How to Be Smarter than Everyone Else

this is a Rubik's Cube some people believe that the more intelligent you are the quicker you're going to be able to solve something like this well what if I was to tell you that while I speak to you about what's in this episode I was going to solve this without even looking at it would you believe me well over the course of this particular episode of changing Minds I'm going to walk you through not only the history of intelligence and what intelligence really means and what it measures but also specific strategies that you can learn

about how you can start to become smarter how you can use your brain better and be even more effective so you can become smarter than everyone else and if you bet against me at the start you would have been correct I'm terrible at these useless it's nothing to do with intelligence though I swear welcome to another episode of The Changing Minds podcast I'm on Fitzpatrick and today we are not going to be talking about Rubik's Cubes that's for sure but what we will be talking about is intelligence and in this particular episode what I want

to do is I want to break down for you exactly what we mean when we talk about intelligence and give you specific strategies that you can use to become smarter than everybody else now I know that's a bit of a click baity type title I will ask for forgiveness because look it's not going to be that you're smarter than everybody else but my aim is for you to be smarter than you already are if that works so I still think it's worth it now when I say smarter than you already are I'm assuming you're smart

you know why because you're tuning into this podcast and the fact that you're watching or listening to this podcast right now is evidence that you're one of the smartest people out there there's a lot of dummies a lot of stupid people out there that aren't listening to this podcast right now but you are which puts you in the category of really really intelligent people and I'm going to do my best to offer you strategies that you can use to become even smarter than you already are and we'll do so by first of all looking at

intelligence as a term some of the other terms that we often associate with it like being wise or being clever or being smart we'll then look at some of the factors that are correlated with intelligence what are the kind of advantages that you have if you are smarter than the average bear then we're going to be looking at the Neuroscience of intelligence what are the kinds of things that happen to our brains when we become smarter and we will dive into the history of intelligence oh I'm telling you I can't wait for this we're going

to be looking back to what people used to think intelligence was and we're going to be going all the way through from ancient times right the way through to the present day figuring out how did you measure intelligence all to serve the most important part of the entire episode which is through a number of different strategies that you can use immediately practically on a regular consistent basis to become smarter than you already are so let's start by looking at well what is intelligence and intelligence can be seen as a a cognitive ability to do a

number of things it's the ability to learn from experience the ability to be able to adapt to new situations the ability to be able to conceptualize abstract Concepts to use knowledge to manipulate your environment to use reason effectively to remember things and to be able to use that information in an effective way solve problems effectively or make great decisions all of those are examples of the kinds of skills that really make intelligence now when you hear the term knowledgeable or well informed that really means that you've got a lot of information or knowledge and then

wise is your ability to apply that knowledge in a way that gets you the results that you want it's sort of like something that comes with experience when we talk about clever we're really talking about a form of intelligence that is really connected to your ability to understand things that are complex and when we talk about smart we're really talking about the ability that you have to make great decisions finally when we look at what a genius means what a genius means is really someone who is stands out for their creative or intellectual excellence in

some way they're outstanding in that way it's like why was the Scarecrow awarded a very important uh award because they were outstanding in their field it's an old one but a good one so as we go through and we look at these different definitions the next question we need to ask is so so what right why should we even bother trying to become smarter you might think to yourself well Owen why should I become more intelligent what's the point in listening to this episode and learning these great ideas that you have to share that will

help me to be smarter well let me tell you this first of all although the research does suggest that what we call IQ 50 to 80% at least tends to be genetic that's still means there's between 20 and 50% of your intelligence you can work at you can develop and you can make better and so I really encourage you to be focusing on it and the reasons are because first of all the more intelligent you are the more likly you are to do better in education I mean that's the obvious one the more likely you

are to do better economically so you're more likely to make more money over the course of your life you're more likely to be healthier over the course of your life as well and live longer as a result of being more intelligent so there's a whole host of different advantages that you will tend to have the smarter that you are now we have to be aware that there are circumstantial factors that are involved you can be born into circumstances and indeed you are born into circumstances that will determine how clever you are likely to become because

