How to get intelligent again (with detailed instructions)
Reclaim your mind, learn to think again, but sharper and more profoundly than before
The internet is shallowing your mind.
Which means it is also shallowing your entire life.
Technology is restructuring how we process information in an ugly way.
Information is what shapes your identity because information determines what you see.
What you see is what you aim at.
And what you aim is what shapes the things you value (and don’t, by not aiming at those things).
Pretty much, you become what you consume.
If this seems obvious to you, good.
Let’s go a bit deeper.
We used to feel driven enough to spend decades of our lives painting Sistine Chapels. Building massive monuments around the globe. To spend half our lives creating these magnificent works that had depth and sustenance.
Yes, I know these people were paid to do their work.
But you probably couldn’t pay the vast majority of people today to spend one week without a phone. Their minds would self-destruct from having 1000 stupid thoughts a second, mixed together with years-old unprocessed emotions.
This does pain me to say it.
But today, we can no longer read 1 page of a book without the feeling of boredom strangling us to death.
I have felt this. You have felt this.
If you haven’t felt this, you are balls-deep in this problem without knowing it.
And if you can’t see why that is a serious problem, I don’t know what to tell you.
Thinking is becoming the most profound form of rebellion against this attack on our minds
In this profound ideas letter, I want to run over some profound ideas, of course.
Namely, why your mind is getting pulled away from being capable of truly profound thinking, and what you can do about, with a complete thinking system (and I mean it when I say ‘complete system’).
Also, if you are not willing to change your behaviour as a result of this letter, don’t bother reading.
I’m serious. I would rather you do something else better with your time instead.
But if you are willing to think about this, and therefore act and make even 1 microscopic change to your life within the next few minutes, guess what?
The path will be set before you.
Not a single stone left unturned.
Profound Idea I - Learning
Let’s talk about the feeling of learning.
By that, I mean a few things.
Reading feels like learning.
So does taking notes, and finishing a book or a Substack newsletter like this one.
But here’s the thing.
Learning, or what learning really could be defined as, is behaviour change.
For however long it takes you to read this letter and process it, every time you see the word learning, I want you to think of that idea exactly.
Learning is behaviour change.
It’s only when you start thinking of what learning isn’t... that this finally starts clicking.
Reading is not learning.
Taking notes is not learning.
Watching a YouTube video on 2x speed is not learning 2x faster.
Buying a course or a guide is not learning either.
Even my own guides, which I genuinely believe in, are WORTHLESS in isolation. I don’t mind shooting myself in the foot saying that. Because if your behaviour does not change because of them, they are worthless. Full stop. Don’t spend your hard earned money on them.
The missing link between all of these examples, and the word learning, is this.
Thinking.
In order for learning to enforce behaviour change, you have to think.
You cannot change your behaviour without changing your thinking.
Changing your behaviour means changing how you think, speak, write, explain, recall, or apply something.
Doing something a new way, and achieving a new outcome as a result.
In our case, changing your thinking is an example of changing your behaviour. Because how you think is a habit. How you question. How you respond. How to analyse an idea with a certain system for analysing it.
That is what we will be focusing on. Changing your thinking.
So what is it that is stopping people from doing this properly?
Profound Idea II - Thinking
It has been beaten into us through formal schooling that you should be reading through tons of pages, highlighting highlighting highlighting and making lots of notes, and that success is measured by finishing a book.
Not about how much of a book you processed.
Just because you feel like you are learning, does not mean you are making any real progress.
We just aren’t told this.
And it is no accident.
Most people measure reading by the pages they have read.
Yes, I know that everybody says this online.
Let’s think a bit more profoundly about this.
Well, there is a ladder of abstraction that shows you what truly matters when consuming information of any kind.
