[austin-cheney]

All the research indicates you are as smart as you are born according to measures of intelligence in psychology. You can boost your intelligence up to 10 IQ points with intense practice but that is extremely temporary.

What you can do is instead learn to enhance your personality as such results yield long term benefits (sometimes permanent). For example conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intelligence but boosting your conscientiousness increases your capacity for self-improvement (including increased learning and thus intelligence). Same with lowering your neuroticism. Expanding your openness is directly correlated with increasing both intelligence and happiness.

Perhaps the single most important short term thing that yields long term changes to the mind is to improve yourself physically. Becoming athletic results in short term measurable increases to intelligence.

The single greatest differentiator is becoming more physically durable. When you are less prone to injury, heal faster, and physically tougher you are less risk adverse. Your neuroticism drops to near 0. This alters everything about how you perceive the world including what you do with your time, your interests, and your relationships with other people. It directly affects what and how you learn and the paths you take to accomplish work tasks, even something as boring as writing code.

Unfortunately physical durability is largely fated to good genetics and good diet. The maximum soft tissue healing rate for compound injuries in humans is about 70 hours (it’s also the maximum infectious rate for microbes in humans). Some people have that near invincibility naturally like Wolverine in the comic books (not the movies). Some people have unbreakable bones (soft bones at 1.5-8x higher density). Some people can naturally produce vitamin D in the dark without need for sunlight or risk of depression (gingers).

[theaussiestew]

While the research does point to general intelligence being largely fixed I find this to not be true in my own personal experience. I find that this kind of fixed belief, plus other beliefs like “I’m not good at this, or I’m not good at that” actually drag down performance. Of course, if we’re 4“11’ then we’ll never play in the NBA, but I mean beliefs like “I’m not good at math” or “My IQ is only so and so, therefore my intellectual ceiling is this”. I truly believe that we can increase our intelligence by 1 to 2 sigma (15-30 IQ points) if we make an effort to train not only our physical heath, but also emotional health, mental health and finally spiritual health. For me, it was realising that so much of my brain power was tied up in unresolved moments of the past, poor diet and exercise. With those out of the way, as well as some meditative exercises, I feel so much clearer than I was in the past.