CHAPTER 7: SMARTEN UP
(THE INTELLIGENCE TRAIT)
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth.
—Carl Jung
Modern society has developed into a cognitive meritocracy. If you have no idea what that means, don’t worry—you’re probably still smart enough to get a woman.
It means that our society values brainpower and brilliance over brawn and breeding to such a degree that intelligence is now the primary driver of your economic, social, and mating success. It doesn’t pay to be stupid anymore, no matter how much you can bench press or who your dad was.
This isn’t just true in school and work. It’s also true in short-term mating (in ways that it took science years to understand). And it’s especially true in medium- and long-term mating, when women are instinctively looking for high-IQ genes; bright, adaptable partners; and knowledgeable dads.
If you’re smart and girls ignored you in high school or college, you might be skeptical that intelligence matters to women. For years you’ve watched from your desolate masturbation cave as hot girls fell for a parade of apparently dumb jocks and frat douches. Why did you have Sahara-like sexual dry spells while those boneheads needed an extra penis to handle all their female admirers? Aside from athletic talent, friends, social status, and a good sense of humor, what did those guys have that you didn’t have?
That question answers itself: those four qualities you dismissed are actually clues to intelligence.
If you were a straight-A student, it’s easy to think that all your male sexual rivals were stupid and undeserving. But many of those guys who seemed like idiots to you—because they didn’t prioritize book smarts—actually had a lot of what’s called general intelligence, which basically reflects how well your brain works. Those smart-enough-to-mate guys may not have understood the quantum multiverse or how to program in Python, but they knew how to read people, how to be popular and gain status in a group, and how to solve problems. They were effective at the things women want.
That’s one reason why marines, cops, firefighters, and paramedics (professions not known for their Mensa membership) are so appealing to women. It’s not just the sexy uniform on the hunky body. It’s what the uniform signals—that society officially recognizes these guys as being effective at what they do and grants them special authority to do it. They had enough smarts to pass rigorous training and to survive real-world, high-stress challenges such as facing armed felons, enemy IEDs, toxic chemical fires, or driving ambulances at high speed through city traffic.
All of that effectiveness requires a fair amount of general intelligence. It’s a real-world IQ test with the highest possible stakes. You don’t need to be a genius to be a great firefighter—but being a dumb firefighter will get you killed in a hurry.
Book smarts (or academic intelligence) are important for economic success—but they’re not that important for mating success because books didn’t exist in prehistory, so prehistoric women didn’t evolve an instinctive attraction to bookworms.
Instead, women evolved to value forms of intelligence that predicted who’d make a good sexual partner, life partner, and dad under natural conditions. This is what all of those jealous “smart” guys aren’t smart enough to understand.
WHY WOMEN CARE ABOUT INTELLIGENCE
Several studies have shown that women can pretty accurately assess a man’s intelligence from two to three minutes of face-to-face conversation. Yet there are so many amazingly brilliant dudes out there who are failures with women. Their romantic lives are as barren as their intellects are robust.
If that’s you, you need to broaden your concept of intelligence so you can display it in ways that women actually care about because for women intelligence is no small thing. A recent BBC study of 120,000 people across fifty-three countries showed that the most attractive traits in a long-term mate were, in descending order of importance: (1) intelligence, (2) humor (which is a form of intelligence), (3) honesty, (4) kindness, (5) physical attractiveness, (6) moral values, (7) communication skills (another form of intelligence), and (8) dependability. Three of the top eight traits are related to intelligence.
In some way or another, most of these traits intersect with at least one of the facets of general intelligence: humor and communication skills depend on verbal intelligence; kindness and moral values depend on emotional intelligence; honesty and dependability depend on social intelligence. There’s a lot of scientific evidence now that women feel strong romantic attraction to these facets of general intelligence:
1. Social intelligence (SI): “There is no ‘I’ in team” is a popular phrase about selflessness and teamwork as a foundation for success. But what it’s really talking about is social intelligence—the ability to understand other people’s beliefs and desires and to operate effectively in social relationships and groups for the benefit of all involved.
Millions of years of primate social evolution have given both sexes social intelligence partly so we could manipulate, deceive, and influence others for our own interests, but also partly so we could anticipate their needs, cooperate easily, and resolve conflicts. Social intelligence is crucial for being a good partner and dad, so it is highly valued by women. Some very bright guys have a distinct weakness here, which gives people the mistaken impression that there’s no connection between social intelligence and general intelligence.