An example regarding books:
Question/Problem → Squiggles on a page → Words → Phrases → Sentences → Paragraph → Sections → Chapters → Book → Relevance to your Life
School does not care about the level of the question/problem, or the level of relevance to your daily life. You are told what to read by a standardised curriculum built around interests that are not your own. Questions and problems to consider are rarely given. You are just told to read this, follow the teacher’s orders, and repeat it back correctly on an exam. Why? Because you need to pass the exam. Why pass the exam? Because if not you’ll fail the exam. See the problem?
Formal learning curriculums were never designed to help you build the life you want. They were designed to produce compliant, employable people... and it works.
This is why there is no question given at the start of class. And when there is no valid question, the chances of that information being relevant to helping you live the life you want, they are practically zero.
Walk into any classroom and ask the word “why” enough... and you’ll probably get thrown out because the teachers themselves can’t give you a good enough answer.
Most people will carry this habit with them until they die.
This is why everyone I know thinks of education as something that can be finished.
This is also why people spend 3 hours reading and less than 3 minutes thinking.
Which begs the question.
Why does reacting to a tweet, or summarising a book chapter, or highlighting something, why does it feel like thinking?
Here is the answer.
Just because something pops into your mind, it does not mean you’re actually thinking about it. Really, it is the testing of what pops into your mind that is the thinking. And testing requires sustained attention most people no longer have.
We developed the capacity for contemplative linear thought over centuries. It is a learned cognitive skill, and we are beginning to unlearn it.
The heart of the issue lies with deep linear thought being replaced by shallow reactive processing at every level of daily life.
I do not think you are inherently lazier than those from the previous generations.
I do think your attention is being harvested by systems designed by the smartest engineers in the world whose sole purpose is to keep you looking at screens. To keep your mind and life shallow, because, you know, real life is not lived online.
The feeling of being educated and actually being capable of producing something original have never been further apart. Most people only feel informed, and almost nobody is building anything with what they know.
I am going to hit you with a harsh truth. It’s nothing personal, but I say it because I care.
You have a right to an educated mind.
Absolutely, 100%.
A mind that can think, and do so originally. A mind that can question deeply, and creates things the world has not yet seen.
But all people ever talk seem to talk about is rights.
This has truly pissed me off since the age of 18 (I’m 22 now).
More rights.
More access.
More resources.
But you cannot have the conversation about rights without having the conversation about responsibility.
For example, if people exercised for two hours per week, and ate healthy-enough for about 70% of the time, we would not need to be asking for more hospital beds. Yes, there will be exceptions to that idea - people who cannot move for whatever reason. But it doesn’t change the physics behind the fact that most chronic illnesses are lifestyle driven, and almost entirely preventable.
The same applies to your mind.
The corporations are hijacking your attention, yes. But getting all bitter and resentful about that fact will not change the physics of your situation.
How you take responsibility and ownership of that fact is what matters. That is where behaviour changes can start taking place.
So what are you going to do about it?
Nobody on this Earth is going to build that mind for you. The responsibility is yours. It always has been.
And the good news is that the intervention is not extremely complicated. But it is pretty uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough that most people avoid it.
But it will be incredibly rewarding.
Even within just 15 minutes of using what comes next.
Because that is what it is.
A thinking system.
Profound Idea III - You don’t read to consume, you read to think
How can you actually start thinking better?
I’m excited to show you this, I’ve been refining it for a few weeks now.
The purpose of reading is not consumption.
The purpose of reading is thinking.
I like not to view this as a reading system, so to speak, but as an information manipulation system. Because that is what great thinking should encompass.
The reason I have automated and systematised every step and question you have to ask is numerous.
Quite frankly, I get lazy at times.
Sometimes I don’t want to ask the right questions in the right order. Which is actually more important than you think.
Sometimes tiredness can get the better of you. We don’t want our thinking quality to degrade mid-session.
Forgetting to ask the right questions in the right order is a silent killer of knowledge acquisition.
This system externalises what is required of you so you can focus on thinking. Not remembering to think.
