How to Do Everything – The New York Times

The art of learning things

By Malia Wollan

Illustrations of radio

If you want to know how to do something, don’t just search the internet. Instead, find someone who already knows how to do it and ask them. At first, they’ll give you a hasty, crude answer, assuming you’re not interested in all the procedural details. But of course that’s exactly what you’re looking for! Ask for a slowed-down step-by-step guide through the specifics of the matter.

For seven years I did just that – I called a stranger and asked him to describe how to perform a certain task or skill. For my weekly New York Times Magazine advice column, I interviewed hundreds of experts, including a heart surgeon; a congresswoman; a boy scout who survived a tsunami; a hospital baby stuffed animal; a telenovela star; a sea captain dodging icebergs; many psychologists; a gravedigger; Scientist; Artist; astronauts; and a 13-year-old soda pop entrepreneur.

Sometimes the instruction was related to a physical task (How to save a cat from a tree or How to milk a killer whale), and sometimes the skill was emotional (How to apologize to a child or How to propose an open relationship). In any case, the advice eventually migrated from precise instructions to the most existential guides on how to navigate the world. Take the safecracker from Providence, RI, who after about 40 years on the job knows that almost all locked safes will be empty, but that people will still want to open them; we are curious, greedy and prone to ignoring terrible odds (How to Crack a Safe). Or the laughter researcher who’s tickled humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas, reminding us that touches should be consensual (How to Tickle Someone). Or the eighty-year-old British actor’s advice on playing dead: There’s no need to thrash about, gasp or spit out guts – sometimes death is just a gentle slide toward stillness.

Hearing this philosophical instinct week in and week out from all sorts of people around the world has made me deeply like us humans. We’re all out here together trying to connect; finding meaning in our work; trying to live our lives in these vulnerable fleshy bodies. In writing 301 columns, I tried to create a toolkit for the absurd and the serious. I sought advice on animals and empathy, birth and death, pitfalls and skipping stones – a compendium of tidbits that together happened to create a guide to life from democratic sources over time.

Surprise me with a tip!