No more excuses: my handwriting was worse than yours!
Have a look at how terrible my handwriting used to be and learn how to write again in less than 3 minutes
When someone asks to look through one of my notebooks I usually say yes. Most people have two reactions:
First of all they realize how deeply personal it is.
Second, they remark on how beautiful each page is.
“It’s so incredibly neat! Your handwriting is perfect! I can’t believe how organized everything is.”
And then comes the dark turn:
“I could never do that. My handwriting is terrible. I can’t draw. I could never be so organized.”
Almost everyone goes there. And I’m sure that many of these people have once been told by someone else (a school teacher or parent) that their handwriting was poor or that their drawings weren’t great. But then I ask “how many times have you decided to repeat this mantra to yourself? How many times have you convinced yourself that your handwriting sucks?”
I count to six or seven; typically a good sign that your question has poked at something. Most people smile as they realize that this self-reinforced conviction is not as fixed as they thought.
“Argue enough for your own limitations. And sure enough they are yours” — Messiah’s Handbook in Illusions by Richard Bach
I avoided writing by hand since 5th grade. My writing was illegible to everyone. Except for certain unavoidable situations I did all my school assignments on my parents’ desktop computer. I stopped writing by hand entirely in 9th grade when I bought a used laptop, my first true love.
By the age of 25 my occasional handwriting (I had like so many others developed a romantic-nostalgic fondness for the “legendary Hemmingway notebooks” marketed so perfectly by Moleskine) was often beyond illegible and indecipherable is perhaps more accurate. Enigma go home.
Here’s a page from an old notebook I found:
This is one of the better spreads. I unfortunately don’t have any of my older notebooks here in NYC but this gives you a glimpse of how it looked just months before I decided to learn to write.
If you want to have legible handwriting too, here’s how:
Try for yourself.
Now ask yourself: if something I have believed to be obviously and inherently true about myself and what I can’t do, for more than a decade, can be changed and learned in a matter of minutes, what other limitations may I be imposing on myself?
Mathias Jakobsen is the creator of Think Clearly. He is currently traveling the world to teach others how to integrate their creative and analytical mind using simple tools like pen and paper. Ask him anything on Twitter.
