There are things that kill you instantly, like a bullet to the head or a fall from twenty stories. First aid can’t help you there. There are also things that kill you relatively slowly, like a bacterial infection. If you have even hours to live, you can get to the emergency room. But there is a small class of things that will kill you in minutes unless someone comes to the rescue. There isn’t time to get to a hospital, there isn’t even time for help to arrive in an ambulance. There is only time for someone already on the scene to provide emergency treatment that either solves the problem, or stabilizes you until help arrives. Here, first aid can be the difference between life and death. Not long ago I became a father. Being responsible for the life of someone so helpless and vulnerable spurred me to finally take first aid training, including CPR. Here’s what I learned from that experience, and what I think everyone should know about first aid. What most of the things that kill you quickly have in common is that oxygen can’t get to your cells. If you are choking, oxygen can’t get in. If your heart stops beating, blood doesn’t flow. If you have a severe wound, you’re losing that blood rapidly. If any link in the respiratory-circulatory chain is broken, your cells are starved for oxygen and you have minutes to live. The key first aid skills follow from this: CPR manually substitutes for heart and lung action; the Heimlich maneuver expels an object from the airway; a tourniquet stops life-threatening bleeding (on an extremity, at least—if the wound is elsewhere, there is a different technique, known as packing the wound). The basic skills are remarkably simple. The course that I took was only a few hours of online instruction, followed by about an hour of in-person demonstration and practice with dummy patients. And I went through a lot of the optional material, including things like stroke, fainting, and jellyfish stings. I’m sure I’m nowhere near as good someone with more professional training or experience, but an introductory course is not daunting. The most important thing I learned is that if you find yourself in an emergency situation, it is better to do almost anything rather than nothing. Again, if someone stops breathing for any reason, they have only minutes to live. They are dead by default, unless someone intervenes. There is very little you can do to them that is worse than cutting off their oxygen. In fact, it is probably better to attempt CPR or the Heimlich maneuver than to do nothing, even if you have never been trained and are only guessing, or mimicking what you have seen on television. The skills were fairly unsurprising to me and were consistent with what I expected prior to training. This does not mean that you don’t need to bother with the training, and of course if someone trained is on hand then let them take over. But don’t let the bystander effect paralyze you if someone’s life is ever in your hands. In fact, the American Heart Association promotes a form of CPR called “hands-only,” in which you only do chest compressions, without giving breaths mouth-to-mouth. Their instructions for this are: “push hard and fast in the center of the chest.” That’s about it. if you only know that, you can do better than nothing. Similarly, if you can find an AED machine (automated external defibrillator), you do not need training to use it. The instructions are literally: open it and follow the prompts. The parts are clearly labeled, and there is a voice recording that walks you through every step of the process. Wensha In the end, the biggest thing I gained was the confidence to act. I made an Anki flashcard deck for the course and have been using it to keep my memory fresh. If you do a similar course, you can download my deck from AnkiWeb.

I first made a version of this chart seven years ago today. It’s worth a re-up (and it’s never been on my blog). The meaning of this chart is: Everything you do should be justified either by being inherently enjoyable, or by being important for some other purpose. Absolutely minimize activities that satisfy neither of these criteria: things that are neither fun nor important. (This seems obvious, but think of how often it’s violated: online flame wars, doomscrolling and general overconsumption of news, long sob stories about trivial inconveniences, endless stewing over long-ago wrongs, etc.) Spend the vast majority of your time on things that are both enjoyable and important, such as (hopefully) career and family. Some time on chores, taxes, etc. is unavoidable. Some time on games and diversions is fine. But both should be small relative to the big, meaningful, deeply rewarding things. (And just to anticipate one reaction: if you enjoy arguments on the Internet, then they can go under “fun and games”.) It’s not a complete guide to life, but it’s important and something I apply often.

