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Ass-Kicking Email – The 1 habit to make yourself smarter

Hey,

The key to making yourself smarter–mental training.

That is, if you actively engage your mind on difficult mental
problems, you’ll get better at thinking across a wide range of
issues.

Companies like Nintento capitalized on this fact when they released
their game Brain Training, a game directed at adults who wanted to
keep their minds sharp.

However, I disagree with the form that most “mental training”
programs are taught in. They tend to be repetitive logic or math
problems, which may test your brain, but only in a narrow
calculating way.

In fact, most academic problems suffer from the same flaw. Instead
of asking difficult, creative problems–they ask you to solve
formulas and perform tedious calculations.

The problem isn’t that mental training doesn’t work–it’s that most
activities suggested for mental training are boring.

—

There is another way you can train yourself to become smarter
without relying on mental math drills–problem invention.

With problem invention, you don’t follow drills, instead you look
around the real world and pose yourself questions that:

1. You don’t know the immediate answer to
2. Feel solvable on a gut level (that is, you feel someone,
somewhere probably has the answer)

Once you find this problem, you spend 15 minutes or so working on
a possible solution. The key isn’t to find a solution, but to
start chewing away at it. Some questions you pose will turn out
to be too difficult, that’s okay. What matters is that you turn
your expectations around.

Here are a few example problems I can pull from the top of my head:

1. Trees look like fractals. What would be the simplest shape I
could draw that would look like a tree if applied recursively?

2. How far away is the horizon?

3. How could I get a computer program to check if a maze was
solvable?

Those are just examples from math/logic/computers, you could easily
change the situation to set yourself a particular challenge to
practice a different mental skill such as:

1. Translating a theme song into another language

2. Figuring out which motions I could no longer make if I were
missing a particular muscle

The point is to create an interesting mental problem that you can
do without research or tools that you can think about when you’re
bored, waiting in lines or otherwise unoccupied.

If you set yourself these kinds of mental tasks, you’ll find when
you’re faced with them in real situations (or tests) you’ll do much
better.