How To Be Smarter

Tips and tricks to make you smarter, or at least appear that way.

Unfortunately, you’re an idiot. The good news is that while it’s not a completely reversible condition, it can be helped, and you have taken the first step to recovery in your admission of dumbness – reluctant or not – and in seeking out the advice of the HA Guy.

(Unless of course a friend sent you this article, in which case you’ve either been unaware that you’re an idiot, or that your friend is an asshole. Either way, you’ve just learned something. You’re welcome.)

The path to being smarter is actually quite simple and clear. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to follow due to distractions such as peer pressure, the opposite sex or genetics. Being smart is not about having an enormous vocabulary or the ability to complete complex math problems in your head. It’s really about avoiding saying and doing dumb things. If you can manage that, then your intellectual failings are known only to you, causing you to be perceived as “smart” by others.

This is where my highly researched 7 step program begins. Read the steps below, and apply them to your every day life.

Step 1

Think of the things you can remember saying or doing that elicited (bring about) the following reactions from your peers (people standing around you):

snickering
eye rolling
all out laughing at you (when you weren’t trying to be funny)
immmediately walking away with horrified looks
staring at you as though they are about to puke and / or punch you in the face

Write them down.
Stop doing those things.

Step 2

Ease up on the four letter words rhyming with duck, lamb and shit. Cursing frequently (a lot) turns people off and generally gives them the impression that you have to fill your conversations with profanity in order to compensate for a small vocabulary. Check out www.improvevocabulary.net and then hit the scrabble table with grandma. Just don’t tell her she f-ing sucks when she kicks your ass.

Step 3

Stop watching Fox News, it leads to blindly repeating things you hear on Fox News. Think for yourself when it comes to news and politics. If you can’t stop your Fox addiction, mix in a little CNN (considered liberal by right wing conservatives due to the fact that more than one side of each story is presented) and MSNBC. It’s impossible to have a well informed, smart opinion on an issue unless you understand both sides of the argument and can decide for yourself which one makes the most sense. Plus, Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. So if any of you consider him a friend, I suggest putting on your asshole pants and sending him this article. Chances are you won’t find him reading it on his own.

Step 4

Start reading magazines that include articles, generally referred to as grown up magazines. If you keep being asked to locate a tall, slender, mildly creepy guy in a crowd of people, you are not in the grown up magazine section.

For starters, check out the Week. It’s cheap, and it keeps you well abreast (aware – of your surroundings, not breasts) of current issues: www.theweek.com

Step 5

Start reading more books. The good news here is that there’s a ton of books written specifically for you. Most bookstores carry them and they are very easy to find as they come with bright yellow covers, large format text and titles ending with the words “for dummies”.

Step 6

Do some traveling. The ability to speak upon some personal experiences you’ve had while traveling around the country / world will help you seem more educated. However, please be aware that if all of your stories begin with “I was so wasted,” or “As I was leaving the strip club,” or “I had just lost my pants, again,” you will be unsuccessful in your attempts to convince others of your intelligence.

Step 7

Write a blog telling other people how to be smarter. If you’ve gone to the trouble of posting your thoughts on the internet, people will automatically grant you a great deal of credibility. If you tell them how to be smarter than they currently are, they’ll automatically think that YOU are smarter than they currently are.

Now get out there, read, travel, check out multiple news sources and don’t forget to send this article to a friend. Because, as detailed in step 7, telling people you think they are dumb is the first step in being smarter.

The HA Guy