From doubter to a believer — My tryst with touch typing

Having the right attitude can help you grow leaps and bounds

For the longest time in my life, I never believed that I could learn touch typing. I always had a preconceived notion that it would take me years of practice to touch type as a regular. Many times I felt that only the geeks would be capable of achieving such miraculous feats. I was so wrong, in fact, I was so far away from the truth.

I spent a hell lot of time surfing the internet about the best resources to get started with something (touch typing, coding, etc), while the single most important thing to do was to get started and pick up resources as the journey progressed. I wish I could travel back in time and tell my younger self back then to just get started and not overthink, make baseless assumptions.

Now to the readers wondering why the hell touch typing is important and why I started it, a technical answer would be that it improves productivity etc and amplifies your coolness quotient (😄 at least that’s what I thought). The real reason was that I had a laptop that did not have a backlit keyboard and I was someone who used to type by literally looking at the keyboard. It pissed me off when I had to work like this in a dark room as I was always in need of a light source to find the right keys on my keyboard. Finally, a month ago after much deliberation, I decided to start learning touch typing and it has turned out to be one of the best things I have invested my time into lately.

After reading some posts on the internet, I finally landed on keybr (😍 my favourite one). In the initial stages (for at least 2 weeks) I was so hooked that I used to spend literally an hour every day on it (comparatively less nowadays, ~10 min). This website had lots of interactive charts and visualizations using which I could track my daily progress and this proved to be a real motivator for me to challenge myself and just stick to learning. I realized that the f and j keys have little bumps on them and that too for a reason only after starting out with touch typing 😂.

I guess I initially started out with ~28 wpm and with regular practice, I was able to cover the entire keyboard and my speed improved a lot too (currently my peak is at ~60 wpm, avg is around ~50 wpm and if you are wondering if I am bragging about this then you are so damn right!). The fact that my fingers would find the right keys on the keyboard despite the speed improvement still feels like magic to me. The funny part is that I really don’t know how my speed improved (probably due to muscle memory) and it still leaves me flabbergasted. For someone who believed that learning to touch type was impossible and that it would take years of practice, this was a huge achievement and all it took was around 20 hours and some patience.

“You don’t become what you want, You become what you believe” — Oprah Winfrey

During the first few weeks into touch typing, I still had lots of self-doubts whenever I did not see a noticeable improvement in my typing speed as I have always suffered from impostor syndrome. I started to look out for people starting out like me and I found Kalle Hallden’s video, which helped me a lot in calming my nerves and staying focused. Ali Abdaal’s touch typing video also helped me on my journey as I found other amazing touch typing platforms like 10fastfingers and monkey-type.

This experience and the overall outcome have meant a lot to me in terms of boosting my confidence. One of the greatest lessons it has taught me is that many times it is our attitude towards life, learning new things, etc that decide what we can and cannot achieve. It is important to stay positive, be a believer rather than a doubter, and have the right mental set up to achieve a goal. Another thing I learned was the power of consistency, effort, patience, and perseverance. Together these attributes make one hell of a winning combination.

I understood that everything cannot be achieved in a day and that everyone has their own pace when learning something. I stopped comparing myself to others and strived to achieve linear progress — step by step. The little milestones motivated and pushed me towards tackling larger and seemingly impossible goals. On a similar note, I always thought that writing/blogging is not for me as I am not a professional (I don’t know what to write about, I don’t know if my content will be good, My language is not flowery like other people, etc), but here I am writing my first article at 3 in the morning hoping to spread positivity and inspire people to change from doubters to believers and become the best version of themselves. The trick is to get started.

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies” — Andy Dufresne

For any football fans reading this article, just FYI I ain’t a Liverpool fan. I am a Leo Messi and Barcelona fan, but I do admire Jurgen Klopp for the man he is and the progress he has made with Liverpool. Congrats on the recent silverware too 😉.