once again the circumstances that surround you will very much impact how your intellectual capacities are developed over the period of your childhood and that kind of thing so C circumstances do indeed matter and it's also important to realize that being smart does have its downside as well for example people who are extremely smart tend to be overthinkers I mean I overthink a lot I re I'm like a total overthinker I'm constantly thinking too much right and I suppose yeah that might make me extremely smart okay thank you another thing is that you're more likely to

be a perfectionist if you are a very very intelligent but being a perfectionist has its negative sides as well it can be very stressful and you can constantly feel not good enough because you're not holding yourself up to the same standards as you want to be holding yourself up to also one of the factors that we do know about being intelligent is that sometimes it can make us feel more isolated and I can certainly relate to that and I think it's because when you're so intelligent it's hard for you to relate to other people for

example uh the other day I had asked my friends if they wanted to go out and they said no we we got to brush her hair and I said but I'll pay for everyone and they said no we'd still prefer to to stay at home and I said well I could come over and they said no we'd prefer if you didn't and that's probably because they're so intimidated by my intelligence so they're like oh if own comes over it's going to be too stimulating and so we have to deal with that kind of isolation and

it's tough but it's it's again a bit of evidence that suggests that I'm super smart and then finally there's also the tendency to introspect the tendency to go inside your mind and think a little bit different to overthinking introspection is really getting too Lo lost inside your own thoughts but on a more serious note unfortunately a lot of the times people who are struggling with things like depression or anxiety do tend to be extremely smart and it's because they have a depth to emotion or a depth to feeling that some sometimes can lead them in

the wrong direction they're thinking so much that they're actually creating sort of catastrophes or in their own mind and struggling with their own mental health as a result so it is something to be cautious of that being smart is not the the be all and end all and sometimes the smarter you are the more you think yourself into a hole so it's important to not just become smarter but become smarter about how you're smart see what I did there you need to be smarter at being smart so not just smart for the sake of it

but Smart in a New Direction a direction that allows you to solve the kinds of problems you need to as opposed to being too internally philosophical or whatnot let's get into the Neuroscience the brain science of intelligence so with the brain one of the interesting findings about the the study of the brain when it comes to intelligence is that the more intelligent a person is the more they found more what we call Gray matter now the brain typically has lots of what we call white matter and gray matter and gray matter is actually crucial for

processing in the brain mental processing of different things in three parts of the brain it has been shown that there's definitely a correlation between those parts operating quite efficiently and effectively and our intelligence they're the frontal lobe the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe temporal lobe is more to do with our memories the prial lobe is more to do our spatial reasoning and that kind of thing and the frontal lobe is of course the the seat of what we call the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for a lot of the decisions we make a lot

of the problems that we Sol solve all that sort of gist and we finally have what we call the brain efficiency hypothesis and this is really the idea that the smarter you are the faster your brain works and the more efficiently your brain works so you use a lot less energy in order to be able to get the kind of results that someone who wouldn't be as smart as you would be able to use now the reason I bring up the Neuroscience is because I want you to understand that a lot of the work that

we'll be talking about later is really about boosting what we call your neuroplasticity this means brain's ability to learn and make new connections and as you do that you're making your brain more efficient as you do that you're activating your frontal temporal and prial cortexes more effectively and as you do that you're increasing the amount of gray matter in your brain and that's really what we're looking for but before we get into the actual this is what you need to do let's talk history shall we I know what you're thinking you're thinking to yourself oh

my goodness Owen out of everything that I've ever wanted to listen to I want to hear you tell me about the history of intelligence well I got good news for you that's what we're doing right now and we will start with the wonderful Plato Plato had this notion he talked about the three parts of the soul and whatnot and he always claimed that the rational part of the Soul was the best he called the ultimate type of leader the ones that he said should only be learn leading Society what he called philosopher Kings and these

are people that are super smart Aristotle his student came along afterwards and Aristotle said yo yo Plato hey chill bro he I'm pretty sure he didn't talk like that but if he was talking like that that's probably what he would say and he said listen bro you need to understand that intelligence is much more about what you see in the outside you take from the world and what you do is you extract observations general principles from What You observe he talked about two types of wisdom what he call theoretical wisdom and also practical wisdom and

