I’ll Know Someone’s Pseudo-Smart When They Do This

I met up with an old childhood friend called Nick for coffee and we ended up talking about writing.

Well, I say talking.

I mentioned something I’d been working on, and Nick immediately started giving me advice. Like why I was probably approaching it the wrong way, what writers should actually be doing, and how he thought I could get better results. Then he’d give me another example, explain why that proved his point, and move on to the next thing I was apparently doing wrong.

I tried to explain that I literally do this for a living, but he’d interrupt before I could finish. I’d start making a point, and he’d jump in with a correction. Eventually, I just sat there and let him talk.

Nick has never published anything online. Ever. Yet somehow, he was explaining writing to me with the confidence of someone who’d spent the last 20 years publishing bestselling books.

Crazy, right?

That’s one of many things that I think can make someone pseudo-smart. They don’t seem particularly interested in finding out whether the facts they have are accurate. Instead, they’re often…