Thanks a lot for giving me a chance and making it to this page. I really appreciate it and means a lot.
But I’m sure, a few people might be having this question, “What have you done worthy enough to preach to us about this topic?”. That’s definitely a fair question. In fact, that’s the first question I get whenever I search for good content creators on YouTube. I try to do a little bit of background check on the YouTubers to know if they are actually someone that follows “Practice What You Preach” and not a hypocrite. But I hope, the end of this post, you will be convinced.
In this post, I would be sharing what inspired me to fall in love with consistency, how I practice consistency, and how it is helping me become a better person. However, I don’t want to bore you all with everything about my life in a single post. So this post is going to be only about Fast typing, a skill I gained as a result of Consistency.
Since 2020, I’ve been consistent in practicing to type fast and have improved my speed from 30 wpm to 100 wpm. I’ll walk you through how this happened. In July 2020, one of my friends sent me an invite link to a website called typeracer.com. It is a website that lets you race (in typing) against friends, and other people from across the world. Basically, we raced against each other and I lost. Like anyone else, I felt really bad about it. But I didn’t express my disappointment. But I badly wanted to improve my speed which was around ~40-45 wpm at that time. However, that was seeing the keyboard the whole time while typing. But to be a fast typer, I knew I had to learn to type without seeing the keyboard and make typing become a part of my muscle memory. That’s when one of my friends introduced me to another website called typing.com. It basically has fun exercises that are perfect for beginners to gradually improve their ability to type without seeing the keyboard. I loved it.
The next day, I started practicing the exercises and started enjoying them. But I should say, it wasn’t entirely fun when I started out. I dropped speed trying to use the appropriate finger for all keys and made a ton of errors which was frustrating. My speed had dropped from ~40 to ~30 wpm. I had no motivation to continue. However, my personality in general helped me with this. I am a person who gets motivated easily. At that point in time, one short video of Kobe Bryant speaking about his work ethic would get me pumped up and give me all the motivation I needed. I still remember to this day, the video that really changed the way I viewed things when it comes to learning new stuff. Many of you might have already seen this interview between Patrick Bet-David and Kobe Bryant, where Kobe talks about his work ethic, Laker days, mindset, and untold stories. If you haven’t watched that video, I’d highly suggest watching that when you get time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9GvDekiJ9c. During the interview, he said he was terrible at basketball when he was in school and has had zero-point seasons too. But he decided to play the long game and just be consistent with his training and practice. He said he knew he wouldn’t be able to get the better of the other kids who were naturally more athletic, bigger, and taller than him in 1-2 years. But he believed that he could catch up in a few more years and start dominating them in the games. By being consistent and outworking them, the separation between him and others kept increasing and he eventually became the number 1 in his State. What happened after is history.
That interview really had a big impact on me. Whenever I learn a new skill/subject, I used to easily get affected comparing where I am in the process with the people who are already great at it. I did the same with typing too. But I wanted to follow what I learned from the video. So I decided to not see what others around me are doing, what speed they are able to type at, or anything that will affect me. The only thing I decided to do was to just practice typing for 30 minutes a day. I had no targets in mind nor did I worry about not making enough progress. I followed that for months, and I started seeing some progress which was motivating. However, I hit a rough patch where I wasn’t really making enough progress, or at least it felt like I didn’t. But I didn’t let that get to me and managed to not skip the 30 mins practice session. However, due to the hectic schedule during my master’s, I did break the streak multiple times. But I made it a point to not keep skipping for more than a week. I always found a way to get back on track whenever I lost my way. And that has taken me to where I am today and I currently type at an average speed of ~90-100 wpm with my current best at 116 wpm.
There can be a few hiccups along the way too. Improving speed at the cost of accuracy will hurt you later. From 60 – 75 wpm, I had dropped accuracy a little bit. So I had to step back and start taking exercises on Typing.com again to recalibrate my fingers. But after that, I got better and eventually got back on track. Looking back, that was a great decision.
“It is necessary sometimes to take one step backward to take two steps forward”
Vladimir Lenin
It might get harder and harder in the future to allocate time for this activity. But I am sure I will be able to find some time here and there to keep the streak going. After all, it’s not easy to get out of an ADDICTION, is it?
Useful resources for improving typing speed:
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