To be fed from a spoon requires three distinct skills. First, you must open your mouth when the spoon approaches. Second, you must close your mouth around the spoon once it has fully entered the mouth (and not before). Third, you must swallow the food that remains in your mouth after the spoon is withdrawn, rather than spitting it out. I know this because my daughter, who is six months old, did not possess these skills two months ago. She learned rapidly—ah, to possess the neuroplasticity of the young—but there was a brief period when she literally did not know how to be spoon-fed. (Note that I have not begun to describe the skills required to feed oneself with a spoon, in part because she has not yet acquired them.) The first lesson I have received from fatherhood is that everything must be learned, or very nearly everything. Babies are born with a very small number of reflexes and instincts: to suck on whatever enters their mouth, to “root” around on mother’s chest to find the nipple, to cry when they are uncomfortable. Everything else is a mental step in a long, upward climb. In the first weeks, both the parents and the child are focused on digestion. The infant is essentially an alimentary canal with arms and legs. (The limbs are superfluous and indeed get in the way more than they help; if children were properly engineered, they would be born limbless, and the arms and legs would grow in as they were needed.) The infant is learning to nurse, to sleep, and to poop, and that’s about all they do for a little while. Yes, they even need to learn how to poop, or at least that’s how the nurse in the maternity ward explained her grunting sounds and puzzled expression. All capabilities come in the tiniest increments. At first she did not know what her hands were for, and was more likely to scratch her own face than to do anything useful with them. After a few months she started to realize that hands could grasp things, but not how to do so. She would pinch and grip randomly when something was under them. Just feeling. She started to hold the bottle when I fed her, but she made every conceivable mistake in doing so. She would put her hands on top of the bottle, rather than on the bottom or sides. (Gravity has to be learned.) She would try to balance it on her knuckles, to comic effect. She would get a grip on the bottle, then move her hands and lose her grip while drinking. She would hold the bottle very close to the nipple, giving her no leverage to lift it. She would squeeze it between her wrists instead of using her palms and fingers. (She still does that, actually, and she’s gotten remarkably good at it.) At a certain point, she had learned that hands are good for holding things, but she would only grasp a toy if you literally put it in her hand. She would do nothing purposeful with it, not even look at it, and then drop it randomly, unconsciously. Later, if you held a toy out to her, she would stretch her arms out and reach for it. But she would not yet reach for a toy that was nearby on the ground. Then one day she started reaching for those toys, too. This was a triumph: her first sign of pursuing an object of her choosing, rather than one which was (literally) handed to her. Gross motor skills, like fine ones, have also come by degrees. At first she could push herself half an inch or so along the ground by flailing her legs, not always intentionally. Then it was intentional. Quickly she realized that by combining half-inch scoots, she could travel a longer distance—maybe multiple inches. At that point she was mobile, barely. For a brief time she would crawl towards a toy she wanted, but only if the toy was within a foot or two of her. Soon she grasped the inductive argument: if I can scoot N inches, then I can scoot N+1 inches. From then on her range was unlimited. (Although she has yet to get up on all fours, and she crawls by dragging her belly along the ground, commando style.) The crawling, and the grabbing, lead me to the other lesson I have received so far, which is that much of human motivation is curiosity and self-actualization, not mere comfort and pleasure—even at this very early stage. She has not yet said her first word, and yet already she seems driven by an insatiable desire to explore—to explore both the world and her own abilities. She delights in her toys but is not content with them; she wants to move beyond the delimited rectangle of her play mat, with its smooth, round objects of wood and plastic in bright solid colors. She seeks the world beyond the mat: to touch the carpet and the curtains, to crawl behind and underneath the chair, to handle a grown-up cup, to pull clothes out of the drawer, to grab at hair and glasses and clothing, to eat the tag hanging underneath the sofa. She crawls towards objects of desire, but not all her motion is directed at a tangible goal in the environment. She climbs over cushions, or up a foam-block incline, or up my chest, apparently for the fun of doing so. The first time I helped her sit up, at a few months old, the look on her face was wonder and amazement. I’m sitting up! How did that happen? I didn’t know that could happen! Now