Intellect is the ability to learn, reason, create, know and understand.
You can’t know it all, but every little thing helps, right? I believe our intellect holds the key to the limits of our own development and life satisfaction. Becoming educated either formally or informally and following other intellectual goals and pursuits contribute to our lives substantially. This is especially true of health and fitness.
In the late 90s, I worked at a very popular and large gym in Northern Utah. Every day around noon the gym would slow down and one particular guy would come in for his workout.
You could tell he was a bit out of his element. Often he’d wear dirt encrusted boots over his soiled and greasy jeans. I hate when people wear jeans to the gym. It’s not a fashion thing (who’d take fashion advice from me?). Rivets on jeans rip vinyl seats. So do belt buckles, so do dangling multi-tools - he was wearing all of them. The first time we pointed out his belt buckle ripped the bench he was lying on he seemed genuinely sorry, but it didn’t stop him from doing his next set.
His workouts were - strange. He had a thing with his neck. It’s all he worked on. He’d come into the gym several times per week and walk down the rows of exercise machines trying to do things the machines weren’t designed to do using his head and neck. For example, you are supposed to sit on the leg extension machine and put your legs behind the pad then lift the pad by extending your legs out in front of you. He’d kneel down beside the machine, put the side of his head on the pad where your feet are supposed to go, and push it around with his head using the muscles of his neck. He’d sit there on all fours, head on the footpad doing head/neck exercises for sets of 50-60 reps. Then he’d walk over to the cable machine and try to hold the handle of the cable under his chin while he did chin-tucks. Dozens of them. The weirdest one I saw was where he padded a barbell in a squat rack, stood underneath it placing the top of his head in the middle of the barbell, then stood up with it trying to balance it on top of his head. He’d do a set where he stood there balancing the barbell, shaking incredibly, for 20-30 seconds then put it down. Then he’d pack on more weight and do it again. The dude could pick up an enormous amount of weight on his head.
After weeks of watching him do this, I decided I’d hit him up about it. While his workout didn’t make much sense to me, maybe I was missing something.
I had a really nice conversation with him. Such a nice guy. He said he really admired people with thick necks and profound jawlines. He said he was rather embarrassed by his comparatively skinny neck and weak jawline. He explained a friend told him working out would help with this. So he joined the gym.
I asked him “why only do neck stuff?” He said he was really happy with the rest of his body. He didn’t think he needed to work on anything else. I asked him if he was open to some other points of view on this. I even offered some training. He said, “No, thank you. I think I’ve got this.” With that, he gave me a wry smile and he was off to the next neck thing.
There was so much I could have done to help this guy. Turns out, I wasn’t the one missing something. It was totally him. Thick necks and profound jawlines from lifting weights come as the result of heavy compound lifts. Lifts like squats, deadlifts, presses and pull ups. Working the neck directly isn’t very effective for building neck muscles. This is because it’s hard to apply direct resistance to the head, which is why he was on all fours at the leg extension machine. People who work their necks usually do so as a type of therapeutic or preventive program. My dude needed a little more knowledge and I was sad he wasn’t open to it.
How to Improve Intellectual Health
If you’re over 40 and not actively sharpening your mind… you’re drifting. And drift is the enemy.
Here’s how to stay dangerous:
Stay Curious
Start asking better questions. Why does this work? What don’t I understand? Curiosity keeps your brain young—and most people lose it because they stop using it.
Never Stop Learning
You don’t need a classroom. Read. Watch. Study. Take a course if you want—but don’t confuse “done with school” with “done growing.”
Read Outside Your Bubble
If everything you read just reinforces what you already believe… you’re not learning—you’re hiding. Mix it up. Different viewpoints force your brain to work.
Think, Don’t Just Consume
Stop blindly accepting information. Question it. Break it apart. Decide what actually makes sense. That’s where real intelligence is built.
Create Something
Write. Build. Draw. Teach. Creating forces you to organize your thoughts—and exposes what you don’t actually understand yet.
Have Real Conversations
Talk to people who think differently than you. Not to win—but to understand. That’s how your perspective expands.
Clean Up Your Inputs
Your brain is only as good as what you feed it. Less junk content. More substance. Be intentional with what you watch, read, and listen to.
All of our thoughts and decisions are influenced by our experiences, academic knowledge, creativity, general knowledge and common sense.
Intellect truly holds the key to the limits of our own development. In this case, had my new neck-flexing friend understood more about the limits of his weird programming, he’d have gotten a lot more out of his workouts. He likely would have actually accomplished his goals. Predictably he didn’t. He went away after a few short weeks after our discussion, his neck none the thicker.
You can’t know everything, but every little thing helps, right? Maybe the best thing to know, is the fastest way to improve the intellect is simply to know there is always more to know. It appears to me, with intellectual development, it’s not always about how much you know, instead it’s more about how much you don’t. French philosopher Albert Camus probably said it best. He said, “An intellectual is one whose mind watches itself.”