How To Get Smarter

Am I the only one who's noticed that all those apps, supplements, and magic elixirs for getting smarter don't actually work? In this video, I'm going to give you 8 habits that do work. 8 dead simple, science-endorsed techniques that will sharpen your mind the moment you finish this video. Each one is rooted in peer-reviewed research and ends with a specific action you can try today. So let's get started. Strategy number 1, teach it to learn it. The Feynman Technique. Richard Feynman was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. He was responsible for breakthrough after breakthrough in some of the most complicated science in the world. For his efforts, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. More important for our purposes, though, he was an incredible explainer, and you can learn from him. Feynman kept a plain notebook labeled Notebook of Things I Don't Know. His rule was simple: if he couldn't explain something to someone else in simple language, he didn't really understand it. Modern research backs him up. In one study, students who taught a lesson scored significantly higher on comprehension tests than students who merely studied Teaching others forces you to process the information more thoroughly, which strengthens learning and leads to deeper understanding. So, here's our first action step. Pick one concept you learned this week, whether it's the causes of the Peloponnesian War or how to change the oil on your Subaru, then find a friend and take 5 minutes to teach them. Do they get it? If not, try again. Hone, hone, hone until they understand, because that means you understand too. Too shy to teach a friend? Explain it to your dog, your mirror, or record a voice memo. Voice memo. Seriously, it works. Number 2, quiz yourself because retrieval beats review. When we study for a test or prepare for a meeting or presentation, most of us devote lots and lots of time to reading and rereading our notes. It feels like progress, right? But just because a topic seems familiar doesn't mean you understand it because there's a better way. When researchers began studying this phenomenon 17 years ago, they discovered that students who tested themselves retained roughly 50% more material a week later than peers who just reread the material. And multiple studies since confirmed this finding. Quizzing yourself works because retrieval yanks information out of memory, strengthening the neural pathway the same way that lifting weights strengthens muscles. When your brain works a little harder, it works a little better, and the learning sticks. So the action step this week, take one article you've read, something a little long, a little complicated, upload it to your favorite AI system— Claude, ChatGPT, whatever— then ask it to read the article and quiz you. Here's a prompt that I use. This is a long article I recently read, and I want you to test my understanding of it. Please read the article, then ask me 5 to 10 open-ended questions about its key ideas and concepts. After I answer each question, evaluate my response and explain what I got right or wrong. Continue with the questions until it's clear I've mastered the material. You're teaching others, you're testing yourself. Now let's get moving. Number 3, take a walk because movement sparks creativity. Becoming smarter isn't only about understanding and remembering other people's ideas. It's also about creating fresh ideas of your own. And here, getting up from your desk and taking a walk can make a world of difference. For instance, Stanford researchers showed that people who took a 5 to 16 minute walk boosted creative output by up to 60% versus sitting. Walkers generated more ideas and better ideas than sitters, because with walking, blood flow increases, dopamine rises, and the brain's default mode network connects previously distant thoughts. I've been a walker all my life, but until I started looking at the research, I wasn't sure why. Now I know. As one writer said, walking is really thinking at 3 miles per hour. So now I swear by it. And so can you with this set of action steps. The next time you're stuck on a problem, leave your desk or your workplace and go for a 20-minute walk. You'll probably figure it out, and even if you don't, you'll get 20 minutes of modest exercise. Or if you feel stuck in a rut, try this twist, which I use all the time. Go for a walk, but on the walk, pick a color and consciously look for things on your walk that are that color. Forget about everything else. Just look for orange or purple or blue. You'll see your surroundings and your world with fresh eyes. Which will invigorate your brain. Number 4, change the font because difficulties are desirable. Here's a weird one, but I use it a lot, both when I'm trying to understand a topic and when I'm trying to write something important. I change the font to make your notes and words harder, not easier to read. In a 2010 study, researchers at Princeton gave students material in a funky, slightly illegible font. Think like Comic Sans Italic or something hideous like that. Students who wrestled with the ugly type retained about 14% more than those reading pristine Arial. A little disfluency in the text led to greater fluency over the concepts. The mild friction forced deeper processing, what psychologists call a desirable difficulty. Now here's your action step. Next time you're reviewing your notes for a meeting, convert the text to an unusual font and notice the extra mental grip you get. Or do what I do when I'm editing my own writing. I take a font I usually use— I'm team Garamond, folks— And swap it for something hideous like Impact or Lucinda Blackletter. I guarantee you'll find ways to fix the writing that you missed before. We're halfway home. Let's go to number 5. You've heard this one before, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. So please, in the name of all that is holy, stop multitasking and devote yourself to monotasking. You've heard that multitasking is bad, but the