“What Would a Smart Person Do?” 12 Ways to Live More Intelligently

Asking this basic question can train your brain to make better decisions.

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For the last few years, I’ve had this question taped to my office wall: “What would a smart person do?” I was in a leadership role at work, and I was looking for help making decisions. I found some online advice that recommended asking this question as a way of critically distancing myself from my problems. I wish I could remember the source, because I’d love to give it credit.

How does it work? What exactly does a smart person do? How does a smart person think? At a basic level, smart people strive for objectivity while accepting that their limitations make perfect objectivity impossible.

From a different point of view, acting like a smart person is about valuing your time and energy and spending them judiciously. My advice is to spend more time creating and less time worrying or consuming. Here are twelve other things you can do to live life more intelligently:

Resist Patterns and Habits: A lazy mind tries to predict the future by recalling what has already happened. Our culture glorifies this kind of thinking; you’ve probably read somewhere that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” or something similar…