2. Emotional intelligence (EI): For women, there is a special allure to men who can get inside their heads and know what they’re thinking, sometimes before they’re even consciously thinking it. This is not some crazy Inception-level brain-burrowing trickery. It’s just emotional intelligence—the ability to understand and use your emotions to guide effective thinking and behavior and to read other people’s emotions accurately in their faces, bodies, and speech.
Over the last twenty years, advocates often claimed that EI was totally separate from IQ, but in fact, they’re strongly positively correlated: bright people manage their emotions better and create better emotional connections to other people—including women. Women adore guys with high EI because they’re less moody and dangerous and more empathic and cooperative—as boyfriends and dads.
3. Verbal intelligence (VI): Setting the whole “Leader of the Free World” thing aside, Bill Clinton is, by most accounts, a weird-haired, bulbous-nosed, hillbilly philanderer. He also has a Carnival-cruise-ship’s worth of charisma, and that made him the sexiest man in America for a decade—all of it born primarily of his ability to use words effectively, to express himself articulately, to directly connect with people, and to resolve arguments and lead effectively in groups. That is verbal intelligence.
VI is especially important in courtship because it also predicts your ability to tell good stories and jokes, to carry on an exciting conversation with active listening and good topic flow, and to have fun pillow talk after sex. Language probably evolved around a half million years ago, and women have been favoring guys with good verbal courtship skills for a very long time. (This was a central point in Geoff’s book The Mating Mind.)
4. Practical intelligence (PI): It’s not James Bond’s Eton education that makes women’s butter melt; it’s his ability to drive any vehicle, use any weapon, find his way in any country, and survive any practical challenge. PI means having the “street smarts” to cope effectively with daily challenges by selecting and shaping your tactics and tools to fit your context. It means you’ve acquired practical, real-world skills that bookworms tend to neglect—things like understanding circuit breakers, car engines, subway maps, tax forms, barbeque recipes, and gun safety. Women’s romantic fantasies often involve guys showing impressive PI in emergency situations. They instinctively value high PI as predicting effectiveness at life because a lot of challenges that potential partners and dads will face are at this level of practical problem solving, not abstract theorem proving.
Here again, people have the mistaken impression that PI doesn’t correlate with IQ because the blue-collar guys who specialize in PI-type jobs like electrician or mechanic aren’t stereotyped as having much book smarts. But those guys are smart, just in a different way.
5. Mating intelligence (MI): If more men had even a modicum of mating intelligence this book wouldn’t exist. Unfortunately, the ability to understand the other sex, anticipate their needs and desires, and display intelligence in romantically attractive ways has not been high on our list of “teachable moments” as a culture. Nor has making good choices about mating markets, dating venues, and individual women.
MI depends a lot on all the other forms of intelligence—SI, EI, VI, and PI—and it taps deeply into general intelligence. This whole book is basically an exercise in applying your verbal intelligence (your ability to read) and general intelligence (your ability to think, learn, and act) to build up your mating intelligence.
6. Academic intelligence (AI): Our cognitive meritocracy puts a lot of emphasis on book smarts: doing well on the SAT, going to a good college, and getting the credentials required for most high-paying jobs. That’s fair enough because book smarts are highly correlated with general intelligence, and they strongly predict your ability to succeed in school, work, and wealth building—each of which signals good partnership and fatherhood potential.
Here’s the frustrating part of academic intelligence, however: women have not evolved to feel romantic attraction to your raw IQ. They don’t care that you have a Mensa card. Your intellectual ability is not appealing—what’s appealing to women is what you do with your intelligence, as displayed through your social, emotional, verbal, practical, and mating intelligences.
Here’s how all these different forms of intelligence overlap:
Note that general intelligence is at the top because it’s the most important, it predicts all the others, and it’s what women are instinctively trying to evaluate when they meet you. Mating intelligence is in the middle because it’s the focus of this book; it overlaps a lot with general intelligence and draws upon all the other intelligences, which actually overlap (and correlate) with each other a lot more than the diagram shows. (For example, practical overlaps with academic; verbal overlaps with emotional, etc.)
Intelligence shows up again and again in what women want—and not just when they say they are looking for intelligence itself, but also in the attractive traits that signal good genes, good partner, and good father. Intelligence has very high heritability—almost as high as the heritability of height—and positively correlates with a wide variety of desirable, adaptive traits, like brain size, body symmetry, physical health, and longevity.
