I read an Inc.com article on raising your IQ in 30 days a while back. The headline promises science-backed methods, and the article mostly delivers — but the real point is easy to miss if you skim it. Here’s the gist in plain terms, reorganized into the seven things it actually recommends.

1. Learn a new skill, not new information

The article’s core argument: learning increases IQ, but not the passive kind. Reading a book normally, watching a documentary, absorbing facts — that’s information intake. It fills your brain, it doesn’t make it work harder.

What moves the needle is a new skill. A new skill forces the brain to struggle, and struggling is what pushes it past its limits. The article’s examples are simple and free: brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand, learn a language, learn an instrument.

2. Make reading an active workout

Books aren’t useless — passive reading is. If you want reading to grow your brain, use techniques that force engagement:

• Sit in the character’s place — eat, breathe, and sleep as the character while you read.
• Memorize parts of the book, then recall them while writing the rest of the story.
• Finish the story yourself, with more intertwined plot points than the author used.
• Dissect the main character and extrapolate the traits that make them function.

3. Memorize and recall

Memorization is a workout by itself. Holding a passage in your head — not just recognizing it on the page — exercises the same recall machinery you use for everything else. The article’s reading techniques all lean on this: memorize, then recall while writing.

4. Play games that load working memory

Some activities are well studied for making you focus and think: chess, checkers, and dual n-back are the ones the article calls out. The common thread is that they stimulate multiple parts of the brain at once. The catch: you have to actually try. Half effort doesn’t build anything.

5. Sprint — or do HIIT

Cardio boosts cognition, but the article specifically recommends sprints: high intensity, taxing, and the biggest endorphin release of any exercise. If sprints aren’t your thing, HIIT in general is the alternative. Same mechanism — brief, intense effort the body has to adapt to.

6. Regulate your hormones

The point people skip: regulate and stimulate your hormones. Sleep, stress, and training all feed into this. Exercise and skill learning help; chronic sleep deprivation and constant stress undo them. If you’re doing everything else and sleeping badly, the other work is leaking out the bottom.

7. Rotate and push — never coast

The article’s final trick is straight out of Arnold’s muscle playbook: you have to confuse the muscle. The brain version is rotating your activities — 15 minutes on one, switch, come back — and always pushing for real effort. As long as you’re using the core functions of your brain, you’re in the right territory. Just don’t give it half effort.

Bottom line

Raise your IQ the way you raise anything else: consistent, hard, varied work. Learn skills instead of collecting facts, read actively instead of passively, train your working memory, sprint, sleep, and rotate. Thirty days of that beats thirty years of coasting.