My least favorite compliment (to be on the receiving end of) is “smart.”

It happens occasionally that someone pays me that exact compliment. I don’t want to begrudge anyone that says something nice to me! If you’ve ever thought of me in such terms or voiced as much, please don’t think me ungrateful. It’s just that in my whole life, that’s never been anything but a hindrance.

Being smart as a kid is such a terrible curse, especially the way the average American school is set up. It completely kills your work ethic as a kid, because if you’re smart enough that the normal work is easy, all the adults in the room just pat you on the head and move on. You’re left with the impression that life will be easy just because you were genetically gifted with a few extra IQ points above the average. But life absolutely doesn’t care about that. At all.

I don’t think I’ve ever done the following with my own children, but I hear other adults do this all the time: they tell their kid that they’re smart as an accusation. In so many parent-child interactions, being smart is the precursor to an exasperated question about behavior or performance: “You’re so smart, why did you fail this history test?” Or maybe “You’re so smart, why did you get in that fight?”

Or even, “You’re so smart, why are you unhappy?”

I’ve dedicated a huge, huge part of my adult life to self-improvement. To shedding the bad habits I learned as a child, adolescent, and young man. More than half of the posts on The Opportunity Machine are dedicated to that theme, and in addition to my own thinking and philosophizing on the topic I’ve consumed seemingly endless books, articles, speeches, lessons from mentors, and other pieces of content on how to make the various aspects of your life better. How to improve your health, how to reach your professional goals, how to raise a strong family, how to improve your interpersonal relationships. How to be happier. I’ve read a lot of great advice and thrown out a lot of bad advice, and done my best to be wise about the distinction.

Absolutely zero percent of the good advice has ever been: “Be smarter.”

The keys to all of these things aren’t intelligence. You don’t need to be smart to be healthy, successful, happy. You need to be diligent. You need to be moral. You need to be kind.

I don’t know that being smart has ever helped someone become those things. I think it often makes you think that intelligence can replace work ethic, thus killing your diligence. I think it gives you the tools to rationalize and justify bad behavior, thus killing your morality. And I think it can breed pride and contempt, thus killing your kindness.

The great answers to the questions of life aren’t undiscovered – they’re just obscured. You don’t have to be smart to find them, you just have to dig through a lot of noise that the modern world throws your way. You don’t have to be especially smart.

Shift your personal Overton Window in the direction of self-improvement. Don’t let it slip in the direction of self-harm.

Let’s say that you find the concept of killing other people and taking all of their stuff to be personally abhorrent. You would never do such a thing, never consider anything close to it, in fact. But because you’re intellectually curious about the mindset of people that advocate for such wicked behavior as a way of life, you read their manifestos. Blog posts and articles from the pro-murder-and-theft crowd. YouTube videos. You’re not looking for instructions! You’re just interested in what makes such minds tick.

So you read them… a lot. And you remain critical, and absolutely none of them convince you that murdering someone and taking all of their stuff is something you’d like to do.

But then one day, you come across an essay written by a more “moderate” member of that crowd, and it suggests that murdering and looting is extremely bad, but just beating someone up who deserved it and taking a portion of their stuff to compensate for whatever they did is acceptable, or even encouraged.

“Ah ha,” you proclaim. “Finally someone reasonable.”

But of course that’s not reasonable at all. It’s just that you’ve spent so long reading (and rejecting!) extreme claims that a less-extreme claim seems reasonable by comparison. You let your personal Overton Window shift without realizing it, even as you were firmly grounded against the extreme stance.

That’s why critical absorption of material is necessary but not sufficient. You also need context. You need broader moral philosophy, opposing claims on the other end of whatever spectrum you’re exploring, and a wider view of the influences on your influences.

Truth isn’t democratic, of course. Everyone in the world can believe that two plus two is five, and that doesn’t make it so. But you aren’t guaranteed to be the arbiter of truth, either, and the wisdom of crowds is a thing. Even if your only reason for exploring an extreme that you reject is to satisfy your intellectual curiosity (and by the way, let me say here that I think it’s very good to do that), you should be careful about who’s staring into who, you or the Abyss.

Of course, you can use this to your advantage!

When I first started trying to work out and get healthy, I read a lot of blogs, watched a lot of videos, etc. on exercise routines and mental habits to get into, etc. As is often the case, the most prominent examples were the most extreme body-transformation things advocating for wild, Gerard-Butler-in-300 level engagement. I soundly rejected all of those as being unrealistic, firmly in my position that real exercise was a scam for only people who didn’t have jobs or kids, etc.

