Seeking Foundational Knowledge
Hi friends,
I’ve learned something pretty important writing this newsletter.
I’m not good at typing.
I can get by. I’m not two-finger poking. But based on an initial typing test I’m only slightly above average. According to the internet, the average person types at roughly 40 words per minute. I was coming in around 45-50. 70 and above is considered high speed.
That’s kind of embarrassing, especially given that an non-trivial part of my day job is spent writing and responding to emails and writing other documents.
This is because I never learned how to type properly.
There is, in fact, a proper way to type. It’s called touch typing and it enables you to type really fast without looking at the keyboard. I’m not sure when I was supposed to have learned this in school (do they teach this in school?), but I guess I wasn’t paying attention.
I type in a strange way. My left hand operates pretty normally, using all five fingers. But what I noticed is that my right hand actually only uses one finger, the middle finger, to hit all the keys! What is going on there?!
Okay, you might ask why this is important.
It seems like a slightly above-average proficiency should suffice, right?
While it’s unlikely anyone will fault you for being able to type at less than 70 words per minute, typing fast is a gateway to entering a flow state.
Psychologists define flow as a state where you are fully immersed in the task at hand, and your sense of time and the external world melts away. There’s widespread acknowledgement that finding flow leads to higher quality work output and a sense of wellbeing.
There are many paths to entering a flow state. Drawing, playing music, playing a video game, and writing are all ways to do so. I’ve found the act of writing to be helpful in processing my own thoughts about various topics and can be a reliable way of entering a flow state on the best days.
Except it’s not easy to get into flow when you encounter the friction of your fingers tripping over themselves and constantly hitting backspace.
One of the requisites to entering a flow state is being good at what you’re doing. You need to reach a point of unconscious competence with the tools where the conduit between your mind and the medium disappears and the ideas or emotions that you are trying to externalize literally “flow” out of you. A virtuoso piano player is no longer consciously thinking about the black and white keys, only how to express the music.
So it’s not too much of a stretch to say that learning to type better and faster is a high-leverage skill that will have an outsize impact on my quality of life. And that’s exactly the kind of nerdy stuff that I’m interested in.
So I set out to learn to touch type.
My first step was to look for the foundational knowledge. When learning anything, the biggest bang for your buck comes from finding and absorbing the key pieces of information that underlies more advanced concepts.
People sometimes skip this step, because it’s often not the fun part. If you skip ahead to the fun stuff, you can gain a surface level competence at what you’re trying to do, but eventually you will plateau and be unable to progress because you lack the foundational knowledge that connects everything.
For example, you can learn to cook by following recipes, but until you learn a little bit of theory behind how heat, fat, salt, and acid affect different ingredients, you won’t get beyond following or repeating step-by-step instructions.
For touch typing, in my research I found there to be two key pieces of foundational knowledge:
The home row
Your hands should start on the middle row, with your index fingers resting on the f and j keys, which on most keyboards have a conveniently placed raised bump.
Keyboard map
From the home row, your fingers maneuver around the keyboard to reach all the keys, returning to the home row as needed. Each key has a finger responsible for it.
As far as I can tell, that’s all you need to know to type properly. From there it’s simply a matter of practice and repetition until it sticks.
So for the past two weeks, I’ve been practicing daily, consciously making myself adhere to the keyboard map when writing emails or presentations. I even printed out the diagram and put it in front of my keyboard at the office. And it’s working. Muscle memory is a stubborn thing, but eventually I was able to more or less adopt the new technique.
I’m still tripping over myself as my brain rewires itself, but in my last typing test, I was up to around 70 word per minute, which is a marked improvement and puts me barely in the “fast” category. I was able to type this week’s newsletter considerably faster than I have before, with what I perceive to have been less gaps in flow to correct my shoddy typing.
So if you are trying to learn something new, look for the foundational knowledge that will serve as, well, a foundation and help catalyze your other learnings.
Sometimes, you might find yourself a few steps ahead and tripping over something that points to a gap in your foundational knowledge. Go back and look for it.
Have a great week.
Anson
Interesting things of the week
📖 Article - On Design Thinking (Nick Foster, Medium)
I’ve always had a disdain for “design thinking” because it seemed like a neat way for people who weren’t actually good designers to package up some BS and get paid even more for it. Nick Foster, the Head of Design at (Google) X, does a great job here eloquently articulating the differences between design thinking and the actual craft of design, and the dangers of conflating the two.
🔊 Podcast - Tony Fadell on the Tim Ferriss Show
Tony Fadell was previously the CEO of Nest, and before that he led the team at Apple responsible for the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first 3 generations of the iPhone. He now runs an investment firm called Future Shape that is focused on solving big hairy problems facing humanity.
While there are lots of interesting parts of this interview, from Steve Jobs stories to discussing the difference between acceptable vs. unacceptable assholes, what I found most refreshing was how serious and unvarnished he was about climate change. Instead of this leading to gloom and doom, he pushes people towards action, because apathy is only going to worsen the problem.
📦 Product - Keychron K4 (Amazon)
I’ll admit, I was a mechanical keyboard skeptic. I thought it was just another fad being pushed by YouTubers with trendy desk setups. But I recently discovered that there’s a whole community of enthusiasts, makers, and tinkerers behind this increasingly popular product niche.
Given my recent obsession with typing, I decided to see what the fuss was all about and a fellow industrial designer recommended the Keychron K4. In my few days with it so far, I can say it definitely brings a new joy to typing. It’s so damn satisfying to hit the keys and hear those clicky clicks! Plus it looks great, too.
🗨️ Quote of the week
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“Don’t say no to several small ideas; say yes to a few big ones.”