theoretical wisdom is your ability to understand things but practical wisdom is your ability to be more as he would call it virtuous right being good making good ethical responsible moral decisions and then a few years later in fact couple of uh Millennia later we had the Renaissance of course and that was people like Leonardo da Vinci the polyat The Legend he's like does everything well he's one of those kinds of people that you look him up on Instagram and he's like oh look at what I just painted and then he's like oh I just invented

the plane the only thing he didn't invent was time travel so Da Vinci showing off on his Instagram feed would be something that just wouldn't come across very very well in today's world I'm sure but it was another example of this notion that there's lots of different ways in which you can be intelligent when we then got to the enlightenment you have dudes like John luck who talked about what he called we're all born with a tableau rasa or tabula rasa which is a blank slate he said you're born and you got like an empty

brain right and I know people that 20 years years after they were born 30 years 40 years they still got empty brains if you know what I'm saying but uh he talked about the the two the to Bill I'm not going to mention that anymore I'm just going to call it the blank slate and he said we're all born with a blank slate and this Blank Slate takes on information from the GetGo so as soon as we're born our brains like downloading information and so it's really important to ensure that you've got the right surroundings

and if you've got a child make sure you surround them with all the good stuff so that they're learning if you then look at some of the other thinkers like voler or you look at dero they also talked about the importance of making sure that you share wisdom you try to create more and more intelligent people because they saw it as a great way of combating problems of the time like tyranny we don't have any problems with tyranny at the moment oh no don't mention the don't mention it don't mention it um and uh Superstition

as well so they felt that us spreading the word spreading the wisdom spreading the intelligence was a great way of being able to do that then we get into the late 19th and early 20th century and this is when we start to go okay we need to measure this right it's well and good but think about it in before the 19th century people could just go around and go hey by the way super smart and and you couldn't argue with them you could go no I don't think you are yeah super smart why because we

didn't measure it but all of a sudden this guy called Francis skeleton came along and he goes hey let's measure it he's actually the same person responsible for surveys and questionnaires if you've ever failed out a survey or questionnaire this dude is responsible don't worry he's dead he died like a long time ago but still he's the person responsible for the surveys and questionnaires and actually a lot of great information has come from those surveys and questionnaires Galton was great he decided using statistics he would figure out what's the average sort of mental age that

kind of thing he had some issues he thought that you could actually measure intelligence and it was correlated with certain physic the size of parts of your Anatomy for example I think probably it was like the size of your head determines how smart you are or something when I was in school people used to tease me cuz I had quite a big head for the size of my body and uh hurt at the time but looking back maybe Galton was on to something I mean the science doesn't back it up I mean the science suggests

that it's not correlated at all but you know I had a big head people said it maybe you just thrown it out I'm just asking questions I'm not making any statements I'm just asking questions so you never know I mean we do know but you know you never know then after galon we had a guy called Alfred B and Alfred B was commissioned by the French government to try to figure out how could you identify students that needed special education and he joined up with a guy called Theodore Simon and together they created a sort

of intelligence test in 1905 which was called the B Simon intelligence test and it really emphasized that it wasn't a case of how much knowledge you have it's more a case of your ability to solve problems your ability to have a good memory your ability to pay attention to things and so that became a really really good and very popular form of measuring intelligence and just a few years after that a guy called Lewis Turman came along and said we can do better boys we can do better and rejigged it into what was then called

the Stanford be intelligence scales now that immediately makes me think to myself what did Simon think of all of this right you have your name on an intelligence test with your buddy BNA everything's good and then this other third party comes along and calls it the Stanford BNA intelligence test how can you compete with a university I would be pissed if I was sent poor guy but um anyway this Stanford BNA intelligence test was the first time we learned about this concept called IQ intelligence codent and IQ is basically your mental age over your chronological

age multiplied by 100 and it became the standardized way of measuring intelligence they also started to do longitudinal studies where they'd study a person over their lifetime which is why we know now more about uh being intelligent tends to be correlated with better educational results and more money over your lifetime and health and all that sort of jazz David wesler was the final person that sort of came along with a sort of a measure of intelligence and what was known as the wesler adult intelligence scale and this became quite popular because it didn't just look

