3 Tips to Top off Your Real Intelligence
By Tom Kagy | 09 Oct, 2025

Actual intelligence is mostly a product of good mental habits, not genetics or even education.

Remember those old IQ tests?  Now forget them, foreever.

Beyond a modicum of genetics, intelligence is mostly the reflection of a mindset that optimizes use of the brain's many capabilities — memory, knowledge, analysis, creative synthesis.

The brain of an unintelligent person is like a hamster on a wheel — stuck repeating the same small experiences endlessly.  An intelligent person has a brain capable of freeing itself from constraints of class, education, economics, cultural conditioning and social expectations.

We, and our brains, were born free.  These tips, diligently applied, will re-liberate your brain and you along with it.

1. Be Curious

The average mind focuses on events.  Superior minds look behind events to understand causes and mechanisms — the why and how.  Keeping up with the news will keep you informed, goes conventional wisdom.  Problem is, merely knowing what happened puts you among the masses of sheep constrained to reacting after the fact.

True agency, true control over your own fate, depends on discerning the direction in which events are headed before the fact so as to stay ahead of the masses.  That kind of perspective can only be gained by understanding the whys and hows behind events.  That means learning not only the headlines but also key drivers and mechanisms behind the events.

For example, the fact that a major business filed for bankruptcy is news.  Most people feel informed by simply knowing that headline.  Intelligent people want to know why that happened.  They might discover that the business had been steadily facing intensifying competition from smaller, more specialized rivals, or that social shifts were making its products or services less relevant, or that it had invested too much on a project that never got off the ground.  

Each of these different reasons would, to an intelligent person, provide different actionable insights for their own business or career.  To an unintelligent person the event is merely another one of thousands of meaningless facts cluttering their brains to no discernible advantage.  Over time, that difference makes or breaks careers and fortunes.

2. Believe (Almost) None of What You Hear and (Maybe) Half of What You See.

Most people have seen legal dramas in which lawyers jump up red-faced and shout, "Hearsay, your honor!"

For most people the law seems obscure, boring and hopelessly irrelevant to daily life.  Yet our legal system is to a large extent the repository of ages-old wisdom about human behavior and psychology.  

The hearsay objection against allowing a witness's out-of-court statement to be considered by the jury (or the judge if it's a court trial) embodies experience about how and why human beings talk: they rarely provide reliable statements of fact, especially if said out of court, making it impossible to cross-examine the speaker.

The hearsay objection (as well as its many exceptions) embodies long human experience that the usefulness of a statement as evidence to prove any particular fact is limited by the speaker's veracity, motive, memory, experience, opportunity and capacity to observe and understand the event, and self-interest in a particular outcome, among other factors.  So the law decided several hundred years ago that by default hearsay statements are better left out of court.

That's exactly how intelligent people treat what people say, even if spoken in their presence, because there isn't likely to be an opportunity to engage in the kind of pointed colloquy like an in-court cross-examination.  

Unintelligent people, on the other hand, tend to take what people say at face value — and suffer the consequences of addling their brain with even more nonsense.  Once a brain gets filled with unfiltered garbage, it begins acting like your laptop when you open too many windows with too many videos: it freezes up, making it all but useless.

A woman walking with her boyfriend sees an intriguingly attractive man approaching and can't take her eyes off him.  "He looks stupid," she might say to excuse her inappropriate attention.  Or a man dining with his wife who sees an intimidatingly attractive man at the next table might say, "He looks like a bum," because he himself has been feeling anxious about his finances and manhood.  

Obviously neither statement would provide any useful information — probative value — to anyone within earshot.  Most words are simply not spoken to pass on reliable information but typically to address some need of the speaker, possibly insecurity, anxiety or a desire to make himself sound important, manly, witty, etc.

Even statements by public figures are often unreliable, as Americans are becoming increasingly aware as we enter a ninth month of Trump posts from the White House.  

"So many countries are kissing my a** to make trade deals," was posted months before any trade deals were wrangled from a handful of defenseless allies.  

"We will win so much, Americans will get tired of winning," is another memorable Trump campaign statement.   

"Climate change is a liberal hoax," is particularly memorable one.

Many months later, without a single win worth mentioning, Americans are getting tired of hearing a daily gush of statements of that ilk, especially as they face higher prices, intensifying weather events, lost exports, a tight job market, and a resentful world turning their backs on American products, travel, education and culture.

This isn't to suggest that the solution is to become a cynic.  It's to point out that boosting your ability to filter nonsense from facts is more important than ever in this age of endless social media babbling and generative AI images and videos.

3. Think Quantitatively

Compared with people in most of the developed world Americans rank low in quantitative skills, setting us up to rely heavily on migrants to fill between a quarter and half of key jobs in tech, finance, medicine and academia.  Without those migrants the US would quickly fall behind countries like China, India, Japan, S. Korea, Germany, the UK, even Canada and the Netherlands, in key technologies. 

All too frequently even articles in respected publications conflate millions with billions — a devastating indictment of Americans' poor grasp of numbers.

Americans who have an ease with numbers and quantitative analysis command respect as stars who possess both American culture and world-class intellects.

So start getting comfortable with the numbers behind quantities like per capita GDP (thousands), populations of nations and states (millions), dollar valuations of leading companies, trade deficits and the global population (billions), and the US and Chinese national GDP and budget deficits (trillions), or the number of times quantum processors can out-perform current supercomputers (tens of septillions).  

The first stage of your quantitative education entails making use of the memory centers of your brain to become familiar with numeric values that make up the physical realities of our world — distance, time, area, populations, economic output, revenues, profits, etc.  

Over time you will have a comfortable grasp of the relationships between things like GDP, tax collection, number of people who pay any income taxes at all and the highest sustainable amount of tariffs that can be collected on imports without crushing economic activity.  

To our great distress the guy in the White House is one American without a clue about such things.

An understanding of the world on a quantitative level is the only way to avoid being lulled and deceived by vague assertions like "bigly", "uuuge" and "so much".  For example, we've heard his claim that tariffs can take the place of income taxes.  But when you become quantitatively literate and have a command of numbers like US GDP, total US income tax collections, and the value of annual US imports, you can laugh and shake your head at such nonsense.