for money.

We want to get better grades and learn difficult subjects to make more money, and also to flex on people.

And lastly, we want to sound smart in conversation, just enough so people respect you, but not too much to the point where people think you're a nerd.

The problem is, most advice on the internet is so vague and philosophical that even if it works, the only people who could actually follow it are Oprah and Socrates.

And if you instead look for specific advice that you can actually try right now, this is what you get.

Eat blueberries cause they're brain food.

These things sound good, but at some point you have to, you know, actually learn stuff.

Besides, even in the past, there have been some geniuses who've spent the whole day sitting at a desk, getting 2-4 hours of sleep a day.

So what can you actually do to get smarter that's not just the same 6 brain hacks from a Facebook post copied and pasted from a WikiHow article inspired by a quote spray-painted on a New York subway wall?

Fiction is good for learning to read faster, and it gives you better vocabulary.

Also, if you read a lot of dialogue, it makes you feel like you have friends.

But most people go straight for non-fiction, which indeed is the key to being able to casually drop interesting knowledge in conversations.

For example, just by reading this book, you can come off to anyone in conversation as someone who knows history.

Crazy how we evolved from chimpanzees, right?

Well actually, evolution is non-linear and several human-like species inhabited Earth simultaneously, none of which could even be remotely considered as chimpanzees.

While this is considered polite by the standards of a YouTube comment section, in real life, saying well actually before proving someone wrong will make you instantly unlikable.

Change the well to an easy, and now we're talking.

You know, I was reading the other day, and apparently, humans and chimpanzees- I always thought we evolved from them, but I guess we just evolved side by side.

You can be smart while also being humble, and also sounding like you touch grass.

The key is to teach people what you know, without making them sound dumb.

This way, people will actually learn from you, which will make them see you as smart and respectable.

You don't have to read the same five books everyone tells you to read.

Just think of a topic you want to learn about, like cleaning.

Usually, these books cost money, but if your finger slips, you might accidentally end up on this website, and you might accidentally search for the title of the book, and by chance, click on the first link, and oh no, accidentally download a file, and opened it with the appropriate ebook viewer.

Well, now that you have the book, you'll also find that not only can you pick out interesting tidbits to use in conversations, but you can also learn many useful skills.

There are 10 things you should know before you learn a skill. 1.

Unless you practice the skill, your brain will think it's useless and forget it. 2.

You only have to know 20% of the knowledge to master 80% of the skill.

It's a graph of how good you get at a skill over time.

As you can see, just by practicing a little bit, you can make a lot of progress in the beginning.

No one ever learned how to tie a tie by watching how to tie a tie.

You only learn how to tie a tie by watching how to tie a tie while tying a tie.

Books only make you smart if you give your brain a reason to remember the stuff in the book.

So once you read the chapter on cleaning a bedroom, go ahead and clean a bedroom.

Just clean one, and now you'll never forget it.

But let's just imagine that's something that you can't practice right now.

Like imagine you're reading a book about cars, and then you see this diagram of how to jumpstart a dead car with a good car.

Ideally, you'll read about it, and then go practice it.

But not everyone has two cars lying around to practice on.

But you can still practice it by just imagining.

Imagine the moment where you'll need to know how to jumpstart a car.

Put yourself in the situation, find a video, and pretend that's your car.

By imagining the whole process from start to finish, you just convinced your brain that you used all that information, and now you'll remember it.

Meanwhile, the person who just looked at the diagram and tried to memorize it still won't know what to do if they ever had to jumpstart a car.

And if you can't, imagine yourself in the moment where it'll be useful.

This is basically how the entire school system works.

You learn a piece of information, and because it'll be like 15 years before you actually use it, your teacher creates an imaginary situation where that information is useful.

An exam that has questions on that exact piece of information.

This is usually enough to make your brain at least attempt to remember the information.

The only problem is, once the test is over, your brain says it's not useful anymore, and you forget it.

Some people think repetition, or spaced repetition, or studying in intervals, or mind mapping will help them get better grades and learn faster.

But in reality, doing practice questions will give you the most results, because they simulate the actual situation in which you'll need to use what you learned.

If you don't have any practice questions, make your own, and convince yourself that the stakes are high.

Like, pretend that you're hanging off a cliff by one arm, and someone's there to pull you up, but only if you can name all the parts of a human cell.

Learning information, and making it seem useful to your brain, is all you need to get smart.

And this is why textbooks are the S-tier format for becoming smart as fast as possible.

There's no fluff, no hand-holding, no distractions, just pure information, and a bunch of practice questions, and if you can't solve them, you have to flip all the way to page XXXVVIII in the appendix to get help.

Textbooks aren't for the casual learner, because it's not as fun as watching a YouTube video on the topic, and forgetting it all an hour later.

But if you're ever up to the challenge, there is a website you might accidentally end up on, where you could accidentally download free textbooks on any subject you want.

 But before you do that, I'm collecting donations in the form of subscribes to fund the next video.