Women understand instinctively that bright dads are much more likely to have bright, healthy kids than dumb dads are—even if the sexy genius leaves after one night of pregnancy-inducing passion. The logic of female mate choice works like this: a guy’s clever courtship reveals his general intelligence, which reveals his general brain function, which reveals his general genetic quality, which predicts how well his kids will survive and reproduce in turn. It’s not that bright people have special genes that turbocharge their brains; they just have fewer mutations that mess up their brains than average people do. So by choosing a man who’s smart, a woman gets a huge range of genetic benefits for free.
Intelligence predicts helpful cooperation and efficient division of labor in a relationship with a woman. Brighter guys are more likely to remember what’s on the grocery list, when to pay the bills, and which sexual positions she likes. They are likely to achieve higher socioeconomic status, so they’ll bring home more meat (if they’re hunters) or money (if they’re workers or entrepreneurs).
They’re also more mature at any given age (remember that IQ was originally mental age divided by chronological age), with stronger ego development and moral reasoning. They also have lower rates of drug addiction, unemployment, and crime—which are huge predictors of women breaking up with and divorcing men—and they are less likely to cheat on or beat their wives, abuse their kids, or get in fights. Brighter guys also have a lower risk of death per year and so are likely to last longer as boyfriends and dads.
Intelligence also predicts teaching and mentoring ability, so brighter guys can teach their kids more effectively. Women get crushes on their teachers and professors partly because the intelligence required to teach new things to the women themselves will generalize to teaching new things to their future children.
IMPROVE YOUR INTELLIGENCE
So how can you get smarter?
Genes are not destiny, but genes do put some constraints on how smart (or dumb) you can get. You’re likely to end up about as smart as the average of your two parents (who are probably smarter than you realize). But if your parents are idiots, chances are that you will be too.
Nonetheless, there are many ways you can help your brain work as attractively as possible, given the genes you have. Some involve cultivating specific intelligences, skills, and habits. Some of them just require avoiding lifestyle choices that handicap the brain health of most American men. And guess what—they are some of the same things that handicap physical and mental health.
1. Sleep and Nutrition
Chronic sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you fat and weak (poor physical health) or emotionally unbalanced (poor mental health); it also makes you stupid and irrational (poor intelligence). Geoff can usually tell which of his students didn’t get enough sleep the night before a seminar because they’re the ones trying to make irrelevant, incoherent points. The fastest way to be smarter tomorrow is to get 8–9 hours of sleep in a completely dark room tonight.
Apart from water, your brain is made mostly of fats, so if you avoid eating animal fats and cholesterol, you’re depriving your brain of the exact repair materials it needs to function. If you begin eating lots of good, brain-building fats—like grass-fed butter, coconut oil, omega 3 fatty acids, and clean animal fats—you will see a big improvement in your mental energy and clarity.
2. Learn New Things
The more you understand about the world, the more you can discuss and debate ideas with other people (including women), and the more you will turn this knowledge into actions—and the smarter and more attractive you become to women.
You don’t have to become a walking Wikipedia or a Renaissance Man. Miyamoto Musashi, the greatest samurai ever (and a total Buddhist badass), said, “From one thing, know ten thousand things.” If you gain real expertise in any one thing, that can be your window into understanding everything.
For example, if you really understand car engines, you’ve got a stockpile of mechanical metaphors for understanding more abstract processes—like “Oh, mass media combines advertising and programming to drive viewer interest? That’s like a carburetor combining fuel and air to produce power!” And the more of these “mental models” you’ve mastered, the easier it is to find a metaphorical connection to any new concept.
What should be your first, one thing to master? Why not start with the things you already love? It could be anything—football, video games, hunting, snowboarding, whatever. Just identify something you care about, and ask yourself, Do I really, truly, fully understand it? Could I explain its coolest details and deepest principles to someone else—like a girlfriend?
If you can’t actually explain your favorite topic, go learn more. Even if you were bored in school because of boring teachers and boring topics, don’t let that deter you from learning about what you love. You don’t need a $100 textbook, and you’re not accountable to standardized tests. You’re free to learn in whatever way you enjoy—watching YouTube videos or Netflix documentaries, reading magazines or blogs, Skyping with your uncle who’s dying to talk about his favorite hobby, etc. Overall, women care more that you are intelligent about anything and less about what that thing is.
