May 27th, 2026
Smarts Matter Part 2
It’s important to be educated. It’s essential to be smart.
Last week I started a list of the reasons smart people, you and me included, sometimes do remarkably dumb things. We covered the first six. Emotion, quantity, recency, friends, history, and diligence. If you missed it, the gist was this. Education hands you a diploma. Smarts hands you a way home.
Here are the other six. I’d argue these are the ones that really separate the people who sleep well at night from the ones who lie awake wondering how on earth they got talked into it.
Pressure. Pressure is a sales tactic. That’s all it is. Somebody, somewhere, is being paid to make you decide before you’re ready. The cure is embarrassingly simple. Decide, in advance, that you will not decide today. Say it out loud if you have to. “I never make a decision the same day I’m asked to make one.” You can always change your mind later, but a decision made under pressure is almost never the same decision you’d make under a quiet sky. Smart people make decisions through calm analysis, not pressured paralysis.
Time. Know whether time is your friend or your enemy. As a rule, buyers benefit from moving slowly. Prices drift down. Quality drifts up. Sellers benefit from moving quickly, because nearly everything, from a used Buick to a four-bedroom Colonial, loses value the longer it sits. Before you decide anything that costs real money, ask whether the clock is ticking for you or against you. Then act accordingly.
Escapes. Here’s a small idea that’s saved me more than a few times. Big decisions are really little decisions, as long as you can change your mind. Life rarely cooperates with our plans. Markets shift. People change. The job that looked perfect on Tuesday looks unbearable by Friday. Smart people carve a back door into every commitment they make. Not because they expect to use it, but because knowing it’s there is what lets them walk through the front door in the first place. Escapes let us sleep at night.
Questions. The importance of a decision should dictate the number of questions. Nobody needs a forty-point checklist before picking a restaurant. But buying a house, hiring a contractor, signing a contract, choosing a doctor? Ask everything. Ask the obvious questions. Ask the silly ones. Ask the one you’re afraid will make you look uninformed, because that’s usually the one whose answer will save you. Serious decisions demand copious questions.
Filters. Don’t let what you hope influence what you see. We all do it. We meet someone charming and decide they’re trustworthy. We find a house we love and decide the inspection report isn’t really that bad. It’s a peculiar form of self-hypnosis, and it’s costly. Years ago I picked up a phrase I’ve never forgotten. When people show you who they are, believe them. Smart people evaluate decisions, and people, the way an accountant evaluates a column of numbers. It is what it is.
Optimism. If it doesn’t look good, it likely won’t get better. Decisions are like first dates. The handsome stranger with the easy laugh may turn out, somewhere between the appetizer and the entrée, to be the most boastful man in three counties. The wise move is the same in dating as in business. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, unwind it quickly. Don’t sit there hoping the appetizer will redeem the evening. It won’t. Constantly read the changing landscape, and adjust your course before the cost of staying exceeds the cost of leaving.
So there you have it. Twelve reasons we trip over our own feet, even when we know better. I don’t pretend to have mastered any of them. I still get hooked by recency. I still let optimism do the talking when realism should. But I catch myself faster than I used to, and that, I’ve come to believe, is most of the battle.
Here is the truth I wish someone had told me at twenty-two, when I had a fresh law degree and the unshakable certainty of a young man who’d just been handed one. Education is a beginning. Smarts is the rest of your life.
John Wayne, who never wrote a law review article in his life, put it more plainly than I ever could.
“Life is hard. It’s harder if you’re stupid.”
Amen, Duke. Amen.
