I guess I misunderstood it and falsely applied it to make my code clearer and more effective. I failed to become "more clever" in the process and now I'm doomed to write unclever code other people understand better.
Nobody said that you should never write unclever code. Unclever code is alright, but it does not help you to improve. When you want to have a "cleverness boost", you can try to write and debug some clever code thus applying Kernighans's lever. You are not doomed, you can start doing that at any time. I'm sure that the unclever code that you get to write most of the time will even improve after that process.
