How To Be a smart
In this article: Significantly deepen your intellect Look smarter Related Articles References
Would you like to be smarter? Would you like others to believe that you are intelligent? The latter is easier to achieve than the former, but whether you sincerely want to increase your brainpower or just want to reap the benefits of having a more intellectual image, there are some concrete steps that can get you there.
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Deepen your intellect significantly
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Dedicate yourself to being a lifelong learner. It used to be thought that intelligence was something fixed and that it could not be improved with effort. However, contemporary studies suggest that this may not be entirely true. While an unintelligent person can never become a genius, it is increasingly thought that everyone has the ability to strengthen their intellect to some degree.[1] However, the process is not as simple as learning a few new vocabulary words. It takes time and effort to learn to engage more deeply and critically with the world around you.
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Follow what you are passionate about. A person learns more effectively when they have a passion for a subject.[2] If you are passionate about a certain topic, you will be more likely to want to understand it more. It is this type of sustained and focused research that leads to increased intellect. True intelligence implies a deep mastery of a few subjects, rather than a shallow knowledge of a wide range of them.[3] Was Albert Einstein equally gifted in physics, anthropology, linguistics, geology, animal behavior, and literary criticism? Of course not. To be a person who knows a little about everything is to be a person who has no command of anything in particular. If you want to try to learn a little of everything, you may end up understanding a lot of nothing.
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challenge yourself. If something doesn't seem difficult to you, then you won't try. Learning should not be torture. It should be satisfying, and it may not require much effort. Push yourself for new ideas and enter intellectual territory unknown to you.[4]
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Analyze how you think. This is called "metacognition," and it's something the smart ones excel at. Metacognition allows one to understand how one learns and apply those strategies from one context to another. If you find that you learn much better when you study alone, for example, you'll know better than to join a study group to prepare for a final exam.[5]
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Take care of your body. Some sometimes forget that the brain is a physical organ like any other. Just as your skin is healthier if you shower and your lungs are healthier if you don't smoke, a physically cared-for brain functions at a higher level than a neglected one. You might be surprised at how much better a person processes information if they get enough sleep and exercise, and eat fruits and vegetables.[6]
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Learn a language. This will force your brain to negotiate new ways of constructing meaning, and increase your conscious and intuitive understanding of linguistic systems. Thinking more about languages also has the added benefit of improving ease with the mother tongue, and learning new vocabulary will help improve memory.[7]
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Learn to play a musical instrument. This exercises part of the brain that is used for many types of cognitive processes and introduces you to new ways of receiving and communicating information. It also helps improve memory, reduces stress, which can be a major factor that inhibits intellectual growth.[8]
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Read the news. While staying on top of current events won't exactly increase your brainpower, a truly intelligent and curious person is inclined to want to engage with the world they live in. Having new ideas is often the result of developing existing ideas, so it's always good to understand as much as possible about the problems the world is facing and the ways they are trying to solve them. Remember: all news sources have some kind of bias, so make sure you read news from a variety of sources, and never accept anything as absolute truth just because it's in the newspaper.
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It depends less on technology. The ease with which we can now obtain information makes our lives much more practical, but it can also make us dumber. For example, the neural pathways for reading maps probably