at non-verbal reasoning it also looked at verbal reasoning as well but that brings us to the fact that intelligence there's a lot of arguments over this notion of IQ because let's face it I'm sure you know a lot of people I certainly do that are very intelligent like very high IQ not the brightest candles on the cake right they're kind of dumb right and they're smart but they're D you know what I'm talking about you know what I mean right they they'll do really well on exams and tests but they've got no what we call

an Ireland cop on or no Street smarts whatsoever so with that in mind how do you identify the difference between them and guy called Howard Gardner came along he wasn't a gardener right it's just his name but Howard Gardner came along and he wrote a book called frames of Mind in the ' 80s in 1983 or so and uh he said look there's eight types of of intelligence and the first one is what he call linguistic intelligence and this is really your ability to articulate yourself using like lots of wonderful words and language then there's

the logical mathematical type of intelligence which is I suppose a little bit closer to yq you also have music intelligence how good you are with picking up an instrument and all that you got bodily intelligence this is something I'm terrible at I'm very clumsy but bodily intelligence your ability to to move and your ability to dance and stuff would be part of supposed bodily and music to a degree spatial intelligence is what Architects are really really great and known for interpersonal intelligence which is really about your ability to be intelligent with other people one of

the parts of of emotional intelligence read you've got intrapersonal intelligence intrapersonal intelligence which is more about your intelligence about yourself and your own self-awareness and your ability to regulate your own emotions and finally a new one he added an eight one which was a sort of a naturalistic type intelligence your intelligence about the natural world and another guy called Sternberg Robert Sternberg came along as well and talked about three types of intelligence where he said there's analytical right very similar to IQ there's creative your ability to solve problems and then there's practical right which is

more the street smarts so I throw all that at you and I add to that lastly emotional intelligence which was made popular wasn't invented but made Popular by Daniel Gman your ability to be self-aware manage your own emotions be more socially aware build better relationships and as part of that of course the social intelligence and you got all of these things and it begs the question well with all of these different factors what is it we need to do so there's really five things I'm going to walk you through here that will help you to

become smarter and the first thing is mindset the work of Carol dck Professor Carol dck from Stanford University identified this notion of mindset which is really that the beliefs that you have about how intelligent you are or the beliefs you have about your ability will play a large part in determining how lightly you are to improve that ability and she found that people have two types of beliefs about their intelligence some people have what she called a fixed mindset this means they believe that this is how smart I am and I will never improve other

people have what she calls a growth mindset and they are people who believe that they can work on their intelligence in fact every single person listening to this right now is someone that has a growth mindset how do I no because you would not watch or listen to a podcast which tells you how to become smarter if you didn't believe that you could become smarter see how smart that is so you've got a growth mindset in at least in that this area when it comes to your intelligence but she found that people with the growth

mindset people who believe that they can improve their intelligence are significantly more likely too not only that but they're more likely to be healthier likely to live longer more likely to have better relationships all sorts of positive benefits that you can acre as a result of believing that you can improve your intelligence and you can improve your ability now how do you do that well again the notion is that you put in effort you work hard you learn how to do it you take feedback and this growth mindset propels you towards becoming smarter solving more

problems tackling whatever challenges that you might face being able to grit through it all and come out the other side better as a result so the growth mindset is crucial if you believe you can improve if you believe that you're smarter that will help you to become smarter as well and there's another related concept to this which came from a study done by Rosen Thal and Jacobson in 1968 or so where what they did was they went into a school and they told the teachers that there were certain students in the school that were in

the class that were intellectual bloomers and the teachers learned about the particular children that were intellectual bloomers and a year later they came back and studied the children who they previously studied their IQ and they found that the children that they told the teachers that these children had this intellectual Bloomer label those children had a significant increase in their IQ from the year before to the year after which suggested that the teachers expectations of the students actually influenced how intelligent the student was able to become so their intelligence improved significantly as a direct result of

the way in which the teachers treated them which is fascinating this is also known as the pigmillion effect which is named after the the Greek sculptor and he sculpted a statue and fell in love with the statue that he sculpted I mean there's people now that fall in love with robots but leave robots will talk back to you statues I mean don't get me wrong it' be a quiet life I mean if you're in a relationship with a statue not many arguments are going to be happening right you know they're not going to be like

