5 Self-Improvement Techniques That Actually Make You Dumber

Yes, that confidence is important. If there's one thing all children deserve, it's being called great.

The Terrible Truth:

Encouragement ... is awful? Yes, but there's something of a caveat here: Some kinds of encouragement are good, because painting that fence pure black or pure white is idiotic. Still, other kinds of encouragement will reduce you to some kind of lumbering dummy dum-dum. So how do you tell the difference?

It's simple: Praising someone for doing a whole bunch of work or putting a ton of effort into something will help them succeed. Praising them for being "a natural" or "gifted" doesn't. It's pretty easy to see why: When someone tells you "Good job for working hard!" your mind connects the praise to the hard work, which makes you want to work harder. Being praised for being a perfect little slab of brilliance that burps symphonies and sweats champagne makes you feel like your very existence is an accomplishment, and that you'll just naturally keep creating greatness no matter what. And that's how supertwats are made.

Warner Bros.
"My job experiences are: fisherman, hobo, and bar back. But, I believe I can be
a reporter for a Pulitzer-winning newspaper. How hard can it be?"

People are born with natural abilities, sure, but mastering something takes a metric fuckton of effort in virtually every instance, ever. Telling people they're naturally good at something perpetuates the illusion that success can just spontaneously appear in an effort vacuum. Telling people that they're gifted or a "genius" makes them feel good, but hell, so does heroin.

What I'm saying is that telling your kids that they're naturally good at something is just as bad as giving them heroin.

The Terrible Truth:

There's a twist here: A distraction, even a brief one, can decrease your brain's ability to process information by as much as 20 percent. However, waiting for an interruption that never comes actually improves your productivity.

But really think about that -- being available all the time means your email alerts are always popping up in the bottom right corner of your screen, because like hell you're going to mark sale alerts from Steam and GoG.com as spam. And even when you're away from your computer, your phone is making a helpful little noise to let you know that an email came. There's no avoiding it, which is why a study found that distracted workers cost businesses an average of $10,790 per worker every year.

Jupiterimages/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Uh, unless they're reading a list-based comedy website. Then they get back to work smarter and sexier.

I gotta say, of all the studies in this article, this is the one we're all the least likely to take to heart. Hell, I stopped to read an email from my editor while I was writing this entry, because my phone made the special noise I have reserved for when a Cracked editor emails me. And it shows: When I typed "xenomorph hiss site:youtube.com" into Google, the sun was shining outside and there was hope in the world. Now, the part where Hudson freaks out and 15 different kinds of porn later, I've completely forgotten what I'm even writing about.

And the difference is huge: They compared the brain power of Indian sugar cane farmers during harvest (when they're effectively rich and can eat however much they want) and pre-harvest (when they're basically poor and eating just to subsist), and they found the IQ difference to be around nine or 10 points. Being hungry -- the default state for everyone on a diet -- has the same effect on your intelligence as losing an entire night's sleep or headbutting a garbage truck in half.

The Terrible Truth:

It's not just the Internet and 24-hour news networks that are conspiring to keep you uninformed (spoilers for further down this page!), it's your brain. Key parts of our ability to process and synthesize new information shut down whenever we're confronted with something we disagree with. In fact, if we are bludgeoned (or bludgeon ourselves, as intellectual masochists are wont to do) with information that contradicts our inane beliefs, we can actually end up making ourselves cling even more desperately to our erroneous assumptions -- even if they've been proved false. In fact, especially if they've been proved false.

David Livingston/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
I'm just going to leave this here.

Amazingly, the harder we work at not being "that guy" at the party who can't admit he's wrong no matter what, the more likely we are to arrogantly claim that Obamacare is a socialist Islamo-Nazi takeover and get a flaming shot tossed in our face. And it sure isn't helping that ...

Nothing will earn you the rightful dismissal of your peers faster than casually saying that you "don't follow politics" or "don't really keep up with the news." Especially if you live in the United States, or another First World country, your every little decision has ramifications that stretch around the globe. Failing to pay attention to what's happening in the world isn't just ignorant, it's downright irresponsible. Just have MSNBC playing in the background while you play Dota 2, for fuck's sake.

The Terrible Truth:

OK, so watching all news isn't bad for you -- it's pretty much just the 24-hour networks. Remember that headline that was making the rounds a while back about how Fox News was making you dumber? They only spun it that way because the real headline -- "Journalism in the United States Is Less Reliable Than Inspector Gadget's Tragically Glitchy and Mangled Body" -- wasn't quite as clickable.

DHX Media
"Wowsers" is just another way of saying "What in the name of Christ am I?"

Yes, people who watch Fox News were "significantly more likely" to believe things that aren't true, but pretty much only in a way that favored the American right. People who watched MSNBC, NPR, and PBS believed, for example, that it had been proved that the Chamber of Commerce was laundering money (it was just accused), while people who watched network TV broadcast daily were more likely to believe that Obama signed the bank bailout (it was Bush).

But that's an old story from 2010. What about the 2012 study saying Fox makes you stupid? Well, although NPR did better that time, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC were still the least informative news sources. Fox is still the worst by a reasonably large margin (obviously), but when all three major news outlets in the country suck, picking on one of them and acting like they're the only problem is actually the exact goddamn core of that very problem. Even contemplating that idea has dropped my IQ into "Hey, look, a quarter!" territory.

J.F. Sargent is an anti-dumbass activist, vehemently lobbying against self-improvement. He has a Twitter, a Tumblr, and a Facebook.

Always on the go but can't get enough of Cracked? We have an Android app and iOS reader for you to pick from so you never miss another article.

Are you a fan of money, everlasting glory, but really just money? We want to give you that! (Particularly the money part.) Enter as many designs as you want into our T-shirt contest and you might just win $500.