How to Finish at Top 1% Global of 10FastFingers

If you’re the type of person who likes to walk over burning coals and program in raw machine code, you can also use markdown for makeup.

a.k.a. namaste a.k.a. ooohaaaiyo

tl;dr

1. Finish touch type from typing.com, excellent website, those guys are genius at it.
2. Finish it twice.
3. Competitions + 1minute test.

tl;dr++

Note: All this mumjo-jumbo applies only after you cross 100 wpm, until then it’s git gud.

1. When you’re stuck — type at half your normal speed for a while, with complete accuracy (easy and simple).
2. Move in one go. Obviously that’s easier said. Once all the words are automated, you press a word instead of a letter. And that’s the higher order thinking shit wise folk say I guess. My first word-type was “something”. I also tried to you know, get to think about the words not as bunch of letters but a single entity. My speed jumped by 15+wpm when I figured it.
3. The eye hand span is the maximum characters the eyes see to the right of the characters. In the average case that is 7 characters. Gordon D Logan (prof at Vanderbilt Univ) found this statistically. His decade full of research papers are full of research on automaticity, typing, hand-eye coordination, etc. Check him out.
4. The Bruce Lee way — to think and have it happen — zero thoughts, not one, not second, none. And that’s what everybody above me right now has mastered better. (Also, this guy is a massive inspiration. You may have heard of him, or maybe just heard him for months on end.)
5. Besides this, I don’t really have any secrets. There’s just two modes of typing: education and performance. You focus on accuracy when you want to get a hang of words you type. So your metric when you type is just: speed or accuracy not both at once. Lose all care about accuracy when you perform. The goal is to erase the need for the visual feedback eventually. The focus if supremely on “natural unnaturalness” (refer pt 4).
6. And the combination of both has helped me go from 19 WPM to 119, and to 139 on a good day. The end goal, so to say, is when you can call yourself learned — to shut down rationality, believe in this — the right keys will hit my fingertips, all the time, all the time, all the time. I participate in typing competitions more now, and more than once in some, for the fuck of it.
7. This mumbo jumbo makes sense when you realise that when doubt and double checks go away, you can time your word faster because the nervous impulse can flow more freely, and reach your fingertips faster. Think of it like the smoothest expressway ride — and not a single toll stop and 0 traffic.

About me Well. I began to really touch typing in the summer of ’15, when I was 19 years old. I’m 23 now. I type because I want my brain to sync with my gut — zone / flow / max meaning — I want to be able to swim in flow at will. More than dance in life, I want to dance with it. Here were my findings. Hope they are useful to someone like me. I haven’t been very active lately, but here’s my 10FastFingers profile URL that I forgot to add when I cross posted the piece out of my profile there — click here.

Mandatory shukriya and Namaste because Mera Bharat Mahaan! xD

Thank you for reading,

Rohan