I didn’t (really) learn to type until I was almost thirty.

I was always a fast typist but I had bad habits. There was no chance that I would ever touchtype on QWERTY. I tried hard.

So I learned Dvorak. Here’s why it was a great decision and what it taught me about learning.

It’s much harder to learn to do something BETTER than it is to learn to do something NEW. It’s helpful to be bad at something for a while.

“Picking things up quickly” is a specious talent. It means you can gouge bad habits into your brain and become an Arrogant Novice fast.

I pick things up quickly. This means that I usually skip fundamental steps like:

  • Stopping my palm from touching the basketball during a jumpshot (or a dribble)
  • Positioning my wrist properly when touching the fretboard of the guitar
  • Always using my pinky to type a P or a Q

Once you’ve gone a certain distance with bad habits, it’s very unintuitive to improve because a big step backward is required before you can go forward.

This is why when it came time to touchtype (I’m a writer and a developer, my job is the keyboard), I had to switch to Dvorak.

The first few weeks of typing Dvorak could be excruciating at times. I was SO slow and made tons of errors. I had no crutch to lean on. The keyboard had no labels on it to guide me.

But when I relaxed into it, the process of learning/carving new pathways felt awesome.

It’s conventional wisdom that learning new things gets harder as you get older. I no longer believe this is necessarily true.

The reason it FEELS true is because when we’re older we get the idea that we already know things. It’s disorienting to access Beginner’s Mind.

The good news is that Beginner’s Mind can be accessed at any age. There are many techniques to get there, but a really simple one is to just slow way, WAY down, to the point where what you’re doing becomes foreign and doesn’t even make sense to your brain anymore.

This is a great way to practice almost anything. Slow it down until it requires all of your attention to make a single move, ring a single string, touch a single key. Relax into that kind of focused attention and get comfortable not focusing on ANY resulting song, move, or skill.

A lot of meditation practice can be seen as simply accessing Beginner’s Mind, not becoming attached to all the things you think you already know. Letting them become new to you, objects of curiosity. With this kind of attention, you can learn, or relearn, anything.

Aside from touchtyping, here are a few other Dvorak benefits:

  • It’s an objectively better layout, with all the vowels on the lefthand home row and the common consonants on the righthand home row
  • If someone asks to touch your computer you can say “but you don’t know the layout”