Teach your little brother to tie his shoes and he’ll use your lesson every day for the next seventy years.

Small skills have absurdly long lives. Ten minutes on a kitchen floor installs something that gets used every morning for decades, long after everyone has forgotten who taught it, which is a strange ratio between effort and result. Most of what you give other people works like that rather than like a grand gesture.

Teach one small practical thing to somebody younger this month: a knot, a bus route, how to cook a single meal properly. Stay patient past the point where it stops being fun. You are putting something into daily use for a very long time.