Twitter is a wonderful social network. I don’t know about their financial records, but what I do know is that it made me a lot smarter. On Twitter you can find almost anything that can be posted online: Kitten GIFs, cooking recipes, baroque music, political debates, etc. A lot of crap and a lot of brilliant content. With some curation and some time you can design the perfect timeline to make you smarter. Everything is out there, waiting to be found.

1. Read, meet and talk with people smarter than you

There is always someone smarter than you out there. Because there’s always someone out there addressing a particular issue in a smarter way than you. And like Nicolas Cole said, “Extremely smart people read a lot, but they also read quality stuff”. The best way to read quality stuff smart people read is to read quality stuff smart people share. And then “Smart people surround themselves with smarter people”. On twitter, you can talk to (and even meet) a lot of smart people. Most of them are on Twitter because they like to talk and share. As long as you don’t behave like a nasty troll, many of them are happy to talk. And by reading there conversations, you can discover new persons that are sometimes even smarter.

2. Debate “deliberate practice”

Debating is one of the most efficient ways to test your knowledge and beliefs against other’s, and by doing so you become smarter. And when you debate with people smarter than you on Twitter, it is close to deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a way to quickly improve performance. I first heard about it in The talent code by Daniel Coyle. To apply it to an activity, you have to repeat a lot and have feedback on results continuously available. As it’s highly demanding mentally (because of the focus) you may feel exhausted after it. And that’s how I often feel after a deep and interesting debate on Twitter. When you’re wrong, people point it out really quickly, and as anything is written, anyone can do it and take the time to find the perfect answer. And even if you’re right, people rarely give up and the debate keeps going on.

Duty calls — http://xkcd.com/386/

3. Improve your emotional intelligence

With a lot of conversations comes a lot of emotions. And with only 140cc for each tweet, misunderstandings appear really quickly. To be able to continue to talk to people, you have to be really quick to pick up signs of emotions. A huge part of the our day-to-day communications is done by a written form, it is really useful to be able to pick up those signs. And again, it’s deliberate practice, because it goes really quickly, but with less consequences that an email to a business partner.

4. Discover new things and let some of your biases go

First you follow a couple of friends and famous people in your area of interest (for me it was Law, Business and Tech). Then you follow the people they talk to. And after some time you end up following accounts about imaginary architecture, pharmaceuticals, psychology, baroque music, and the list goes on. As many of those accounts are held by experts in their fields, the content is curated by competent people. You also learn to let go of many of your biases by talking with people you wouldn’t have met if it wasn’t for Twitter. And biases are for sure something that does not make us smarter.

5. Network helps creativity

Being creative on your own does not last long, and I’m pretty sure it’s not even possible. As Jeff Goins puts it “success in any creative field is contingent on the networks you are a part of”. On Twitter, you are in contact with so many different ideas, so many different persons, that if you let your thoughts go to diffuse thinking mode, you will be creative. But that is only the first part. By studying creativity Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi came up with a “systems approach.” First you have to master a skill as on individual , then you have to offer the product of your work to influencers to get feedback (the field), and then the gatekeepers open you the gate to the domain. On Twitter, you have influencers and feedback available easily.

6. Practice writing

Twitter is micro-blogging website, and therefore a place to practice your writing. The 140cc limitation forces to be very concise and clear. And you can write and test your skills. And the more you write, the better you get. Practice makes perfect. Using a pseudonyme can be the perfect way to do it in freely. If you want to create meaningful content, test if the things you say are clear enough, the reactions on Twitter can give you a quick feedback. And more than once I found myself having to change sentences that were not as clear as I thought. And if something is not that good, you can still delete it, it’s just a tweet, not a full blog post that took a lot of time to write.

Bonus : Twitter is introverts’ dream

Many people thrive when they are in large groups, some others have a tendency to prefer small and quiet gatherings. Most of the positive effects I described can be achieved (less quickly) in bars or conferences. But that solution does not suit many introverts. On Twitter you can go straight to the point, get rid of the small talk and have all the benefits of large discussions, without some of the things that make introverts uncomfortable.