numbers are brutal and the findings widespread. For instance, in one Stanford MRI study, Heavy media multitaskers had diminished activity in the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. What did that mean? It meant they couldn't focus and their working memory fell through the floor. Switching tasks is like slapping a tax on your brain, costing up to 40% of productive time. So here's a tiny action. Put your phone in a different room, silence your notifications, close every tab, try one 25-minute focus sprint. Work on one thing and only one thing. When the timer dings, take a 5-minute break, then do it again. This might sound familiar. It's a version of the Pomodoro Technique, which has helped me write my books. Don't believe me? In one book, in the acknowledgments, one of the people I thanked was Francesco Cirillo, the Pomodoro's inventor. Number 6: Build another brain by keeping a commonplace book. Generations of thinkers— Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf— have kept what's called a commonplace book, a notebook, a diary, a single vault where they compiled great quotations, interesting facts, surprising definitions, anything that sparks their brain. They do it to lock in big ideas in powerful language and to make connections they might not have seen otherwise. Modern science shows why the habit works. For instance, some research has found that with note-taking, the pen is mightier than the keyboard. In one study, students who wrote notes by hand outperformed laptop typists on exam questions a week later. But the benefits stretch way beyond handwriting itself. Collecting and revisiting scattered material in one place turns isolated facts into an interconnected web of insights. I've been doing this for years. Here's my commonplace book for the 5 years between 2019 and 2023. Each day I wrote down one compelling quotation or startling fact or surprising definition, or even a funny joke. That was a useful exercise in and of itself, but here, as with many things, consistency pays off. 365 days times 5 years, that's more than 1,800 entries, an amazing compendium of ideas and information. And now I'm partway through my second 5-year line-a-day book. So here's your action step: find a notebook, then keep a commonplace book for 30 days. Each day, capture one quotation, insight, or question, and scribble it in your notebook. Then each Sunday, read through the last 7 days of entries and see what connections you discover. At the end of the 30 days, look at all you've captured. You won't want to stop. Let's go to our 7th tip for boosting your brain and getting a little smarter. It's going to sound a little odd, so stick with me. Chew gum. Seriously. Mastication leads to concentration. I know this from both the research and my own lived experience and habit. First, the research. One study from Cardiff University gave half the participants a stick of gum and half nothing at all. Then they asked both groups to memorize a bunch of words. The gum chewers beat the non-chewers by 10%. Another study from St. Lawrence University showed the same thing. When they randomly assigned one group to chew gum, and the other group to do nothing, the gum chewers outperformed the non-chewers on a whole battery of cognitive tests. What's going on? There's something about chewing that bumps up heart rate, increases blood flow to the frontal temporal regions of the brain, and boosts vigilance. That's why before every speech or presentation, I think through what I'm going to say while chewing gum. So, Try this action step. To get a quick mental boost prior to a big test or an important meeting, grab a stick of sugar-free gum. In the 10 minutes before the encounter, chew the gum and think through your plan. Then, right before the test or meeting, toss the gum away. Your brain will thank you. We've done 7. Let's go to the 8th and final science-backed way to get a little smarter. Admit you could be wrong. Practice intellectual humility. Humility. Ever meet someone so sure they're right that they never learn anything new? Don't be that person. Be the opposite of that person. Seek out opposing views. Relish the surprise of discovering you're mistaken. Be a scout who explores ideas, not a soldier who defends them. And whenever you believe something deeply, ask yourself, where might I be wrong? Recognizing what you don't know is a hallmark of both intelligence and wisdom. In one 2025 study, university students who scored the highest on intellectual humility, who were most likely to admit what they didn't know, crushed other students on critical reasoning puzzles, spotting fallacies, and finding the right answers to problems. Another study found that the best predictor of whether people learned and persisted on difficult material was intellectual humility. So here's your small action. Keep a mistake log. Once a week, jot down one belief, prediction, or decision you later discovered was off base, and note what new information changed your view. Reviewing that short list trains your brain to ask, what if I'm missing something? A question that quietly makes you smarter every time you pose it and helps you make fewer mistakes in the future. Those are the 8 lessons. Teach it, test it, walk it out. Ugly font it, monotask it, commonplace it, chew on it, and I don't know it. So here's your 7-day challenge. Pick one technique right now, not later, not tomorrow, but before you close this video. Write it in the comments and then try it for exactly one week. After one week, come back and reply to your comment with the results. I read every single comment and reply to the best ones because here's what I've learned after years of studying studying this stuff. The people who actually get smarter aren't the ones who know the most techniques. They're the ones who consistently use just a few really, really well. And if this video helped you, here's how you can help me. Hit that like button, subscribe if you haven't already, and share this with someone who's looking to level up their thinking.