The first sound I connect with writing isn’t a pen on paper. It’s the clatter of a typewriter. My father wrote for the Freie Presse newspaper, and he did it on a Consul from Czechoslovakia. As a child I often watched him turn his thoughts into a text, line by line.
In 11th grade I signed up for a touch-typing course at the adult-education centre, the Volkshochschule, in Olbernhau. I was the only man and the only schoolboy in the room – around me sat secretaries from the local companies. My classmates laughed about it.
I stuck with it anyway: fingers on the home row, eyes forward, not on the keys. Back then I had no idea how much it would pay off one day.
In the early 1990s, at university, I sat in front of the first PCs running MS-DOS. No mouse, no windows, just a blinking cursor. Mistype a command and you got the merciless reply: Bad command or file name. One single typo, and nothing happened.
Anyone who had to hunt for each key kept their eyes on the keyboard and then had to check what had actually appeared on the screen. I could type blind. My eyes stayed on the screen, and my head stayed with my thinking. That was a huge advantage – not just because I was faster, but because nothing stood between thought and screen anymore.
The course the others laughed at was one of the best decisions of my youth. It showed me that it’s worth learning something that doesn’t fit the role others have planned for you. And it gave me a tool that still carries me today: ten fingers that type while the head thinks.
How things went on with those ten fingers – from SELFHTML to today’s command line – I tell in Thought #175.
Three questions to keep thinking. Choose an answer – you will then get an explanation and a prompt for self-reflection.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
