How To Be Smart (Part 2)

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Developing good habits is one sure way of maintaining a healthy life. It improves your emotional intelligence. It’s another phase in learning the art of being smart. Here are some suggested practical steps to continually take to cultivate and sustain good habits:

1.  Always ask questions. Asking questions and questioning everything around us constantly is what makes us smarter. There's nothing wrong with not knowing the whys or the hows! Everybody has something that they don't know. But by developing a healthy habit about asking politely when you don't know something, you'll find yourself getting smarter and smarter.

2.     Set goals once a week. Ask yourself during each goal-setting session, how many of last week's goals did I achieve? Why didn't I accomplish some of my goals and what can I do to give myself a greater chance of success?

- Constantly work hard to achieve each of your goals. Without goals, you would have nothing to hope for. Reward yourself after accomplishing your goal.

- Be organized. You don't need to be a total neat freak, but wasting time is not smart. Of course, there are many geniuses who are completely disorganized (think of the absent-minded professor) but if you're making an active effort to be smart, taking a conscious approach to how you spend your time is a big step in the right direction.

3.     Devote time to education. Educating yourself takes time, and if you want to get smarter it is going to require effort. Education doesn’t just mean attending school and coming out on top of the class. School is just one source of information. If you have straight A's, that doesn't mean that you are smart (though that could mean brilliance). There are many sources of information out there. For example: books, documentaries, and the almost boundless Internet. Exercising an open mind will make you more intelligent and constantly learning will help you achieve your dream of being smart. Don’t expect it to happen overnight. You need to spend a lot of time actively thinking and learning if you want to really be smart.

Source: Wikihow

How To Be Smart (Part1)

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To be smart is being armed with sufficient information to challenge any problem with possible solutions. For you to be able to do this, you need to continually improve your education. This is the first step in learning how to be smart. Here are some practical suggestions:

1.    Aim to educate yourself. Keep in mind an education isn't the junk you are forced to do in school for diplomas and degrees; it's an understanding of the world around you. People who are naturally curious for some reason begin to stop asking questions the moment they hit school. The truly brilliant mind however, always questions their world and tries to make sense of it. That is the secret to "genius".

2.  Work on your vocabulary. Use a few definitions from the dictionary each day, or subscribe to a "word-of-the-day" service online. You can also take the vocabulary tests in Readers Digest or buy a book on increasing your working vocabulary. Read the dictionary one letter at a time. This will take you at least a year but you will grow intellectually.

3.  Read a variety of books. Reading a lot is often described as the secret to intelligence. The smartest people in the world tend to read every single day. You may not always enjoy it, but reading will open up your mind to a variety of new ideas and experiences. Keep your reading diverse by reading books of all genres including non-fiction.

4.  Educate yourself about the world around you. Cultivate an interest in subjects like current events, interesting facts, funny and inspiring quotations, good books and movies, scientific studies and interesting inventions. Educational television, like PBS, is a great way to learn. Learning to think critically about the world around you by being aware of cause and effect in events will make you much smarter. If you can read much faster than you can speak, it is much more efficient to read a book, or better yet a non-linear electronic document like a wiki than to watch a show for all but the most intellectually demanding or video-dependent learning. Commercial television is particularly bad because its ultimate purpose is to do just enough to keep you at the TV and its ads, not satisfy you so you can do something else.

5. Make connections. Find uses for information, rather than just collecting useless trivia. Burying information somewhere deep in your brain is not useful; you have to be able to access it in real-world situations. Think of real-world situations in which a piece of information will make sense. Then share it and watch it grow!

Source: Wikihow