Don’t worry if you don’t know a lot of different stuff yet. Just start with whatever it is you know or you like, become knowledgeable enough about it that you could teach it to someone else, and then test yourself with real people (which, of course, includes women). Can you actually explain how American football works in a way that is interesting to that cute British woman you know, who’s curious about it? If not, you don’t really know football—and you won’t be able to use football as a metaphor to understand anything else.
3. Get Jobs That Develop Specific Intelligences
Obviously, jobs are a great way to make money so you can have a place to take women back home to, a bed to have sex on, and food to eat afterward.
But they’re also a great way to cultivate specific intelligences and learn attractive new skills. Don’t just choose a job for its hourly wage and convenience. That’s what 90 percent of American guys do, and they stagnate. You’re allowed to be more thoughtful and systematic about what work you do—even if you’re a teen.
Before you take a job, you should be asking yourself a list of questions:
• What am I going to learn, specifically and realistically?
• What mentors and role models will be there who can teach me?
• Who else will I work with?
• Is it a good mating market, with cool women around? (We cover this in Chapter 15: Find the Right Mating Markets.)
• Is it unusual and adventurous so it will give me cool stories?
Choose the jobs that can help you overcome your personal weaknesses, amplify your strengths, and broaden your horizons. If you’re shy, choose a job that requires a little more social interaction—like waiter or salesman. If you care about guns, get a job teaching in a shooting range so you get even better. If you’re a small-town redneck, get a job abroad that requires travel and exposure to new cultures. Jobs can teach you more than most classes—and instead of paying for them, you get paid for them.
Here are just a few of our favorite job recommendations for young guys seeking to get smarter about life:
Waiter/server/bartender: Of the most socially and emotionally intelligent people we know, more than half worked as a waiter or a bartender or at some sort of service job in high school or college. If you keep your eyes and ears open in these jobs, you can learn a staggering amount about people and relationships. Your social and emotional intelligence will grow quickly—because your tips will depend on it. Your practical intelligence will flourish because you’ll be struggling to master difficult skills, prioritize competing demands, and orchestrate service with coworkers. You’ll also come to understand how the hospitality industry works, so you’ll be much more comfortable taking a woman to any bar or restaurant anywhere in the world. And bonus: TONS of women work these jobs!
Sales: Working in retail sales is a crash course in life. It doesn’t matter whether it’s selling cell phones, cars, or insurance. As long as you’re dealing with the full diversity of the general public, your social intelligence will grow much stronger—because your commissions will depend on it. Sales teaches you about the mutual exchange of value that defines all human relationships. You have something they want (goods or services), they have something you want (money)—the only question is whether you can make a deal. If you can sell, you can persuade. And if you can do that, you have a set of skills that applies in every relationship and every job you will ever have. And bonus: You can get sales jobs that interact with a lot of women.
Working overseas: You could take a work-study year abroad in college. You could teach English in a foreign country. You could work as a spring-break chaperone at a Mexican resort, like Tucker did in law school (instead of going to class). After school you could build the first part of your career abroad, like Geoff did for eight years in England and Germany. Travel broadens the mind and fascinates women. By exposing yourself to different people and societies, you’ll strengthen your social and emotional intelligence. Exposure to new food, art, music, film, and festivals will boost your aesthetic intelligence. And by having cool adventures that make great stories, you’ll become more worldly and interesting to women. The U.S. has only 7 percent of the world’s land area, 6 percent of its megacities, and 4 percent of its women. To see the rest of them, go there, work there, live there, and date women there.
Start-up companies: Starting your own company—or even better, working for a small start-up—can teach you more about life, people, and money than almost anything else. If you have the brains and balls, there’s nothing better to shock your brain out of the complacency that you build up in the cozy confines of your parents’ home and your college. Start-ups will kick you in the teeth. They will demand more of your time, energy, and mental effort than you can imagine, in a high-risk, high-gain game. Unlike guys in well-defined jobs in big companies, those in start-ups have to master many different skills and keep lots of plates spinning in the air—building practical intelligence. Cooperating with colleagues and dealing with investors and customers build social intelligence. Learning to pitch ideas, run effective meetings, design Web content, and write good ad copy build verbal intelligence.
