How to be Smart in a World Full of Dumb People
Living a good life is pretty simple. Just don’t be a dumb ass.
8 min readMay 31, 2020
Now, when I say dumb, I don’t mean lacking intelligence. For the most part, humans can be very creative, intelligent, adaptable, resourceful, and resilient. But they also do a lot of dumb shit.
Your job is to avoid these common pitfalls. If you can simply do that, you’ll be miles ahead of the pack.
I’ll share some concrete examples soon, but when I say dumb, some of the things that fall under this category are:
- Being overly focused on things that don’t matter
- Making decisions that compound and get worse over time
- Almost anything under the label of instant gratification
- Blindly following … anything
- Always thinking at a surface level about everything
The common person, you, likely squander much of your real intelligence by doing dumb shit. You are infinitely capable, yet you find yourself continuing to fall into these traps.
Once you learn to avoid these traps, though, you start to operate at a different level. You see the games being played around you.
