How to Make People Think that You are Smart

Being smart is a serious business. The thing about being smart is, once you are percieved as smart, people automatically associate you and smart together. This can be helpful and a nuisance as well. If you are going for the 'smart person' attitude, it is helpful because maintaining the smart badge is a lot easier than earning it. It is, however, somewhat annoying when people see someone who they perceive as smart do something dumb, or not even dumb--merely human. They revel in the glory of your mistakes and try to find out more so that they can attempt to pull you down to their intelligence level in their own mind. People love to see the powerful lose their power. I have thought up a few good ways of maintaining your smart level, or perhaps even earning your very own smart badge.

One way to appear smart is to hang around people who are actually smart. If you are constantly hanging around the pot-smoking, drunk emo kids who draw anime and listen to music instead of paying attention in class, then there is a good chance that people will assume you are one of them. Try hanging out with the people who talk about computers and books, Ahem...literature, and mention politics and the economy in passing. Some of the things that they may discuss can be dreadfully boring, but that is the price you have to pay to appear smart.

So once you find the right group of people to hang around so that you appear smart, you may encounter some problems if your brain isn't quite up to par with theirs. Their conversations may leave you coughing in the dust, so the best way to appear to understand them without actually having to know anything, is to just agree with them. Nod your head enthusiastically every once in a while, while saying, "yea" or "uh-huh". The hardest part of this is that sometimes you need to appear to be bored with what they are saying, and sometimes you need to appear rivitted, but you are trying to interject your own comments in the conversations to impart your knowledge on them. In reality, there is nothing that you really have to say at all because you have given up on actually understanding the things they normally converse about.

Another good tactic to use to appear more intelligent than you are is to use big words that mean simple things, or are so obscure people can't correct you because they don't know the correct meaning of it. This may take the most work out of any of the methods that I am mentioning, but it really is worthit. A good way to practice would be to go to Microsoft Word and type in some words that are commonly used. Then, go to the thesaurus and find some longer or more difficult sounding words that mean the same thing. You will have people coming to you for the answers to physics tests in no time if you keep this up for long!

The final way to appear smart is very simple--change the subject. This method, while the easiest to accomplish, is the most dangerous because people who are smart don't actually like to be interrupted while they are talking about something that they know a lot about. You have to try to change the subject to something that was very similarly related the previous topic, but is different enough so that you can understand it.

So there you have it--some ways wherein unintelligent people can appear to be rather intelligent. I just hope if you know me, you don't compare these methods to my own life. I might have some explaining to do.