Countries with Lots of English Speakers
You don’t need to learn a foreign language to have fun working and meeting women abroad. Here are the countries where English is not the primary language but where most young women speak English well (with high or very high proficiency, according to http://www.ef.edu/epi/): Argentina • Austria • Belgium • Denmark • Finland • France • Germany • Hungary • Malaysia • Netherlands • Norway • Sweden • Switzerland
Research the ones that sound coolest to you, and rank the countries you think would be fun to visit.
4. Hang Out with Intelligent People
You tend to become like the average of the five people you spend the most time with. This is a well-tested, empirically supported maxim that is very important for your life.
If your friends are a bunch of brainless dildos who don’t read, think, discuss, or do anything, then either water has found its own level (which means you are one of them), or they are going to drag you down to the depths of their idiocy. If you want to get smarter, you need to meet, befriend, and converse and engage with people who are smart. This applies to all facets of intelligence.
Yes, if you’re at school or in a smarty-pants job, you should join the clubs and professional associations where the best and brightest mingle. But if you’re not going to be lighting up the Jeopardy board anytime soon, and you’ve started to build a life or a career in a different direction, don’t spend your time with the people who have no ambition or curiosity and are just punching a clock waiting for the sweet release of death. Hang out with the people who are good at making friends. Go back into the warehouse, and check out what those guys are tinkering with on break. Sit in on the conversation in the lunchroom that seems to develop every day instead of scrolling your Twitter feed or fucking around with your fantasy lineup. Those people are cultivating and displaying forms of intelligence that you can almost certainly use more of.
5. Take Gap Years during Formal Education
This one is especially for guys in high school. If you are planning on going to college, don’t go straight from high school. Sure, it’s an American tradition to go straight from high school, but it’s fucking stupid. There’s no good reason to do it and lots of reasons not to.
Your willpower and conscientiousness are still maturing until your mid-twenties, so the longer you wait to start college, the better your self-discipline will be. Geoff has taught college for decades, and he has seen that the students who do best and benefit the most are usually the “mature students” in their early to late twenties. They are there because they’ve already worked, traveled, and had relationships, and now they’re seriously ready to learn. By contrast, the eighteen-year-olds are there because their parents and teachers expected them to go. They’d rather be getting drunk and trying to hook up—the taste of freedom is still fresh on their lips.
So take a gap year—or three. If you wait, you’ll grow up before you go to college instead of during it. You’ll choose a better college; you’ll choose a better major and courses; and you’ll learn more in each course. Also, your extra maturity and mate-value will mean you’ll do way better socially and sexually in college.
By the time you start, you won’t be a virgin, you’ll be able to drink legally, and you’ll have an immense amount of experience. You will have had jobs, been places, dated diverse women, and done shit. You will understand the world in ways the eighteen-year-olds can’t, and you’ll basically be better at everything.
So you’ll have the highest status of the guys in your freshman class, and the freshman women will fall all over you. Who are you to deny them that blessing?
Even if it’s too late for you to take a gap year (because you’re about to graduate from college or you’re in your thirties), it’s useful to think about what you would have done if you had taken a gap year—and then schedule those activities into your life. What ten things would you have loved to learn or experience on a twelve-month sabbatical from normal life that you can’t learn from school or work? Of those ten, which three do you think would be most attractive to women? If you still have time to do them on an actual gap year before college, which would increase your mate value the most to college women?
Now schedule some time to do them for real!
6. Pursue the Right Kind of Education for You
There is an idea in our culture that the only “valid” education comes from formal schooling. This is BULLSHIT.
The authors of this book have six degrees between them, three of those being advanced degrees. And all of them will tell you that most of what they learned, they learned outside a classroom.
If you hate school, don’t let anyone shame or stigmatize you about it. You are not alone. Many, many young men feel the same way, and in fact, many of the smartest, most accomplished men (and women) in America did not finish their formal schooling.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a degree from Harvard, nor does Bill Gates. What they do have is a combined net worth well north of $100 billion from being founders and CEOs of two of the most important tech companies in the last thirty years. If you’re not going to college, you need to think in that vein. If you start a successful company, few women will worry about where you went to school. You’ve already got the material proof of your practical and social intelligence.
Likewise, nobody asks where successful actors or musicians went to school. Nobody is looking at the lyrics of a Jay Z song and saying, “I like the words, but there are so many spelling mistakes. Where did that guy go to college!?”
