🧠 Is America getting dumber?

IQ scores in the US have dropped for the first time since 1932.

But Northwestern Universtity claims "this doesn't mean people are less intelligent".

Excuse me? 😂

Kids are consistently scoring lower in:

• logic/reasoning

• problem solving/analogies

• mathematics/computational

They say the tests simply "favor older generations and not newer ones".

And they're entitled to their opinion.

But with a little common sense, you and I can recognize something is shifting:

• Instead of figuring something out, planning, and reasoning for the best solution... we default to google (and now chatgpt) 99% of the time

• Instead of solving problems... people play victim and demand someone else fix their problems for them

• And math... well, I'm not a math guy myself so I can't say much here 😅

In all seriousness though, the more we enable laziness and lack of skill, every generation will be more lazy and less skilled (myself included).

We can't turn the world around from where it's going, but there's great news:

We don't have to.

All we have to do is control what's in our own homes and our own lives.

In my college Biology class, our professor would make us practice using our brains instead of Google.

He'd show a picture of some bizarre natural phenomenon and have us come up with our own ideas of what caused it.

A lot of our ideas were wrong. Some were right. The point was exercising our mind's ability to reason.

Plug this principle into your life and you'll never be stupid.

Just like muscles, if you stop reasoning, your reasoning muscles get weak.

Even if (or especially if!) you love using AI tools and technology (like I do), practice engaging your mind in other tasks, games, or projects to reason and problem solve.

For me, as much as I despise house projects, it keeps pushing me to solve problems and think creatively in entirely different ways than I do in my job or anything else I'm involved in.

There's even apps you can download just for keeping your mind sharp! (sudoku, anyone?)

Choose to own responsibility for what happens in your life.

It's no one else's fault, and you are 100% capable to change (almost) anything about your life.

In a world obsessed with making things easier, purposely doing hard things and solving your own problems could make you smarter and wiser than anyone you know.

(and sure... try, like, not using a calculator once a year or something...)