Practice makes permanent.
Relearning a 30+ year old skill.
“And this non-college bullshit you’re giving me, I got two words for that: Learn to fuckin' type.”
Mr. Pink, (Reservoir Dogs)
I did learn to [expletive] type in Mrs. Nohavitza’s Microcomputer Applications class in 1990. I had such high hopes when I enrolled in the class—you see I have a form of dyslexia called dysgraphia that makes handwriting incredibly arduous and slow. When I was tested back in the late 80s, my cursive handwriting speed was three words per minute. I thought that learning to type would suddenly open the floodgates of writing. I got to the speed of about 30 to 35 words per minute in Mrs. Nohavitza’s class and then got stuck there. I languished at that speed in Mrs. Johnson’s Microcomputer Applications II class the next year. My touch typing speed is barely faster than the hunting and pecking that I did prior to learning to type properly. At that paltry speed I have stayed for more than thirty years. It is still more than ten times as fast as my handwriting speed, but not the lightning fast speed I was looking for. For whatever reason I have never been able to break 40 words per minute, much less the 50-65 wpm that most administrative assistant or data entry jobs require.
I think fast, and for a Texan, I speak fast. But I sure don’t write fast. And it annoys me to have my thoughts come out not in a torrent, but in little dribbles at a time. To have my productivity tied to such a poorly developed skill is not merely frustrating, it’s maddening. And it’s affected my quality of life. Not being able to type the required speed has made most office/admin jobs well-nigh impossible to find. And my body has suffered for it. I am in the part of my life where jobs that require standing all day are simply out of the question. Retail and cooking are no more. I do type fast enough to get a customer-facing job like a sales rep or in telephone customer service, but I have learned the hard way that my thin-skinned and rejection-averse personality is absolutely incompatible with those kind of jobs. I don’t know how to code, do SEO, or data analytics, and my IT skills are decades out of date—so what to do? Relearn how to fuckin’ type again, that’s what.
About three weeks ago I set out to relearn typing in earnest. Back in December I got a lifetime subscription to typing.com and started their beginner course. Before starting, I did a typing test. I got 30 wpm—worse than the 35 wpm that I was expecting. I did another typing test that day and got 38 wpm. Averaging the two, I was at about 34 wpm for my base typing speed. Which is about what I expected.
Without a clearer goal than “learning to type faster,” I practiced for a few days and then got bored. On March 26th I decided to pick up where I stopped in their beginner course. This time I have clear goals:
To fix my bad habits.
I am as addicted to hitting the backspace/delete key as those rats that have an electrode wired directly into their pleasure centers and a lever to push it whenever they want a hit of dopamine. I know that this one habit probably costs me a great deal of typing speed.
I also want to finally learn to type the number/symbol row without having to look at my keyboard.
I was home sick from school during the days we learned the top row and I have never really learned how to touch type numbers/symbols row.
My main goal is to reach 50 wpm.
This is so that I can apply for a particularly nice administrative assistant job with the City of Chicago. This union job requires a typing speed of 45 words per minute. I figure with typing 50 wpm consistently as my goal, I will have a bit of a cushion for the inevitable jitters and yips that are likely to accompany a real typing test. I should probably push for 60 wpm, but reaching 50 wpm seems doable in the three months that I have given myself. And 60 wpm seems so daunting. So, how is my progress so far? Practicing fifteen minutes a day, I finished typing.com’s beginner, intermediate, and advanced typing courses in a little more than two week’s time. I took a few typing tests on typing.com and monkeytype.com in the past couple of days. Here’s how I did:
I have only been practicing for little over six hours in total and I’ve already improved my typing speed by 8 to 12 words per minute—depending on whether I go with the typing.com speed or the Monkeytype speed. Not bad results for only about six hours of dedicated practice. Do I notice the difference in my day-to-day typing speed? Yes, I do. I have been writing this post noticeably faster. I can also type the number/symbol row by touch now. I am typing more accurately, and so I am not quite as backspace/delete key dependent. Success? Almost. It’s tantalizingly close. But I ain’t quite there. Will I be at 50 wpm in three months? Almost certainly, but there are a few things that I am going to do to help myself reach that goal. I am going to increase the time of my daily practice from 15 minutes to 20 minutes starting tomorrow. I will then increase my practice time in five minute increments until I reach 30 minutes per day. I am also adding another website to my practice routine: Keybr. Keybr is an interesting site. It teaches you to type one key at a time until you have the entire alphabet under your belt. Right now I am drilling the letter “T”.