Remember: Women can judge your intelligence quite accurately from just a few minutes of conversation. You do not need educational credentials to be a viable mate. You just need to get in the habit of learning, thinking, and exploring and then using that intelligence in ways that make your life better—which is what women want to see.
That said, formal education does have its uses in signaling intelligence. In fact, American college works better at revealing how smart you had to be to get accepted (the “credential” function) than at teaching you useful things once you’re there (the “human capital” function—increasing your economic value as a worker).
So if you are planning to go to college, it helps to think of your degree as an IQ credential—that will help you make better choices about where to go and why. If you are applying to colleges now, go to the most selective, most famous school you can get into. Not because it’ll teach you more things, but because the name on the degree is most of the value you’re going to get from it. Either go to a really good school (meaning world-famous Ivy League–level), or go to a really cheap school that has a great mating market. (We’ll talk about mating markets later.)
The worst thing you can do is go to an expensive school that doesn’t have great name recognition or a very high proportion of cool women, such as Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, or Oberlin. They’re like buying a Hyundai Equus car: they’re expensive, nobody’s heard of them, and nobody’s getting laid inside them.
DISPLAY YOUR INTELLIGENCE
A date is an unconscious mutual IQ test. Just as you’re evaluating her brains—along with her body, personality, and background—she’s evaluating yours.
She sees how you cope with mental challenges, and she unconsciously evaluates your intelligence. She asks herself things like, Does he move gracefully and thoughtfully, or clumsily? Does he talk in interesting ways about diverse topics? Does he use good eye contact, facial expressions, and empathy? Does he know how to pronounce ratatouille on the prix fixe menu (if you have taken her to a fancy restaurant)?
The answers to those subconscious questions all influence her estimate of your intelligence and, thus, your mental attractiveness. If you want to give the best answers to those questions, you need to learn the most effective ways to demonstrate your intelligence.
Here are the best indicators of intelligence, in descending order of importance to women:
1. Sense of Humor
There’s a lot of research showing that a good sense of humor reveals intelligence of multiple varieties and is sexually attractive to women. In a study described in one of Geoff’s papers, intelligence predicted peer-rated sense of humor, which in turn predicted success in short-term mating. On the other hand, when controlling for sense of humor, intelligence did not directly predict mating success. In other words, higher IQ seems to help in mating only insofar as it makes women find you funnier. So basically, being funny is always attractive. Unless you’re trying to get laid at a funeral or the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Then you might want to save the jokes for lunch.
2. Conversation and Storytelling
According to recent research, humans evolved language at least half a million years ago. Verbal courtship and conversation developed as amazingly natural ways for us to display and judge each other’s intelligence, creativity, personality, and moral value.
Nowadays, with digital technology, we display a lot of verbal intelligence when writing online dating profiles, IMs, texts, emails, and social media posts. If anything, verbal courtship is even more important than it was a generation ago—despite most of it now happening through keyboards and text swipes rather than face to face.
What if you meet a woman at a party and she asks, “So, what’s your story?” Do you have a clear, funny, engaging, short narrative about where you’re from, who you are, and where you’re going? If you stutter and stumble around and only manage to blurt out your name and your address, she won’t be looking around desperately for your helmet and your legal guardian (which clearly you need); she’ll be looking for the nearest escape.
Learn what’s really interesting about your life story (it might not be the stuff you think it is), practice telling it to friends, get feedback about what’s fascinating versus boring, and be ready to share the highlights with women. Know your story and make it good.
Also, be mentally engaged when you talk with women. Learn to talk articulately. Women especially value verbally intelligent guys who can talk about their feelings and emotions (this doesn’t mean you have to cry). Make eye contact, look actively, have an expressive face, use gestures, and actively listen. These are the intelligence indicators that parents use to assess whether their babies’ brains work right, and they’re what women use on you too. If the light’s on but nobody’s home, they’re not going to keep knocking.
Later, in the chapter on talking with women, we’ll go deeper into sense of humor, conversation, and storytelling.
3. Creativity and Creative Skills
Why do you think so many men want to be musicians? Because women love musicians. That annoying guy who brings a guitar to a party and plays the one song he knows—he does it because it WORKS (at least sometimes).
Intelligence and creativity are tightly linked in the human brain, so having creative skills—like playing an instrument well or being able to draw a good portrait of a woman with paper and pencil—is a powerful, hard-to-fake signal of intelligence, and is thus deeply attractive to women.