Your first attempt at this might feel like it is terrible. But really, you do want terrible. Even 2-3 minutes of absolutely abysmal retrieval or recall at the start of this is better than none. The pain is the point. If you can’t remember something, great. You know what to think about some more. Encode your weaker understandings and gaps with the rest of this system.
That is why our first step is to practise recalling, remembering, or retrieving what we already know.
Here is the system loop:
Retrieve -> Read -> Consolidate -> Connect -> Map -> Question -> Repeat
How to think while reading a book (properly)
I am going to run through every step live, on a real passage, with real material.
The source is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s opening entry on Existentialism. Read it alongside me, it’s short.
I am reading it alongside The Penguin Guide to Existentialism, which is what I am reading at the minute, along with 1984.
I wouldn’t consider myself a full-blown existentialist as of right now, but I do agree with and encourage a lot of existentialist ideas that I am aware of.
Step 1 - Retrieve
If you want to get good at remembering, you need to practise remembering.
This is where retrieval or recall comes in.
This will feel like the most painful step in the process, and that is why you should pay most attention to it.
Why?
Before you begin reading, spend 2-5 minutes thinking about these 3 questions:
What are the 2-4 main ideas I remember about this topic?
How do these ideas connect?
What questions do I still have about it?
This is how prior knowledge schemas get activated and primed before new information comes in to the brain. Think swinging your arms in circles for a couple minutes, preparing to throw a ball as far as you can. You wouldn’t be capable of throwing it as far if you were cold, let alone the risk of injury.
Doing this will give new information somewhere to stick to and expose gaps that you can use this thinking session to go fill.
If you’re like me who often struggles to get into the grove of reading right away, this will get your mind feeling engaged and ready to start thinking deeply.
Here is what my retrieval looked like.
I know that existentialism has always been broadly talked about and not very well defined. I’ve read Kierkegaard’s Crop Rotation, and Sartre’s The End of War, which is a brilliant essay. I know that existentialism is really about how you have freedom to choose your own meaning. How you respond to the existential nature of existence, that all of this means nothing, that we don’t know what it means, and that you have the freedom to choose, and hopefully choose something aimed toward the good.
I want to understand something more about the idea of existence precedes essence, because I don’t fully agree with it. I think there is more to all of us than we think, in terms of genetics and temperament playing a role in how we interpret the world.
I also want to learn about what nihilism properly is (and in simple terms).
I would like to organise my understanding of the key ideas a little better. I think they are freedom, projects, and responsibility. But I know there are other things missing that I must understand.
Again, that messiness is the point. That is exactly what you want.
Step 2 - Read
Read a couple of paragraphs.
This can be 1 or 10. It will depend on the density of what you are reading, and how quickly your mind gets overwhelmed if you can’t understand it absolutely intuitively.
Working memory is very limited. The danger here is overreaching into cognitive overload. There is a range in which the brain retains information best, and that lies between overload (too challenging) and underload (not challenging enough). If you keep reading until you reach cognitive overload, and do no thinking to reduce that load, and return it to the optimal range, you will do what most people do. Read for 3 hours and think for 3 minutes.
This is why you should read in smaller chunks.
Naval Ravikant once said somewhere that he likes to read one page of a book and think about just that one page. That is the level of respect you should be bringing to information.
Once you have read a couple of paragraphs, and you have reached an idea you do not understand, do this.
Stop and consolidate what you’ve read (most people don’t go further than this).
So, I read the each introductory paragraph of the Stanford page.
I took my time. I made no highlights, and I mind mapped my thinking when I needed to. That was enough.
Step 3 - Consolidate
Close the book and stare at a wall. Just look anywhere away from the book… DO NOT LOOK BACK AT WHAT YOU ARE READING.
Now.
Think about these questions:
What are the 1-3 main ideas I’ve just read about?
What am I still unsure about?
This forces immediate retrieval and reconstruction of information.