Because it only drills a few letters at a time most of Keybr’s words are gibberish, which makes it pretty monotonous and difficult to pay attention to. This is why I am only going to do five minutes a day for the the first week. The idea behind the site is that drilling each letter will make you much faster by the time you get to all of the letters. We’ll see. As they say, “Practice makes perfect.”
The old adage “Practice makes perfect” is unfortunately false. Well, maybe not false, but incomplete.
“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”
Vince Lombardi
If you knew how much I hate Vince Lombardi (or football coaches in general) on a cellular level, you would know how much it pains me to quote him—even when he’s right. Grrrrrrrr.
I suppose the most accurate statement is “Practice makes permanent”.
My on-again, off-again online guitar teacher Justin Sandercoe of justinguitar.com likes to regularly re-iterate this point. I think that he is trying to motivate his students to be more careful with their practice, but it always demotivates me when I think upon it. A lifetime of perfectionism and memories of working very hard to learn to type, but kind of failing at it makes me haunted by this notion. It is one of the unabridged dictionary full of excuses as to why I have picked up and put down the guitar so often over the years. I have not so much as picked up my guitars except to dust them in months because I cannot get past this perfectionism. But it doesn’t have to be that way—so what if I get a few bad habits when I play guitar? I can unlearn them later, when I have some mastery of the instrument. Much in the same way that I am breaking my bad typing habits. I know that you expect mostly doom and gloom from my dispatches, but I feel a lot of hope about learning and relearning skills since I’ve started trying to increase my typing speed and having some success with it. Maybe it’s time to pick up the guitar again, or the sketchbook, or maybe try learning to play piano. . . who knows? Practice makes perfect permanent is okay by me.
SHAMELESS PITCH:
Please engage with this newsletter as much as you feel that you honestly can. Please hit the “like” button or leave a comment. Or share a post that you really like. Substack rewards blogs that have high engagement, and I am actively trying to grow my audience. Apparently there is a new feature called Substack Notes that looks a lot like a certain microblogging app that has a bird doge mascot and rhymes with Shitter. I’ll tell you more about it my next installment. However you wish to, please help if you can. It costs you nothing—unless of course you wish to go to a paid prescription. I won’t try to stop you!
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Drop me a line: jeremydnichols@tooearlyoldtoolatesmart.com
Follow me on Twitter: @jeremydnichols
Follow me on Instagram: @germynickels
Follow me on TikTok: germynickels
My PayPal: PayPal for Jeremy Nichols
Discord server: Too Late Smart Newsletter Server
Jeremy’s Guitar Fiasco: Jeremy's Guitar Fiasco
Email for Jeremy’s Guitar Fiasco: jeremy@jeremysguitarfiasco.com
Twitter for Jeremy’s Guitar Fiasco: @guitarfiasco
Facebook group for Jeremy’s Guitar Fiasco: @jeremysguitarfiasco
YouTube Channel: Jeremy's Guitar Fiasco
It's funny how having a little bit of success in one thing can counteract the defeatist part of your brain that thinks it is doomed to fail sp there's no point starting anything new, and that can give you the motivation you need to start something new. I've also found that sometimes I learn things from succeeding in one area about what works for me, what conditions need to be met in order for me to keep going, what ways of structuring or framing my approach stop me from sinking in the quicksand of defeatism, what tricks I need to play on my own brain to keep it happy - and then I can take those lessons to trick myself into doing the real shit I want to do.
So glad you're seeing progress and hope you find it infectious to other pursuits. Cheering you on!
You've made amazing progress already, way to go!