oh I can't believe you said that and if you feel angry you can shout at them they're not going to respond um so yeah that's that's something to think about but um yeah so this guy anyway he created a statue fell in love with it and as a result of that the gods I think at the time said you know what feel sorry for you mate going to make the statue come to life right I again I'm thinking of him you know he's in love with the Statue it's all a quiet life this is great

never get into any arguments soon as the statue comes to life it's a nightmare it's like ah they won't shut up I wish there were statue again anyway the point is what's my point I don't remember what I was talking about oh yeah the pigmillion effect so it's known as the pigmillion effect because it's almost like you fall in love with the potential of a person you make it come alive because of the way you treat it so that's really I suppose points in the direction of how powerful our beliefs are our mindset is when

it comes to how smart we are the next thing is training and this is really mental training this could be working on your cognitive skills like practice problem solving this could be working on your memory right you're working memory practicing trying to remember different things the challenges with those are a lot of times those interventions they tend to be great but they tend to be great for that specific skill so you can train it up very well but it's not always as easy to generalize the skill so you could work really hard in your memory

let's say for numbers but that doesn't necessarily cross over to remembering names for instance so it really is very contextual and not context so we have to be as clear as possible and we'll talk in a in a little while about how to contextualize this more effectively to make it better but there are certain evidence-based practices that have been shown to help us be better at retaining information things that will really help you to be better moving forward whenever you study the first is spaced repetition this means when you study something and you Mak create

spaces between it so you study it today that may be tomorrow that may be a week from now that maybe a month from now when you engage in space repetition the research shows you're much more likely to remember that information long term so as opposed to just crumming give yourself some space between between your different study intervals similarly there's this notion of what we call interweaving and this is really when you're not just studying one thing but you're studying a multitude of different topics again when you do that the research shows you're more likely to

remember it down the line now I I would caution you with this because if you're dealing with something really complex you're working on something that requ Rees a lot of mental effort you're much better served by what we call Deep work and this is a term popularized by Cal Newport where you allocate two three hours or so just on one thing and you focus 100% on it but for things that aren't quite as complex and things that you want to be able to learn long term interleaving which is really your ability to uh learn different

subjects move from subject to subject as you go through it that tends to be quite good for your long-term retention something else that's good for long-term retention is testing yourself challenging yourself in in different ways and also asking questions to really understand as much as you can about the material you're learning so those are some really useful strategies to help you train your brain more effectively then we've got the fundamentals the fundamentals are the things that you you just need to do in general for your life but they also have the byproduct of helping you

become smarter right this is things like get enough sleep things like exercise regularly right right uh things like eat healthy balanced diet omega-3 fatty acids mindfulness and meditation and resting and whatnot things like learning and they found that learning music right musical learning or language learning continuous learning of that kind of nature tends to help you to become smarter overall so learning a new language learning a musical instrument actually improves your overall intelligence as well which is I think quite cool and also social interaction is good for your ability to to learn there's a guy

called vigotsky he's an all this old sort of psychologist Russian psychologist and he had this thing called the zone of proximal development and he talked about this notion that there's sort of a gap between what you can do what your potential says you can do and what you can do with help right the help of a mentor the help of a guardian or whatnot the point was is that a lot of times our knowledge or our intelligence is actually a construct of conversations we have it's a social experience we have and whether or not you

agree 100% with that the research does tend to show that the more we socially develop ourselves the better that is for our intelligence and remember that also provides us with opportunities to have conversations with others which allows us to become smarter as a result we now get to one of my favorites which is number four which is what I call the four questions of contextualizing intelligence and these are four questions that allow you to be able to ensure that you are if in fact becoming smarter in the way that you want to be smarter remember

we talked earlier about being smarter about how you're becoming smarter well these are four questions will help you to do that the first of the questions are what do you want to become smarter at what do you want to become smarter at you have to identify specifically what you want to become smarter at the next question then is what are the core skills that you'll need to be smarter at that so the core skills the core abilities that would let you become smarter at that next what do you need to practice in order to become

