Why Your Skill Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, And What to Do About It.
To be honest… I didn’t know how to zoom in on a PC during my first semester at my University.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s the baseline. A friend’s younger brother had to show me basic keyboard shortcuts. I was starting from a place most people wouldn’t admit out loud.
But I started. And I coded. C++ every day, hours at a time, hunting keys, eyes on the keyboard, fingers moving wherever they landed. Over weeks, my typing speed climbed to 26 wpm and I thought it was fast, and also that meant that I was building something.
I wasn’t. I was practicing broken technique at higher volume. Every session, I was reinforcing the same flawed patterns, typing a character with four different fingers, and constant visual dependency. The reps were compounding but just not in the right direction.
as I already thought, 26 wpm felt like progress. It was actually a ceiling I was cementing.
This is the trap most builders fall into early: effort feels like skill. Volume feels like development. You’re moving, so you assume you’re advancing. But if the technique underneath is broken, you’re not building toward a higher level, you’re building toward a wall you’ll hit harder the longer you wait.
I hit mine quietly. The speed plateau. The sense that more practice wasn’t moving the number and I was stuck at 26wpm. The realization, eventually, that something structural was wrong.
Then I was searching about it and I found typing.com.
The premise was simple: learn proper touch typing from scratch. Home row first. Every finger assigned to specific keys. No looking at the keyboard. and I have a perfectionist in me, so I advanced only when I hit 33 out of 33 stars in every module.
I started from Lesson 1. F and J. The ridges on those keys that your fingers are supposed to live on by default.
My speed dropped to 17 wpm.
From 26 to 17??? Watching that number fall was one of the stranger experiences I’ve had learning a skill. Every session, the old instinct to glance at the keyboard fired. My fingers reached for their usual positions… and the system marked them wrong. My speed, my rhythm, my confidence, all of it dipped.
On day 3 or 4, the voice that says this is a mistake got loud.
I want to be precise here, because I think this is the part that determines everything: I almost quit. Not because the training was unbearable, but because the signal looked wrong. Numbers going down after years of going up reads like regression. It feels irrational to continue. The brain interprets the discomfort as a sign to stop.
That instinct is wrong. And understanding why it’s wrong is the actual lesson.
There was a moment, somewhere in the middle of that 12-day stretch. where I sat in front of a module I’d already done twice, slower than when I started, and I had to make a decision. Keep going or conclude that I’d misread the method. I kept going. Not from certainty. From the understanding that the alternative, going back to what I already knew, wasn’t a real option anymore. The old ceiling was visible. I knew what it felt like. I wasn’t going back to it.
By the end of the protocol, something had shifted. Not dramatically. Quietly. The keys started feeling automatic in a way they hadn’t before. My eyes stayed up. My fingers stopped hesitating. There was less thinking happening between the word and the keystroke.
The dip had bottomed out. The new wiring was taking hold.
Here’s the mechanism, and why it matters beyond typing:
When you type with broken technique, your brain is running two parallel processes. One is managing the physical act, where your fingers are, which key is next, whether you’re looking at the right place. The other is managing thought, what you’re actually trying to communicate.
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Touch typing, when it’s genuinely automatic, eliminates the first process. It moves finger placement out of conscious processing and into motor memory. Once that happens, all available cognitive load goes to the second job: output.
This isn’t a productivity metaphor. It’s what’s structurally happening in your brain when a skill becomes unconscious competence. And the dip, the phase where speed drops, is the period when the old, inefficient process is being dismantled and replaced.
If you quit during the dip, you abort the replacement.
You don’t go back to your old ceiling. You carry the partial dismantling forward and rebuild on an even less stable base.
The same pattern shows up in the gym when you fix your squat form. In language learning when you stop relying on translation and start thinking in the new language. In any skill where the early gains were built on a flawed foundation.
The dip isn’t the obstacle. The dip is the mechanism.
The 12-day module set completed. 33/33 stars in every section. 15 minutes daily, no exceptions, no session longer than that.
110wpm… that number is self-reported as top 1% globally, I don’t have an external leaderboard screenshot to verify ranking, so I’m stating it that way. The wpm and accuracy data is from Monkeytype.
What the number doesn’t capture: I can type in the dark now. Completely. My hands know where they are without visual input. More importantly, the gap between thought and output has shrunk in a way that changes how I work. Writing, coding, responding, all of it runs faster because the physical bottleneck has been removed.
The dip cost me 12 days of first hard work and then continuous betterment and a real confrontation with the urge to quit.
The ceiling it unlocked is permanent.
The Protocol (for anyone who wants to run this):
- Platform: typing.com
- Rule: 33/33 stars per module before advancing. No exceptions.
- Daily structure: take out not much, but 5-15 minutes. Warm-up → module work → speed test → log peak wpm only.
- Starting point: Lesson 1, home row. Don’t skip it, regardless of current speed. That’s where broken technique originates.
- The dip: Expect it. It’s not a signal to stop. It’s confirmation that the old wiring is releasing.
3-minute first move:
Open typing.com. Go to Lesson 1. Run it once, fully, without timing yourself. Just feel the home row finger placement and let the session be slow.
That’s where the ceiling starts moving.
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