7 ways to be more street smart

The difference between book and street smarts is that you don’t learn street smarts from a book. Given the name, this might sound obvious, but this sets the stage for a deeper understanding of everything in this article. 

Let’s address this difference between the two first.

Book smart vs. street smart

Book smarts

Books are organized and edited. Many are fiction. Books serve your desire for knowledge and entertainment. You can choose which books you want to read based on your ideology, affiliation, or preferences.

Book knowledge is safe, selected, and second-hand. There are no real consequences for getting the wrong knowledge from books, and you have zero skin in the game for its acquisition.

Though the phrase is “book smart,” the word “book” is synonymous with any type of second-hand collection of knowledge. You study other people’s life experiences via magazines, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc. 

Street smarts

The street is rough, raw, unsympathetic, and real. The street doesn’t cater to your emotions or care about what’s politically correct. There are no safe places on the street, and no one cares what you’re going through, what you identify as, or whether you’re a good person.

The only thing that matters on the street is what you have, what you want, and how well you can defend it once you have it. Street smarts often conjure up this idea of a gritty hustler in an urban environment, navigating through dangerous situations and dealing with shady characters in shadier situations.

While you certainly need street smarts to survive in the hood (check out my video on what I learned growing up in the projects), some places look civilized to the naked eye. However, those places are full of jackals waiting to take what you’ve earned, and they’ll use any means to do it. 

[Read about the environment where I developed and honed my street smarts here.]

There are several places in the real world where you need to be aware of how people think, behave, and scheme to pass you up, put you down, or rob you outright. 

You can’t learn how to be street-smart from a book in a classroom, on a podcast, or even this article.

I can only show you how to prime your mind to be more street-smart so you can better navigate real life and its people and obstacles.

7 ways to be more street smart

1) Embrace experiential learning and making mistakes

Train yourself to learn from experience because there are many things that you can only know this way. You can’t learn common sense and human nature from a book because we tend to want to believe the best or the worst in people.

We go to extremes in this regard until we get corrected by the harsh forces in society. Someone takes advantage of us, removing our naivete, or we miss an opportunity because we don’t trust anyone, erasing our cynicism. Reality will punish you because you’re not learning from your experiences, likely because you aren’t having many in the first place. 

Intelligence is simply pattern recognition coupled with the skillful manipulation or exploitation of that pattern. Street smarts are no different.

The difference is that you can only become more street intelligent by gaining more experience rather than studying. You learn how to read body language by needing to do it to survive. You learn the difference between seductive and aggressive eye contact by trying to accomplish one of those goals, whether you succeed or fail.

2) Be comfortable with uncertainty and discomfort

You’ll have to be aggressively confrontational with reality because you’ll need to verify your suspicions. That’s the only way you’ll hone the intuition required to develop high-level street smarts.

This training could mean something as harmless as reading body language and asking if your guess about their conversation topic is correct. You may have to go on the offensive if you think a mugger is about to get the best of you. 

Acting without 100% certainty is something that book-smart people are uncomfortable with. They would like to be able to prove and predict everything before they move into a situation. Unfortunately for them, 100% certainty and guarantees are not representative of real life.  

You must not only be comfortable with uncertainty but also accept that an uncertain situation may lead to a confrontation.

Check out the rest of my articles on living in the hood

3) Entertain different points of view.

It’s important to expose yourself to new ideas.

If you get stuck thinking from one perspective, it will be difficult to understand how other people think. If you can’t think like others, you can’t predict, mitigate, or take advantage of their behavior. This liability means other people will always surprise you, and with their initiative, you won’t stand a chance.

You’ll never become street-smart if you can’t think like other people. You can’t be attached to one viewpoint, and you must be able to see the world through another person’s motivations. When it comes to being street-smart, your perspective is effectively irrelevant.

You’re not trying to understand yourself. You’re trying to understand other people so you can reduce the penalty of their worst traits and maximize the benefits of their best ones. This means that you need to suspend your perspective on the world.

If you can do that, you’ll be able to predict what they’re most likely to do, which is the core of street smarts: understanding the behavior of other humans.

4) Don’t be afraid to admit that you’re wrong

Only by admitting that you’re wrong can you figure out what the error is and get right. Most people would rather double down on incorrect information than swallow their ego, admit they were wrong, and try to correct themselves.

Street smarts and ego don’t mix because the ego prevents you from interacting with humans in a manner that will make you feel inferior. For example, you’ll have to deal with many unknown and uncomfortable situations as you hone your street smarts and social intelligence.

But you’ll never develop this type of intelligence if you’re unwilling to do that—because you don’t have a set formula or rule to follow. People will always be able to take advantage of you because you don’t know better.

5) Don’t cherry-pick or force-fit information to align with your expectation

Don’t try to force-fit explanation of actions to your expectations. Take a detached view of what people are doing and then consider the most likely motivation for that action and the most likely outcome. Don’t be afraid to face an ugly truth if you arrive at it.

An unfortunate condition of many people is they will ignore the truth if it makes them uncomfortable or defies a dearly held view of the world.

If someone’s actions are confusing but antagonistic towards you, accept that they mean you harm and deal with it. Regarding threats to your safety or reputation, it is better to assume and be wrong than to be right and do nothing out of fear of appearing presumptuous. 

It may be hard to accept that a person means your harm (physical, mental, social, etc.), but street-smart people don’t ignore the writing on the wall. They act on their reads of a situation, even if they don’t like what it means.

You don’t want to be fooled. You don’t want to be naive. So you need to look at people with fresh eyes. And if you don’t like what you see, you can’t be afraid to confront it and do what’s necessary to protect yourself. 

6) Read between the lines of what’s being said

Pay attention to what’s not being said. Pay attention to anything said that’s not important.

You know you’re being deceived when irrelevant information is emphasized or essential information is downplayed. 

When you learn to spot what isn’t relevant, you give yourself a greater chance of spotting this everywhere. This technique is excellent for picking up relevant information from the noise of daily life.

Some of that noise is there to distract you. Some of that noise is simply a byproduct of modern life. Regardless of the source, these things keep you from focusing on what matters in handling a situation.

7) Study selling and marketing

Everyone needs to study marketing to understand how powerful words can be. 

Good marketing can make people buy things they don’t want and do something not in their best interest. 

Everyone needs to learn how to sell to understand humor behavior related to exchanging value. Selling is trying to get someone to part with something of value, whether it be money, sex, attention, or power. 

If you learn the mechanics of selling and marketing, you’ll recognize two things: 

When those things are done to you, it’s only when you can recognize when people are doing something to you that you can form a more effective defense against it. Guarding yourself against manipulation is part of becoming street smart. 

You realize that all people are engaged in selling and marketing, whether they want to admit it or not, regardless of how good they are at it. 

When you develop your skills to do so, you’ll be in a much better place to spot 

Summing up how to be street smart

Being street smart is about taking what happened to you, good or bad, and learning from it. Then, once you learn from it, apply it to reduce the likelihood of experiencing something negative again.

Street smarts come from a lot of experience. Getting a lot of experience is often the result of bad judgment that you learn from.

As long as you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty and are committed to learning from people and your environment, your street iq will improve.

The rest is up to you. 

Check out the rest of my articles on living in the hood

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