when I offer a hand, she doesn’t just sit up: she stands. Sitting is for three-month-olds. She stands: wobbling, swaying, shaking, sometimes almost collapsing into a seated position, usually getting back up with the slightest tug. The look on her face is still one of exhilaration, every time. If her utility function were purely based on physical comfort and pleasure, most of this would be inexplicable. She already has the cushiest life imaginable: she has servants to feed, clothe, and bathe her, to carry her from room to room, to soothe her to sleep, even to wipe her bottom; her slightest whim or discomfort is attended to quickly if she but makes it known. If the goal of life were to relax and take it easy, she would already be at the pinnacle, with nowhere to go. But—as she reminds me, with every striving crawl across the room, with every curious coo at a strange new object—relaxation is not the goal of life. Not of hers, nor of mine, nor of humanity’s. Our lives are not complete without challenge, adventure, play, and curiosity. When the mere struggle for survival does not provide enough of that—and it has not, since hunter-gatherer times—we invent it for ourselves: through games and sports, through travel, through storytelling, through math and science. We run races, climb mountains, compose ballads, peer through telescopes. These things don’t put food on one’s table, a shirt on one’s back, or a roof over one’s head. That’s not why we do them. We do them in order to be fully human and fully alive. And so does she, even if, for now, she is climbing sofa cushions instead of mountains, and peering at a set of plastic measuring spoons from the kitchen rather than at the cosmos. Daughter, that’s what you’ve taught me, just in your first six months. I only hope I can ever teach you nearly as much.

It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does. To be less pithy, but more clear: Most people are slow to notice and accept change. If you can just be faster than most people at seeing what’s going on, updating your model of the world, and reacting accordingly, it’s almost as good as seeing the future. We see this in the US with covid: The same people who didn’t realize that we all should be wearing masks, when they were life-saving, are now slow to realize/admit that we can stop wearing them. For a dramatic historical example (from The Making of the Atomic Bomb), take Leo Szilard’s observations of 1930s Germany: Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. … In late March, Jewish judges and lawyers in Prussia and Bavaria were dismissed from practice. On the weekend of April 1, Julius Streicher directed a national boycott of Jewish businesses and Jews were beaten in the streets. “I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933,” Szilard writes. “The train was empty. The same train the next day was overcrowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.” How to be earlier Independent thinking. If you only believe things that are accepted by the majority of people, then by definition you’ll always be behind the curve in a changing world. Listen to other independent thinkers. You can’t pay attention to everything at once or evaluate every area. You can only be the first to realize something in a narrow domain in which you are an expert. But if you tune your intellectual radar to other independent thinkers, you can be in the first ~1% of people to realize a new fact. Seek them out, find them, and follow them. I was taking covid precautions in late February 2020, about three weeks ahead of official “lockdown” measures—but only because I was tuned in to the people who were six weeks ahead. But: Distinguish independent thinkers from crackpots. Both are “contrarian”; only one has any hope of being right. This is an art, honed over decades. Pay attention to both the source’s evidence and their logic. Credentials are relevant, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. Read broadly; seek out and adopt concepts and frameworks that help you understand the world (e.g.: exponential growth, network effects, efficient frontiers). Finally: Learn how to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Even when you see the present earlier, you won’t see it with full clarity, nor will you be able to predict the future. You’ll just have a set of probabilities that are closer to reality than most people’s. To return to the covid example: in January/February 2020, even the people farthest ahead of the curve weren’t certain whether there would be a pandemic or how bad it would be. They just knew that the chances were double-digit percent, before it was even on most people’s radar. Find low-cost ways to avoid extreme downside, and low-investment opportunities for extreme upside. For example, when a pandemic might be starting, it makes sense to stock up on supplies, move meetings to phone calls, etc.—these are cheap insurance. In some fantasy worlds, there are superheroes with “pre-cognition”, able to see the immediate future. They’re always one step ahead. But since most people are a few steps behind reality, you don’t need pre-cognition—just independent thinking.