10 Small Things You Can Do Every Day to Get Smarter. You might be under the impression that intelligence is a fixed quantity set when you are young and unchanging thereafter. But research shows that you’re wrong. How we approach situations and the things we do to feed our brains can significantly improve our mental horsepower. Which of these 10 ideas can you fit into your daily routine? 1. Be smarter about your online time. Every online break doesn’t have to be about checking social networks and fulfilling your daily ration of cute animal pics. The Web is also full of great learning resources, such as online courses, intriguing TED talks, and vocabularybuilding tools. 2. Write down what you learn. It doesn’t have to be pretty or long, but taking a few minutes each day to reflect in writing about what you learned is sure to boost your brainpower. 3. Make a ‘did’ list. A big part of intelligence is confidence and happiness, so boost both by pausing to list not the things you have yet to do, but rather all the things you’ve already accomplished. 4. Get out the Scrabble board. Board games and puzzles aren’t just fun but also a great way to work out your brain. 5. Have smart friends. It can be rough on your self-esteem, but hanging out with folks who are more clever than you is one of the fastest ways to learn. “Keep a smart company. Remember your IQ is the average of five closest people you hang out with,” Saurabh Shah, an account manager at Symphony Teleca, writes. 6. Read a lot. Reading definitely seems essential. Opinions vary on what’s the best brainboosting reading material, with suggestions ranging from developing a daily newspaper habit to picking up a variety of fiction and nonfiction, but everyone seems to agree that quantity is important. Read a lot. 7. Explain it to others. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” Albert Einstein said. The Quora posters agree. Make sure you’ve really learned what you think you have learned and that the information is truly stuck in your memory by trying to teach it to others. “Make sure you can explain it to someone else,” Xie says simply. 8. Do random new things. Shane Parrish, keeper of the consistently fascinating Farnam Street blog, tells the story of Steve Jobs’ youthful calligraphy class in his response on Quora. After dropping out of school, the future Apple founder had a lot of time on his hands and wandered into a calligraphy course. It seemed irrelevant at the time, but the design skills he learned were later baked into the first Macs. The takeaway: You never know what will be useful ahead of time. You just need to try new things and wait to see how they connect with the rest of your experiences later on. 9. Learn a new language. No, you don’t need to become quickly fluent or leave for a foreign country to master the language of your choosing. You can work away steadily from the comfort of your desk and still reap the mental rewards. 10. Take some downtime. It’s no surprise that dedicated meditator Azula Altucher recommends giving yourself space for your brain to process what it’s learned–“sit in silence daily,” she writes–but she’s not the only responder who stresses the need to take some downtime from mental stimulation.
