A little effort can go a long way. Getting smarter doesn’t involve a huge time commitment.

It starts with how you feed your brain. That’s the key to becoming smarter.

Just as success doesn’t happen overnight, becoming smarter doesn’t either.

How you approach situations and what you do every day can significantly increase your mental horsepower.

To become smarter, you must create daily habits to cultivate intelligence and feed your mind.

Intelligent people have built daily rituals to support and grow their intelligence. They understand this powerful concept, and it’s always a work in progress.

The key is to train your brain to adapt to new perspectives, situations, and information. You’ll get smarter over time, but it takes the daily grind.

What you can do today to become smarter

Here are 10 habits you can do today to make you smarter.

1. Share what you learn

To learn, you must teach others about what you learned. If you know something, you must digest it and teach it to others.

Share your thoughts via your blog or website. Start a YouTube channel or a podcast. Answer questions on Quora.

Explain to others what you are learning.

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Albert Einstein, a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity

Explain something simply to others. You’ll better understand it yourself.

The key is to express what you know and how you think. When you share, you remember what you learned.

Communicate what you learn by writing and capturing it via video or audio. It will help you become a better communicator and smarter. You’ll remember what you are learning better.

2. Make sure you sleep 8 hours every day

Sleep is critical to your overall health and well-being. Most of us don’t get enough sleep. A lack of sleep can cloud your judgment.

How are you going to become smarter if you can’t think clearly?

Getting enough sleep is one of the most underappreciated ways to become smarter. Take care of your body. Sleep enables our bodies to repair, makes us more productive, and helps us feel excited about the day.

Without enough sleep, our brains can’t function properly. While sleep needs vary from person to person, most adults need about 8 hours of sleep per night.

Sleep is one of the most effective ways to reset our mindsets every day. It allows your body to recharge its batteries. Make it a priority.

3. Exercise for 30 minutes every day

Most adults don’t exercise the recommended 30 minutes a day. Exercise boosts mood and improves a positive outlook on life.

It improves your overall health and well-being. Exercise stimulates the growth of new brain cells and improves your brain health.

To become smarter, you need to make sure that your brain is operating optimally. Exercise helps you think more clearly and remember things better.

Exercise stimulates the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to your body. When your heart and lungs improve, you have more energy.

To become smarter, you must have more energy to learn. Exercise can help you fall asleep faster and deepen your sleep. Exercise and sleep go hand in hand.

4. Schedule time to think without distractions

Are you making time to think about your day or your life? You shouldn’t take reflection for granted. Make time to write, journal, and think. In our fast-paced world, it’s important to slow down.

Thinking is an activity that can tremendously help your success. You should schedule a time to think. Your quiet space should be free of distractions.

Do nothing but think. Turn off your phone, don’t log on to social media, and find a place where it is just you.

Go for a hike in nature. Get outdoors. Research shows nature can make you kinder, happier, and more creative.

Use your weekend to get ahead.

Think out your ideas and question them. Many CEOs spend a specific part of their day just thinking.

For example, Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s Executive Chairman, schedules 2 hours of thinking time daily.

5. Work hard on your mindset

What you believe affects what you do. It’s that simple. The hard part is that it’s challenging to execute. If you think you’ll get smarter, you will.

Your attitude and perspectives can be learned and unlearned. They can be programmed and reprogrammed. They are conscious and unconscious.

Your mindset and mental strength need hard work and commitment.

The more you pick up a new skill, topic, or thought pattern, the stronger your mind becomes. Your brain is a muscle, just like your body.

Make it a priority to learn one new thing every day. When you change your mindset, you become a better version of yourself.

6. Become self-aware and get rid of your bad habits

Self-awareness is a powerful tool for understanding whether you have good or bad habits. We don’t think about every little thing we do during the day. Our habits have been formed over our lifetime.

Habits are hard to change because we are on autopilot.

We don’t realize what we are doing because we have done it repeatedly.

You’d better understand yourself and your daily habits when you become more self-aware. You become at peace with who you are.

Self-awareness also helps you manage your emotions and the factors that influence your daily habits and thoughts. What bad habits do you need to change?

7. Read more

Reading should become a top priority rather than a low priority. Reading books, articles, newsletters, and anything you can find will help you increase your knowledge. Make reading a serious habit.

Exercise is nourishment for your body. The same thing can be said about reading.

Reading is nourishment for your brain. If you really think about it, what you say, write, or think about comes from what you read. If you make reading an ingrained habit, your intellect will be enriched.

8. Write more

Write what you learn. Take a few minutes daily to think about what you learned today. It will boost your brainpower.

Writing is easy because anybody can write. It takes hard work to write well.

Writing is a learned skill that is mastered over time.

Good writing is about your wish, effort, and will to clearly communicate your ideas. Writing helps you become a better thinker.

9. Ask smarter and better questions

One of the best ways to learn and become smarter is to ask great questions. Professionals like litigators, journalists, and doctors are taught to ask questions. It’s an essential part of their training and jobs.

Is asking excellent questions an essential part of your day?

The art and science of questioning are skills that need practice and training. Just like you can’t expect to run a full marathon without training, you need preparation to ask great questions. You can’t just suddenly excel at it.

The way you ask a question matters. The structure of your question is important. The tone and body language you use are also crucial.

These factors control the quality of information you get after asking a question. To become smarter, you need to ask better questions.

10. Work on your personal time priorities

Are you spending time on what really matters to you? Write down what you think you do, compared to what you do. The way you spend your time should match your values. It’s tough to juggle your career, family, friends, health, and fun.

How you spend your time defines who you are.

If you spend time on smart things, you become smarter. Decide where you want to spend your time. An average month has only 720 hours.

Your time should align with what you care about. If you care about being smarter, you’ll make time to become one.

Bringing it all together

“I know that I know nothing.”-Socrates, a Greek philosopher

The good news is that you don’t have to spend much time to become smarter. You must make sure you have good daily habits. This way, you will become wiser and more intelligent than you were yesterday.

Be humble. Strive to know more.

Your knowledge is nothing compared to the vastness of what you can learn. To become smarter, invest your time in what will make you smarter.

Improve your mindset. Think about things from different perspectives. Upgrade your thoughts.

You don’t need much time. You need the proper daily habits. That’ll make you smarter.

---

Join my email newsletter for a free eBook and more helpful insights.