The hard thing about getting smarter
I do not claim to be smart. But I do claim to be obsessed with getting smart-er. So naturally I spend quite a lot of time thinking about the idea and process of what it means to be smart. And the good thing about being interested in the process is that you do not have to spend any time thinking about your current state of smartness. It is immaterial. Your only aim is to become smarter. Of course that does not mean that I do not end up comparing myself with my peers and idols. But I’d like to do lesser of that. Comparison by its definition is a status based non zero sum game. As Ashish Kulkarni said in my conversation with him (which you can listen to here), college is zero sum because you come first by defeating others in the game, you get the most attendance by beating everyone else to it, the existence of a better implies the existence of a worse. Comparison is often based on status rather than substance.1
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Stasis is always devolution
The fact that future will always be a better place is not a given. The future only comes if we build for it. Peter Theil, Elon Musk, Paul Graham and other very smart people have echoed this philosophy in many forms. The insight seems almost trivial at first, something you’d say ‘Of course! I knew this already. What is new in this?’ to. But dig deeper and you’ll realize that it is in fact deeply counter intuitive.
Currently we understand future to be a synonym to progress. We often forget that it wasn’t always like that. Humanity for its most part was a civilization with almost negligent progress and advancements with time. There was not much freedom and not a lot of capital for the most time we’ve been on this planet. And without both of these two - progress (through innovation) is almost impossible to achieve. The Industrial revolution really shaked things up and introduced economic progress on a scale never seen before. And since then we all have been riding the wave of technology - earlier hardware and now software, to become better by the day. We all assume that progress is a fact of life. That tomorrow is going to be better. But, as with most things, we are mistaken.
The reason why we have technological progress is because very smart people work very hard to be able to make the future better than the present and past. Progress is not a function of time, it is a function of innovation and hard work. Without these two qualities, and many more - no matter how much time passes, the future simply won’t come. We’ll be forever stuck in groundhog day.
With respect to smartness, my argument is that putting in the same efforts as you do today will not keep you as smart in future. And the reason for that is simple - your smartness is measured relative to external markers of what is considered to be ‘smart’ in the current zeitgeist. Stagnation is never static. Because the world and the people in it will never be static. They will move forward. So unless you keep re inventing the rate at which you consume informative, make connections, link disciplines and think through insights - being smarter with time is not given. You have to constantly keep putting in more and more effort to become smarter.
So in almost a cruel sense, if you think you are really passionate and really curious - having the same level of passion will not keep you as sharp and smart, it will make you worse. In my opinion, you must be obsessed, batshit obsessed with getting smarter to actually be able to make incremental progress through time. The reason why I say this is because as a 22 year old who never has had any actual responsibility in life other than just studying - it is very easy for me to think that my learning curve will be replicated throughout my life as I go from 20 to 30 to 40 and so on. But as I suppose, and I’m sure as older people will also tell you, it becomes increasingly more and more difficult to take out both time and energy to remain curious. Forget being curious at the same level as when you were young.
It gets progressively harder to - first, be as smart as you are now, and even harder; second, to become smarter with time.
A person who went to X university must be better than a person who went to Y university is a status based adjudication because the deciding factor is the status attached to the names of the institution, rather than based on substance - who actually knows more, who can think better, who can write better etc.