Then one day I caught a video of a “ten-minute upper body workout” and thought “ah ha, finally something reasonable.”

The reality is that I was lazy and unmotivated. If I had found that video, I’d have made some excuse about how even that was too hard. But because I was now comparing it to all of these other much more extreme versions, it became reasonable in comparison. And so I did it, and then that ten-minute routine grew and now I’m in much better health and shape than back then.

So even if you don’t ever plan to do P90x, maybe it’s worth it to watch videos just to push some other workout just a little closer into your reach. Or maybe it’s okay to admire very wealthy people even if you don’t think you’ll attain that much wealth, because maybe it will make some other goal feel more attainable to you.

This is similar to the concept of The River, only with sources of information instead of people. If you only ever absorb information that tells you that you can only expect outcomes similar or worse to what you’re already getting, you’ll believe it. The Overton Window of your belief in yourself will shift downward. Look to the sky instead. Look for the giants whose shoulders you can stand on – or at least reach, where before you might have believed you could only reach the ankles.

When someone makes a mistake, it can be hard for an outside observer to know if it’s a tactical mistake or a philosophical mistake. The reactions to either should be very different, so this is important to know!

Not that this applies strictly to parenting, but I’ll use a parenting example: my oldest daughter sometimes leaves dishes in her room. I don’t want this to happen, obviously. But is it a tactical mistake or a philosophical one?

If it were a philosophical mistake, that would mean that she didn’t understand the reasons why it was important to make sure her dishes made it to the kitchen. That she didn’t understand the importance of it, or the consequences of not doing it. Assuming that she’s otherwise a responsible and prudent young lady (which she definitely is), then the only reason she would be making this mistake is that she isn’t aware that it’s a mistake. Clear communication that emphasizes the above points is the solution.

A tactical mistake, on the other hand, means that she understands perfectly well the why behind the “no leaving dishes in your room” rule, and just is having trouble executing on it. That could be for a ton of reasons, none of which are relating to understanding why the rule is important or the severity of the consequences.

We often fall into the mental trap of believing that people only make mistakes regarding things they consider unimportant. So if someone forgets your birthday, it could only be because they don’t truly care about you – or so the misguided voice in our head tells us. But the reality is that people are just fallible and sometimes make errors that don’t reflect their overall investment in the sphere in which the mistake was made.

It’s natural, when I find a dish in my daughter’s room, to want to sit her down and explain to her for the umpteenth time why the dishes need to get back to the kitchen, how I won’t let her take food out of the kitchen anymore if she can’t comply with the rule, etc. But that’s treating a tactical problem like a philosophical one. She already knows this stuff, and she isn’t forgetting because she doesn’t agree with it. She’s just nine, and sometimes forgetful.

Treating it like the tactical problem it is meant putting a little note on the inside of her door that says “DISH!” so she remembers to grab them on her way out.

I’ll leave you with another absolutely classic example of treating a tactical problem like a philosophical one:

There is absolutely no such thing.

Every skill is specialized, all knowledge is acquired, and there is no such thing as “common sense.” If you want to be really, really frustrated your entire life, ignore that statement.

Everyone is good at something. What a lot of people are not good at, is knowing what that something is. Not because it’s some hidden talent they never use! It might be something they do twenty times a day, flawlessly. That’s not why they don’t realize they’re good at it.

They don’t realize, because they think everyone is good at it. That it’s just a sort of general competency that comes with being alive.

There is absolutely no such thing.

If you’re good at something, I guarantee you that lots and lots and lots of people will be bad at it. This knowledge can help you in two tremendous ways:

1. You can stop being frustrated when other people aren’t good at it. You get frustrated because you think that person is the exception, but they’re not. They’re the general rule – you’re the exception.
2. You can realize that this gives you an amazing opportunity to be a value-add in other people’s lives, by either doing that thing for them or showing them how to do it.

Day after day, I see people that generalize from the self and make this assumption, and watch them get frustrated as a result. Watching that used to frustrate me – but it didn’t take me long to realize exactly what I was doing. Now, I take my own advice.

And I write this blog post for you!

Once upon a time there was a really, really good digger. Nobody could dig like this person – they were like the John Henry of digging holes. They would just dig and dig and dig.

And so they were in a pretty deep hole. And they looked around and said, “I don’t really want to be in this hole, to be honest.”

So the digger called up a friend and said that they didn’t want to be down there any more. And the friend offered what felt like pretty obvious advice: “Okay, then stop digging and start climbing.”

