HOW TO BECOME CLEVER

I don't regard myself as something intellectually outstanding, but I'm striving to become the cleverest possible, it's one of my goals. It seems to me I could now define some factors allowing to become clever, at least cleverer than many around.

1. Interest to learning – pleasure from acquiring knowledge and an urge to acquiring it. Unfortunately, I have no idea, how to make it artificially, if it was absent. I have had it, presumably, from birth. Most likely, other children have the interest to learning none the less. The problem is that many schools discourage it badly, so that many children come to hate learning for the rest of life.

2. Have objectives, why you want to be clever. Apart from interest I have goals, for the sake of which I study – it is unlikely to achieve them without proper knowledge and skills.

3. Read interesting thoughtful books – not because they are required to be read in school or parents say to, but solely from your own interest. It is helpful to find a person, expert at the field, and ask him/her to recommend the best books, those written both cleverly and clear. This is much more efficient than getting through piles of rubbish on the subject yourself (in every subject there is much more trash than books of real value).

4. Ask questions. Find things to ask, and ask. First, ask others (parents, friends and acquaintances, who knows something, teachers and lecturers – each in his/her subject, etc.), then yourself. You acquire a good habit of questioning yourself, and trying to think up answers, and it makes a sign of active thinking, a feature of a strong mind.

5. Think. There is such an occupation – peeling potatoes, there is another – writing a letter, but this is one more: thinking. Special time is to be assigned for it. It requires a situation not to be disturbed (for instance, for thinking I like to lie in the warm bath or on the grass when the weather is fine and no people around), certainly, unless you have already trained to concentrate on your thoughts in any situation. More effective is not allowing your thoughts flow free, but thinking over purposefully with a goal to elaborate an opinion, find a solution and the like. You are trying not to permit your thoughts to wander aside, and whenever they do, you get them back to the topic.

6. Have solved a good lot of cute creative math problems. The benefit of studying mathematics is not only, and even is not so much in utilitarian applicability of math apparatus in everyday activities as development of logical and heuristic thinking. Solving interesting non-routine problems you acquire a habit to turn on your head, and then this acute approach remains toward all other questions along life.

7. Train up to keep attention highly concentrated. Various psychological methods and spiritual practices can be helpful in this; for example, concentration is the core of meditation. You may read some books about that, and take some training.

8. Think with a timer. Starting to think over an issue switch on a timer. It should be constantly before your eyes. This allows to control time, spent on passing a branch of thoughts and timely get back from off-topic thoughts to the main problem.

9. Think with an alarm-clock. If you have a device, which can play a sound every minute, set it up and think. Take this sound as a message "Get back to the topic". This is another tool for getting distracted less. As such a device you can use your PC with a sound card and a program of this sort. If you have Windows 98, you may download this file and place it into the system folder "Scheduled Tasks" (or I don't know, how it is named exactly in English Windows version). Turn on the Scheduler, and it will play for you every minute.

10. Think aloud. When you say aloud, what you are thinking over, your attention is less distracted from the topic, so your thinking is more efficient.

Certainly, if you are able not to be distracted without the last three techniques, you do not need them.

11. Seek company of those cleverer than yourself, with more developed personality, more competent. If we are young, most of such people are simply those elder. However, the farther we go developing, the less person's age can reflect his/her value as an interlocutor. We simply "outgrow" our surrounding, even elder in age, and then we have to pick "the best". Now a criterion may be professionalism in a field. For example, to enrich yourself in psychology, it is helpful to get a good psychologist your friend.

12. Change your image of a know-it-all sage, if you have it, for an image of an inquisitive child, ever ready to learn and listening with pleasure to people who can tell something new and interesting. When a person sees your genuine interest, hears interested questions and sees your sincere gratitude for "the lesson", it is pleasing and stimulates him/her to share everything one knows with you. And if you take the new information with some haughtiness (the most frequently it happens if the interlocutor in younger or is of a lower status), the person may lose the wish to communicate to you whatever new.

