Would you like to both appear, and actually be, smarter? There are many techniques out there that can help you to learn this or that easier, or improve your memory, but it’s not quite so common to find techniques that allow you to increase your general ability to acquire and apply knowledge across the board.
If you’re looking for such a way, or weren’t particularly looking, but you’re interested now that I caught your attention, continue reading this article. I have two such methods for you that both involve writing. Not only will they both help you to acquire, categorize, and interconnect knowledge, but because they involve writing, they will also improve your vocabulary (especially if you make that one of your goals while applying the techniques), which makes you sound (appear) smarter.
Alright, so let’s get started… here is the first way to make yourself smarter:
Write About A Random Topic
Our first technique is to pick, or even better, have someone else pick for you, a random topic and write at least a page about it. If you want to get the most out of this method, write three to five pages about the topic. Write it as if you were writing it for someone else to read, not just for yourself, and it’s even better if you do let someone else read it, as they can give you feedback to improve your writing. It can be whatever kind of writing you want… you can explain the topic, research it, introduce it, write fiction about it… whatever you want, they all work.
It doesn’t really matter whether you know anything about the topic or not. If you do know something about the topic, then writing will help you to refine your knowledge and make it more concrete and easy to call to your conscious mind. If you write about a topic that you don’t know much about, you will obviously have to learn something about it in order to write about it.
As you write more about things you know, you are practicing your skills of making information you already have usable and easy to recall. This makes it easier and easier to do this with any other topics as well… it’s a general skill that you learn, not just applicable to the specific topics that you write about.
When you write about things you don’t know you practice you skills involved in learning, categorizing, and applying new knowledge. Again, as above, this is a general skill which will improve your ability to do these three things with any new knowledge, not just a specific topic, and not even just when it comes to writing.
So, now on to the second way to make yourself smarter:
Connect Two Unrelated Topics
Our second technique is slightly more complicated, and really puts your mind to work. It works by picking two apparently unrelated topics, and finding a way to relate them. This can be anything… you can pick two random nouns from the dictionary, or as above, have someone else pick the two things for you. In fact, if you’re really feeling adventurous, and wanting to push the envelope on this method, you can use more than two topics… but don’t use too many, or the relations you draw between the topics lose their depth.
As above, this works best if you write it as if you were writing it for someone else, and actually allowing someone else to read it can result in feedback that improves your writing. It can also be any type of writing you want, but in this method you really need to write more than one page to get the full benefit. You can use up one page just introducing the two subjects, and you really want to give the connection between them some depth, as this is what makes this technique work.
This second technique teaches you how to see connections between two seemingly unrelated things. This is vital to pushing your intelligence to higher levels… being able to see the relationships between things where it’s not obvious is what separates the smart people from the average people. It helps you to see more and more patterns in the world around you, and recognizing these patterns quickly and usefully is what intelligence is all about. Everything in the world, the universe, is related… there is a pattern that contains any two subjects, and of course there is the pattern that IS the universe.
Your ability and skills in the area of recognizing patterns will be stretched farther (and thus grow more) as the topics you use are less related. That means that if your two topics are monkeys and bananas, you’re not stretching much, and won’t get much. If you relate bananas and an allen wrench, that might be a bit more of a stretch, and thus you gain more.
Again, fictional stories also work for training these skills, though you might not get the added benefit of learning more about the topics as you would if you did another form of writing.
Shared Benefits
There’s another useful thing that you can get out of using these techniques… if you have someone else who is reading your results, you are likely to be helping them improve their intelligence, as well. Their vocabulary should be expanding as yours does, and they, too, get to see connections between things they hadn’t previously recognized as being related. Their benefits will be smaller than yours, because you are having to find those connections, while they are having them shown to them, but they will still benefit.
Make Either Technique More Effective
There are a few things that can make both techniques more effective. One of these things is to have someone else suggest your topics. This keeps you from going easy on yourself when you’re feeling less motivated, and is likely to push you even more outside of your comfort zone. Another one is to have someone else, or several someone else’s, read your end product. At least one of these people is likely to be the one who suggested the topics, but it’s always good to include someone else, because they won’t have any preconceptions based on knowing before reading what the topics were.
Another thing that makes both techniques more effective is to do it with a partner and suggest topics to each other, with a set time to finish your writing. After that time, which should be as short as possible without causing undue stress on either of you, you should give each other what you wrote, read the other person’s writing, and then talk about it. This gives you added motivation to keep it up, added benefits from reading the other person’s writing, and can make it more fun, as your suggestions for topics can mean something to you, and even if they don’t before you write about them, they may have added meaning for both of you afterwards.
Summary
So… there you go. Want to be smarter, and make it apparent to other people as well? Practice one, or better yet both, of the techniques above. Make it work even better by finding a partner, or even a network (ie more than just you and one other person). Speaking of which, I’m interested in finding a partner or network for doing this myself… anyone interested?
