Right now, someone is hesitating to apply a tourniquet because they’re afraid of costing a person their limb. Someone is waiting 24 hours to report a missing person because they think the law requires it. Someone is leaving a sleepwalker alone near a staircase because they think waking them is dangerous. Someone is pouring hydrogen peroxide into a wound because they think they’re cleaning it. Someone is stopping chest compressions to attempt rescue breaths that aren’t required.
Every one of them is wrong. Some of them are watching someone die because of it.
From a West Point graduate and former Green Beret who has spent a career separating what actually works from what merely sounds right, You’re Doing It Wrong is a reckoning with more than 130 myths, misconceptions, and pieces of bad advice that most people carry with complete confidence — and act on every day.
These aren’t trivia. The tourniquet myth has a body count. The missing persons rule has never existed. The sleepwalker rule has no medical basis. The brown bottle in your medicine cabinet may be making things worse. The CPR guidance most people learned has been revised — and the old version has cost lives.
The other entries cover everything from the kitchen habits working against you to the history your teachers got wrong to the psychology research that explains why your instincts are systematically, predictably wrong.
New York Times bestselling author Bob Mayer brings Special Forces after-action discipline to the information you carry every day. The goal isn’t distrust. It’s recalibration.
Being wrong isn’t a character flaw. Staying wrong after you know better is.
Start correcting.