Also it should not be felt to be a humiliation to address for help to people, who, you know, may give a sensible advice. If a person is cleverer than you, or cleverer in a matter, acknowledge this easily, speak about this to him/her. (Although do not consider this unchangeable, try to take over the wisdom.) Removing arrogance within yourself in this sense makes quick return. Soon you will discover that objectively there is less and less people cleverer than you. With regret, because it becomes more hard to find a one to learn something new from, and gladly, because you are respected sincerely by many and you can teach something to somebody yourself.

13. Try to avoid companies, parties, and other crowds of entertaining people, as well as hollow talks. This is waste of time, better to be spent for developing your intelligence. Of course, we can admit such things, having another objective – to set a useful (not only in material sense) contacts, have a rest, after which we can work more productively, etc. But we should clearly realize that association with shallow people and having senseless talks not only devour time, but also have a negative impact on our intelligence. First, we lose mental tonus and acquire a habit to be more stupid than we could. Second, we expose ourselves to influence of the social environment to a greater extent. As this environment usually consists of people less intelligent, than we would like to become ourselves, this influence is for the most part negative.

14. Try not to depend on conventional opinions of your social environment: family, school, work surrounding, friends, social group, society, etc. Don't be afraid to have your own standpoint, let it be different from the common. But an opinion should not be different only to "show off". It may become "different" as a consequence of active and independent thinking.

15. Fast reading. Amount of knowledge disposable is a part of intelligence. This amount, in turn, depends on amount of information absorbed within life. Human beings have limited capacity to absorb information per a given time. A very appropriate method to increase it is dynamical reading allowing to rise reading speed 1,5-5 times (depending on the person, amount of training, and text difficulty).

16. Be clever throughout the life, not only in your job. There is a lot of people, who are excellent specialist, but who acts ignorantly in interpersonal relations, managing one's own physical and mental health, housekeeping, managing personal time and money, and in other questions each of us faces. Surely, there are people, whose time as specialists costs too much to spend it away for whatever else. But for most people it makes good sense to be "a bit" a specialist in everything we repeatedly face on the life path.

17. Understanding, why people act one way, not another, predicting their reactions, and ability to influence their behavior present a good part of life wisdom. Psychology provides invaluable assistance here; it's one of things, worth spending time studying for everyone.

18. Why? What for? Why this way, not another? What for just so, not otherwise? Can it be other way? Why can't it be otherwise? Why wouldn't we try it another way? These and the like questions assist to understand things in depth, realize causative relations. Creativity and improvement of everything around are impossible without them. They are to be made about everything you face. For some reasons it is accepted in society to ask them about some sorts of things and never about others. There are algorithms and rules, which people stick to every day, but there is a few who can clearly explain, why that's to be done this way. No algorithm to be executed in life, no structure we face should remain without having been thought through. These questions are to be asked about every action, every element, their places in the whole structure and relations among them.

19. Consequences of every decision usually include both positive and negative. The more factors one can take into account, the more realistic is his/her prognosis and more successful is realization of the decision into practice. Sillier approach (but very common, I know it even observing myself:) is to make a decision only from one-side directed arguments: pro or con. Wise one chooses something not simply because it has this, this and this positive sides, but because the sum of positive side outweighs the sum of the negative, i.e. the decision is made on the basis of "pluses" and "minuses" difference.

20. Don't clutter up your head. Pick from the available information flow (books, news, the Internet, contacts, etc.) the most interesting and/or useful for your personal goals. It is impossible to learn everything, the time is limited, so it is desirable to fill it with the best things.

21. Stay open to the new till the end of life. No matter, how long you did believe in, change your old views for the new and more trustworthy, true, deep, precise, useful, etc., once they appeared on horizon. Make all the best your own.

22. Better if a decision to become clever was made before 20, although it is never late to make.

23. Lauch your own business. Not a work for someone, let it be even a bigger salary at the moment, but your own busienss. Business is a school, that brings you life experience very efficiently. Business forces you to think systematically and intuitively, to take into account a complex of factors in everything, and constantly seek for optimal decisions.

24. Never become satisfied with the achieved level. Regard the permanent process of knowledge and skill rising all through the life as a norm, try to mine a pleasure from it.