By simplifying or summarising what you have read into just 1-3 main ideas or chunks, you are organising the information inside of your brain, which reduces cognitive load in working memory. That is why chunking is a superpower.
I like this step a lot, since it requires you to stop and think about what you have read in a novel way. If you give yourself 20 seconds to stop and think between this step and the previous step, you will see what I mean.
Consolidation is what catches the gaps in your knowledge right away. Because you are not relying on recognition memory (looking at the words and thinking that you do remember them) and instead relying on recall (remembering the meaning of the words without recognition, but retrieval).
Here is what my consolidation looked like.
The Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bombs both serve as a key influence to the existential movement. Mainly due to widespread anxiety and indifference in response to the ideas of meaninglessness, anxiety, and the human capacity that human beings had cultivated to destroy themselves.
The word existentialism has always been hard to define since it encompasses so many ideas, themes, and it spans across a wide array of disciplines.
Mainly, it is not merely isolated to academia. For this reason, there are a number of key ideas or themes that can be defined as existentialist.
The three that feel most central to me right now are nihilism, freedom, and ethics. All of which are fueled by the idea of existence precedes essence, which I don’t fully agree with.
What was I unsure about?
How can the key themes be structured into a system so as to not let people fall straight into nihilism right away? Why did they believe that every human being is a blank template, without considering genetics or temperament?
Step 4 - Connect
How does this connect to what I have previously read, and what does this connect to that I already know.
Everything within the book thus far, and anything else you know about anything.
This is where the cycle of destroying your understanding and rebuilding it gets under way. The learning cycle. Because true understanding is when you stop just accumulating the author’s ideas, and start colliding those ideas with your existing knowledge.
All knowledge, really, is just your point of view. And thinking is how you build a point of view.
Connecting ideas is what makes them relevant and purposeful.
The brain hates anything that does not directly serve your survival. Forgetting is a biological failure of relevance I think for this reason. But once you give an idea somewhere to connect within your web of knowledge, it becomes damn-right immovable.
Here is what my connecting looked like.
Inside the text - it connected to the number of people named at the start. Existentialist ideas and themes have been discussed by a lot of people. And it is hard to define existentialism to any one of them, or any one set of ideas, since a lot of the people hold differing opinions, apparently on the same ideas.
Outside the text - this connects a lot with integral theory. In that you can become aware of who you are and increase your levels of awareness, and thus your ability to change your first-person perspective, to help you develop a life outlook you want.
This is where my understanding started to crack and rebuild.
Sartre says existence precedes essence, which means you are not born with a fixed self, and you construct it through choices and actions.
But the Big 5 personality model, and everything Jung wrote about psychological types, suggests you are born with a temperament. A pre-given map. Which I believe to be true. Not a destiny, so to speak, but a set of innate tendencies that shape how you perceive and respond to the world.
This is where my understanding conflicts with the idea of existence preceding essence.
So, the more accurate version might be this.
You are born with a map, but a map is not a territory. What you do with the map you were given - how you question it, test it, rebuild it - that is where you actually come from in terms of your idea of “essence.”
Step 5 - Map
This step is optional.
Mainly, since it takes some skill to really do this right. I’m currently testing out my own mind mapping system, but I want to wait until I really have the principles nailed before I can teach you guys everything.
Here is an important distinction between good note-taking and bad note-taking.
Key words and relationships.
Writing tons of linear notes hides relationships. You don’t know what the key concepts are, and how they relate and organise themselves compared to one another.
Mapping these out can work wonders for your brain. Why? The brain processes visual imagery much faster than it does words. There are mixed statistics, some citing it being 60,000 times faster, while others go as far as 3 million.
Yes, this is why linear note-taking is bullshit, and why I love me some mind mapping (even as a writer, for ideation and research).
In terms of what this actually does, well, it externalises structure without transcription.
You can engage in conceptual organisation, in other words, chunking. Which is also called scaffolding, re-chunking, restructuring, or mental model building.
