About a month ago, to my embarrassment, I learned I'd been tying my shoelaces wrongly my whole life. A minute later, thanks to Google, I discovered that I couldn't even offset my shame with self-deprecating pride at how uniquely stupid I'd been, because the internet is full of people reporting exactly the same epiphany. There's even a TED talk – a TED talk! – in which a man describes his shoelace enlightenment. (In short: use a reef knot, not a granny knot. What's bizarre is that I know my knots; I'd just never applied that knowledge to my shoes.) My feelings of stupidity deepened shortly afterwards when I learned that you can tell which side of an unfamiliar car the petrol flap's on by the little arrow on the fuel gauge. Who knew? Everyone else, apparently. It was enough to make an allegedly fully functioning adult start to worry. What else had I been doing wrong?
And, equally pressingly, how would I ever find out? The advice industry – self-help books, how-to manuals and suchlike – isn't much use here. Ordinarily, you realise you have a problem, or a lack of knowledge, then seek help. But in this case, by definition, we're talking about things you don't know you don't know. Eventually, I found a single book – published, spookily, almost the very day I learned to tie a shoelace, in August. It's called You're Doing It Wrong!: How To Improve Your Life By Fixing Everyday Tasks You (And Everyone Else) Are Totally Screwing Up, by Lee Thornton. It told me that red wine should be served slightly chilled, not at room temperature, and that coffee, beyond a certain threshold, makes you tired. I've since also learned to stop cooking scrambled eggs while they're runny, because they'll continue to cook in the heat of the pan. Oh, and adding salt to water doesn't make it boil faster. Now, I can barely cook anyway, so these details don't much matter, but perhaps they will to you.
The best way to figure out what you don't know you're doing wrong in daily life, I suspect, is to ask others what they figured out they were doing wrong. This happens to be the subject of the second-most popular thread of all time on the redoubtable advice website Ask MetaFilter: "What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realise you've been doing wrong all along?" Fuel flaps and shoelaces feature, as do numerous confessions relating to pronunciation – thinking "misled" was "mizled", or that "segue" rhymed with "league" – and more than one person who was astonished to discover they could scoop kiwi fruit instead of laboriously peeling them. And did you know how to remember, at fancy dinners, which bread plate and wine glasses are yours? Curl the fingers of each hand down to the palm, then extend the index finger: you've made a letter "b" on the left, for bread and a "d" on the right, for drink. (I advise performing this inconspicuously, if possible.)
Not that such realisations need be confined to trivialities. As one MetaFilter poster explained, "I have just realised, in the last year (and I'm almost 40!) that just because someone is related to me does not mean I have to allow them to treat me badly." An unquestioned assumption had finally been questioned, to liberating effect. Me, I just waste less time stooping to retie my laces. Which isn't nothing. And at least I've never peeled a kiwi fruit.
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