But this doesn’t just apply to the obvious creative arts. The romantically impressive forms of creativity can be physical (dancing, physical comedy), social (relationships, people management), verbal (conversation, storytelling), entrepreneurial (business success), or intellectual (education credentials, writing).
4. Teaching and Explaining
Remember how bored you were in school? If you looked around, you probably noticed that the girls were bored too. They craved intellectual stimulation just like you did. They wanted to learn things, but their teachers typically weren’t satisfying that craving.
So, whatever you’ve learned, try to get comfortable with sharing it and helping women understand it better—just like you’d be thrilled if a woman explained to you how female orgasms work or why women rock the duck face in their Instagram selfies.
The topic doesn’t have to be fancy (like wine) or esoteric (like French literature). If your dad was a mechanic and you learned how to tell when you need to change the oil or if your brakes are shot, the ability to explain that knowledge and teach that skill to her so she can use it for herself is very appealing. It demonstrates virtually every kind of intelligence.
Important: When teaching or explaining something to a woman, avoid mansplaining it to her like she’s an innocent little kitten who is seeing the big, scary world for the first time. Being a condescending chauvinist does not make you attractive. Respect her intelligence because she is probably as smart as you are.
5. Keep It Simple, and Know When to Shut Up
A wise man once said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” Often, the smartest thing you can do around other people is to shut your fucking mouth, listen, and be open to learning.
Intelligence isn’t just about what you know; it’s also about knowing your audience, knowing how you come across, and knowing that you don’t know everything. Intellectual humility is a key sign of intelligence because the more you know, the more you realize you still have a lot to learn. When the brightest people hear an unfamiliar word or concept in conversation, they usually have the confidence to ask what it means. Their attitude is, “I don’t know about that, but I’d love to learn—tell me more!”
Another sign of intelligence and humility is keeping things simple. Don’t express strong views about complex topics if you don’t understand them. Don’t talk about American foreign policy if you can’t distinguish Iran from Iraq on a map. Don’t talk about immigration if the only Mexican you know isn’t even Mexican and she’s on a TV show where she plays the “vaguely ethnic neighbor.”
The brightest people we know are often the most plainspoken, with just the occasional technical term used precisely right. If you really want to signal intellectual insecurity to women, always use the most pretentious vocabulary: utilize instead of use, empower instead of help, or take it to the next level instead of improve. So simplify your vocabulary, and don’t use big SAT words when small words will do.
Simple doesn’t mean stupid, however. In this era of digital courtship through texting and messaging, it’s especially important to avoid common errors, like confusing you’re and your, affect and effect, or worst of all, supposedly and supposably. It won’t bother some women, but bright women will assume you’re iodine deficient. Before you send that next text, take a second to read it through and correct any mistakes that make it sound like you were a mistake.
Also, don’t brag about your raw intelligence. Shut up about your SAT scores, your IQ, your GPA, and your class rank. Mentioning them might (or might not) reveal your high academic intelligence, but it’ll certainly mark you as lacking social intelligence and mating intelligence (which are both more important for your mating prospects, as we’ve already discussed). Talking about them also reveals a lack of confidence and self-awareness. It’s like writing an online dating profile that claims “I’m really handsome” without including any head shots or “I’m really funny!” without actually saying anything funny.
Show women, don’t tell them. We will come back to that statement again and again because it is so important in almost all domains, including this one. Smart people are too busy being smart to talk much about how smart they are. Plus, there will always be someone smarter than you. Then what?
Takeaways
• Intelligence is not just book smarts (academic intelligence). General intelligence also includes social, emotional, verbal, practical, and mating intelligence—all of which are more romantically attractive to most women than book smarts.
• Women care deeply about intelligence because it reveals general genetic quality and brain function. It also predicts how effective you’ll be as a partner and father.
• You can’t boost your general intelligence very much because intelligence is highly heritable. But you can avoid the common lifestyle problems that make most guys dumber than they would otherwise be, like sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and micronutrient deficiencies. And you can develop specific forms of intelligence through life experiences, like hanging out with smart people, learning more about the things you love, and getting jobs that stretch your mind.
• You can also display your intelligence more effectively by cultivating a great sense of humor, improving your conversation and storytelling, learning creative skills like art or music, learning how to teach better, getting prestigious educational credentials, proving your brilliance with real-world success, and showing intellectual humility.