But the digger replied: “But I’m really really good at digging. I’m not very good at climbing, in fact I’ve barely done it before.”

The friend said: “Well, sure you’re really good at digging. You’re the best! But you don’t want to be in a hole. You can’t dig your way out. So you have to decide which is more important: doing a thing you’re really good at, and everyone praises you for, and is comfortable to you, and that you’ve built habits around…

“Or not being in a hole.”

My middle child is (as of this writing) four years old. Her younger brother turned two last year. When he turned two, I proclaimed him “not a baby anymore,” and my middle kid started crying. Why? Because she knows him as her “baby brother,” and she thought that if he wasn’t a baby anymore, then he wouldn’t be her brother, either.

Silly and adorable! Fortunately, it proved easy to explain to her, but it made me think about all the other associations that even adults make. We experience two things together for a long time, maybe even only knowing those two things in association. And we combine them so much in our minds that we can’t separate them.

For a lot of people, two of those things are “income” and “misery.” Most people’s first jobs aren’t exactly great. (Mine was, but that’s a different story.) And a lot of people take the wrong lesson from that first job – that earning money always has to come at the expense of doing something miserable. Something you’d never in a million years do otherwise.

I was chatting with a friend recently, and the subject of winning the lottery came up in idle conversation. You know, the sort of “what would you do if…” kind of talk. It made me give an assessment of my life, which I’m pretty happy with. I said, “I don’t think I would change much – I wouldn’t move out of this area, I might get a newer car, I think mostly I just wouldn’t work.”

He pushed back, and told me he thought I’d go crazy if I didn’t work. He’s right; I might enjoy a week or two off but I need productivity or I start climbing the walls. So I said as much, and described the kind of work I’d do if money wasn’t an object. He laughed, and I asked why.

He said, “you’re just describing your current job. What’s different in those scenarios?”

And I couldn’t think of anything. Which is pretty nice! By and large, I already have the life I’d have if I were independently wealthy. I’m sure I could think of a few things to spend millions of dollars on, but they’d all be additive, not “fixing” anything wrong with my life.

I think the path to that kind of life is just embrace the fact that it’s a process, and love the process for itself. If I have to walk many miles to a place I want to be, I don’t hate the distance – I love each step that brings me closer. It’s more important to make sure you’re not taking steps in the wrong direction than it is to stress over how many correct steps it will take.

(P.S. If my bosses read this: I can’t afford to work for free yet! Please keep paying me!)

It’s easier to outrun something than to catch up to it. You’re faster when you’re in the lead.

Unless you blow your advantage, you’ll tend to stay winning if you start winning. But that means a few things.

It means taking the risks you need to. If you’re losing, take every risk – you might win, but if the risk doesn’t pay off, you’re already losing anyway. If you’re winning, be more careful; you won’t need every risky move, but the cost of failure is high.

It means knowing how to maintain. You can’t win a marathon by sprinting, so if your early lead is due to a burst of energy that you can’t maintain, you need to strategize how to survive in the long term.

It means knowing how to evaluate whether you’re winning or losing. It isn’t always obvious.

Get in the lead and stay there.

This is definitely true for me, and it may be true for many others: I have a hard time learning directly from a true master of something.

My father is an incredibly skilled drummer. He’s an incredible musician in general, but even among all his talents, the drums might be his most impressive. There isn’t a Gene Krupa solo he can’t duplicate, and he’s done more than a few that D.J. Fontana would have a hard time with. And at 7 years old, I tried to learn from him.

It was nearly impossible. There was simply too large a gap in the knowledge between us. I saw his skill as an impossible mountain. And he was so into his craft that whenever we’d play together, he’d go wildly off of the “basics” and into things that were amazing – and intimidating.

I would have been better off with either a very intermediate teacher, or no teacher at all.

I think when you’re first learning something, the best place to be is in an unsupervised sandbox. Someplace where you can’t do any real damage but you can mess around with the building blocks of whatever skill you want to learn. Someone being great at something doesn’t mean they’re a great teacher of that thing – so don’t make the mistake of seeking out “the best of the best” to learn from right away. Most of what they know is useless to you in the beginning anyway, and you don’t need experts to learn from.

And not for nothing, but people learn more when they’re in a good mental state, and many people are nervous as heck when they know they’re being scrutinized by an expert in what they’re trying to do. No one likes to feel judged, even if that’s not what’s really happening. You can (and should!) work on not feeling intimidated in those scenarios, but that’s a lifelong process and you shouldn’t let it get in the way of freely learning right now.

Learn like no one’s watching!