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How to 10x Your Intelligence


3m read
·Nov 4, 2024

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The best way to 10x your intelligence is to go on a difficult books reading regimen. That’s where you read ten or less books a year, and each one should be harder than the last. And this is probably the opposite of a lot of what you see and hear on YouTube, where the game is often to read as many books in a year as you can, something which I think will be very inefficient if you’re trying to boost your intelligence and mental strength. Let me show you how and why the difficult book regimen works better.

So what is intelligence? Let’s define it as the ability to solve our own problems. The more intelligent we are, the more of our own problems we can solve. Ok, but how do we improve our intelligence? One of the main ways we improve our intelligence, our ability to solve problems, is by creating, obtaining, and using tools.

And there are at least two types of tools we use: physical tools and mental tools. An example of a physical tool is a hammer. If you need to apply force to something, the hammer is handy for that. Physical tools are easy to understand, but I think less people talk about and understand the importance of mental tools, which is what this video is about.

So what is a mental tool? An example of a mental tool is the word forgiveness. Think about the word forgiveness and how much power this word gives you within yourself and within your relationships. When you forgive yourself, you make peace with your past self and your previous mistakes, and you give yourself permission to be a better person tomorrow than you were yesterday.

Forgiveness frees you from the burdens of the past. When you forgive another, you make it possible to repair a relationship for the better and move forward as a team. It’s hard to imagine a world without the concept of forgiveness. Forgiveness, like all words, is really a kind of technology or mental tool.

It’s kind of like a glue that allows us to repair a broken relationship, whether that relationship is with others or ourselves. It has changed our lives immensely for the better and improved our ability to cooperate. Now think about how many books are out there, how many words and mental tools are out there for you to obtain, tools that will completely change how you interact with yourself and with others in the world, just like the concept of forgiveness has, tools that can give you immense power and strength to solve more problems.

Every time you truly learn a new word, you expand your mental toolkit, and by doing so, you increase your intelligence, and you expand your ability to solve a variety of new problems. Mental tools are just as important and powerful as physical tools for solving and overcoming problems; they just operate differently. Mental tools help us make meaning of the world.

And meaning can help us overcome problems or even remove them from our lives. Let me give you an example. Think about the worst suffering you can? Got it? Ok. Now imagine that you’re given a reason for this suffering. Imagine the clouds part and a voice gives you a reason, a justification for why you’re suffering. Does this make the suffering more bearable? I think most people would respond by saying yes.

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl details his experience as a prisoner in the WW2 concentration camps. And in it, he says, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” He found out that meaning could lessen one’s suffering. He also paraphrases Nietzsche when he says, “‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.’”

So how does Frankl’s experience relate to what I’m talking about? Reading difficult books and expanding your mental toolkit will help you discover more why’s for your life. It will help you create greater meaning for the life you live. And according to both Frankl and Nietzsche, meaning, and the ability to produce it, is one of our greatest protections against the suffering of life.

So I said that you can 10x your intelligence, your ability to s...

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