The term restructuring makes the most sense to me, but chunking is the real term.
I like to think of mind mapping as a visual aid that supports your thinking. Your mind map should almost represent the thinking inside your mind. Because if a section of your mind map is messy, it means your understanding of that chunk or section is messy inside your brain too.
Here is what my map looked like.
I have three groups:
Influences
Existential movement
Key ideas
They could be better, but that is my current hypothesis of what this topic looks like for now.
Step 6 - Question
Write down 1-3 questions you have while reading.
Gaps, confusions, open questions the book has not answered for you yet. Don’t try to solve all of them right now, but dot them down.
By coming back to them later, at the top of every half hour say, you preserve flow. You don’t want to let every second sentence lead you down a road full of infinite questioning, because then you’re not reading.
Questions are targets for what you must look out for.
This balance is what creates a middle path between ignoring your confusion, while also not letting it stall your curiosity either.
Here are the questions I was left with.
What can nihilism be defined as simply?
How do you not slip into nihilism by just saying “fuck it” to any objection within those key ideas?
And the one question that stayed unresolved.
Where does genetics play a role in existence precedes essence?
These questions are the fuel for the next session.
Step 7 - Repeat the process
Yep… go back to reading some more paragraphs now.
If at any point you feel like your head is melting, you feel genuinely lost, just stop. Take 30 seconds to look away from whatever you’re reading and think. Try and run through each step, or reread what you have read slowly. Think about it. This is supposed to feel hard. You are learning how to think. So if you don’t know what to think about something right now, that is the entire point of all this.
Learning to read (and thus learning to think) is about learning to pull yourself up from a fall. It’s hard, but you are your own teacher and student.
What to do at the end of each session
Before finishing up, repeat the retrieval practice you followed in step 1.
What are the 2-4 main ideas I remember about this topic?
How do these ideas connect?
What questions do I still have about it?
This is for consolidating what you have read. It will set you up for your next reading session too, by giving you a new mental structure (schema) to build upon next time, rather than some vague impression that you can only recognise once you open the book again, and not recall.
Think of each loop of this system as adding a new layer of comprehension every time.
The goal here is not to understand everything in one session. You want to layer and layer new understandings across multiple sessions. Learning is a layering process, which is pretty cool I think. Over time the structure in your thinking will become progressively denser, more connected, and more usable.
Here is what I built from those three paragraphs that wasn’t there before.
I built a mind map with three groups.
Influences, the existential movement, and key ideas.
They could be better, but that is my current hypothesis of what this topic looks like for now.
I now have a better understanding of the key ideas, and how they all relate to freedom at its core.
I hope this has showed you the difference between reading to consume, and reading to think.
Because that folks, is why we use this cool thinking system.
And thinking is why we read books.
I’m leaving it there for today.
You’re an absolute legend.
- Craig :)
Free Things I Have Built For You:
If you want to learn to write long-form (essays, articles, newsletters like this one), download my free long-form writing course.
If you want a unique prompt that will make you a personalised 30-day project-based learning plan, download that here.
Paid Products I Have Built For You:
Check out The Profound Self-Education Guide if you want to stop consuming mindlessly and start becoming dangerously self-educated (and build a life you want to be living).
Check out A Guide To Profound Reading if you want to remember more of what you read in 5 minutes than most people do with 3 hours of “reading.”
A little bit off topic:
Don’t you think forgetting is actually a kind of reward for us as human beings?
There’s a very rare condition called Hyperthymesia (HSAM), where people can vividly recall almost every day of their lives in precise detail, including personal events, dates, and even the most mundane moments.
But from what I’ve read, many people with this condition don’t experience it as a gift. They often struggle, because they can’t let go of painful memories. Their past is always present.
It makes me wonder if forgetting isn’t a flaw, but something protective.
Got a reality check, reading and learning and actually using our brain to complement is a different thingg