really good at those skills and then finally when will you do this so very simple straightforward but very powerful what do you want to become smarter at what skills do you need to be smarter at that what do you need to practice to work on those skills and when will you do that when you answer those four questions you'll be giving yourself the specific actions and behaviors that you need to engage in consistently to become smarter in that area and possibly even smarter than anybody else or at least anybody else that you might be comparing

yourself to maybe and then finally we have thinking smarter this is number five and with thinking smarter I'm really talking about what I believe is the most under indexed and underappreciated of all the things you can do to improve how smart you are this is something that I spend a lot of time in because I look in the area of what we call belief leadership which is your ability to cultivate beliefs in what's worth believing in and to be able to change the beliefs that might limit you or hold you back and so the first

thing about thinking smarter is we really need to identify what our cognitive biases are these are the sort of the the things that trip us up the habits the habitual heuristics or shortcuts that we have in our mind things like what we call confirmation bias where we look for evidence to prove our conclusions are true and we dismiss evidence that contradicts them right the things that hold us back because we're only listening to what we want to listen to the Dunning Krueger effect the concept or idea that the smarter we think we are the less

we probably know the overconfidence bias where we're more likely to be overconfident of our answers because we maybe we were right in the past but as a result of that we failed to think critically in that way and then finally the availability bias where we're more likely to overvalue how important something is simply because we see it everywhere and these kind of effects and these kind of biases can steer us wrong so the more you're aware of it the more you can recognize these different kind of biases and challenge them the more likely you will

be to be able to think more critically and as a result make better decisions now when you're making better decisions you also want to reflect on how you decide and make sure you have a consistent way of making decisions that is using rational and using reasoning in the most effective way you want to recognize when your emotions are trying to move you aside not just listen to your emotions thinking your emotions are the guide sometimes when you think you're listening to your emotions you're not doing it we've talked about that on a previous episode sometimes

when you say oh I'm listening to my gut and you're thinking to yourself this is just like the force I'm listening to the for you're not listening to the force you're listening to your emotions and your emotions might be like clever full of wisdom or they might just be absolute nut jobs so before you listen to your emotions you got to figure out which is which and you can't listen to your go as to which is which because again remember the nut jobs the other thing that you can do is to enhance your critical reasoning

skills to begin to improve your ability to be more logical to debate better to analyze things to evaluate things to train that part of your brain that challenges and looks for the contrary information try to look for the things that make you wrong the more comfortable you are at being wrong the more you look to become wrong the better will be and the more you apply this to actual real life scenarios as opposed to abstract exercises the more you apply it to the real life world that you're live in the more likely you are to

start to cement it as a natural part of your way of thinking remember what you're doing here is You're Building neural Pathways in the brain the more you practice it the more you make it specific the more those Pathways will serve you and will make your brain even more efficient so if I was to summarize everything we've talked about where does this leave us well number one you need to believe in your ability to improve your intelligence and build that growth mindset and believe that you can and will and are becoming smarter number two you

need to contextualize understand how do you want to become smarter what skills will you need to become smarter what behaviors will lead to those skills and when are you going to engage in those behaviors you need to get the fundamentals right you got to eat right you got to sleep right you got to exercise right you got to maybe practice mindfulness or meditation if you can but you got to take care of yourself and learn learn learn learn music learn new languages just consistently learn you got to practice the skills that will help you to

become smarter and finally you need to work in your critical thinking you need to think critically bro you know what I'm talking about and so if you do all of those things you will find yourself becoming so much more successful and you will find yourself able to become smart where it counts you don't need to be able to do a a Rubik's Cube you don't need to be able to figure everything out you don't need to be able to win every single game you just need to become smarter in a way that works for you

and one of the things that would make you smarter is to make sure that you're subscribed to this podcast make sure you rate and review it make sure you share it with everyone you can possibly think about make sure you sign up for my newsletter onit patreon.com newsletter I guess that'll make you smart it's a very smart decision to make it you'll subscribe to my YouTube channel you'll follow me on social media all all those things I believe are super smart decisions but if you don't do any of those it doesn't mean you don't but

for now take care hope you found this useful excited to see you very soon for another episode of the change of Minds podcast I'm onit Patrick thank you very much for listening practice being smarter believe better and may the forces always be with you