Mind-Manual

Your Emotions and How You Think About Them

2008-11-14T19:00:33Z

There’s fascinating data out there suggesting that you don’t actually have most of the emotions you feel you do. You have a response in your body and later call that response an emotion. This is called the Singer-Schachter theory of emotion. I’ve written about an experiment about it here. In the same blog entry, I talked about Tim Ferriss‘ reattribution of certain physiological states. In my memory, there’s two he does, the first is about eustress (positive stress that helps you grow) vs distress (negative stress that weakens you), and the second is when he’s fidgety before a big dance competition. Most people would look at his behaviour think about how we’d be feeling in that situation and say that he’s nervous, but he asserts that he’s not nervous, he’s excited. And he’s perfectly right, because if I recall correctly both nervousness and excitement feel the same way, but I’ve been trained to act, think and feel a certain way about each that’s very different. If I attribute my physiological state to nervousness, I’m supposed to be worried, however if I attribute it to excitement, I’m suppose to be happy and at my best.

Steve Pavlina recently did the same sort of thing in a recent blog entry called Fanatical About Growth. He wrote:

The goals that interest me most are the ones that cause me to say to myself, “Wow… I’m really not sure if I’m cut out for this. This looks pretty damned tough. I’m going to have to push myself to a whole new level in order to make it to the end. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to pull this off.”

But then I think to myself, “What if I fail? No big deal. At least I’ll know where my limits are. But what if I succeed? How awesome would that be? I’d gain an incredible new reference experience for the rest of my life. I’d have an amazing experience to share with others. And what new challenges might I tackle beyond this one?” That’s the kind of thinking that excites me.

I find this interesting because if I was in the same position, I’d have very different self-talk. It would be more along the lines of, “What if I can’t do it? What if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough? I’m not sure I can handle that.” Notice, oddly enough, my self-talk isn’t specific, it’s universal about all of me rather than, say my level of self-discipline, and it doesn’t include anything about being able to improve things, as if failing this once means that’s the end of the game and that’s only as good as I can ever be. That’s the epitome of taking it personally. Additionally, I wanted to point out that I asked “what if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough?” while Pavlina said “I’ll know where my limits are.”

According to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, at the bottom of every one of your fears is that you can’t handle what life throws at you, or what you throw at yourself. In the above example, Steve Pavlina has turned a physiological state of arousal into an exciting challenge. I might have seen it as a fear of the unknown, but he sees it as excitement and discovering and mapping out new territory.

I’ve been exposed to a new theory of what emotions might be. They may be a way to size up a situation or a problem quickly, formulate the problem and then try to solve it. However, you can obviously size up things differently and your emotional gut reaction might be different from the one that you might choose consciously. So, I suggest you question your initial gut assumptions and sizing up of a situation, perhaps you will find that what you interpret as a fear or failure or a fear of the unknown into excitement over discovery or exploring new territory, knowing that as you explore, the territory actually grows bigger and there’s more to explore.

What I want to emphasize with all of this is that your emotions are not just your emotions and they’re not all-knowing and always “right”, you can have some conscious control over them. You can see things not as fear inducing, but as exciting, and they’re both “right”. I would choose exciting because that is simply more empowering for me. I hope this helps, and I’d really appreciate your thoughts in the comments to let me know someone’s reading. :-p

I’m a Thief…and MSN Messenger Fast

2008-11-15T17:54:23Z

I’ve been on a break from MSN Messenger or Windows Live Messenger since Wednesday till next Wednesday. It’s been instructive. So far I’ve been forced to find other ways to entertain myself, and indeed been more productive. Perhaps I will set no-MSN hours when this break ends. You might be interested in seeing how you spend your time using RescueTime.

Also, I accidently stole a book on Friday as I was buying another one. Oddest thing is that I can’t remember putting it in my bag at all. Ironically, I stole a book that would strongly advocate not stealing: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina. Steve has a past that included being addicted to stealing, so perhaps even more ironic. Obviously, I will be returning it. I may even buy it because this is a book I’ve been wanting to read and doesn’t appear to be in the library system at all. It is also reasonably priced because it is a paperback.

Money Beliefs

2008-11-14T18:20:34Z

We walk around with a lot of bad beliefs about money. A big project for me over the past 12 months or so has been to root these out, put them under a microscope and decide whether to accept them or change them. Until or unless you pull these things into consciousness, they have power over you but when you pull them out and consciously acknowledge them, you have choice and power over whether to keep them or discard them and adopt others. I like to share my progress on this blog so that if someone else is going for the same goal, they can benefit from my experiences.

So, let’s start from the top. I wrote this a few weeks ago:

A central claim of many personal development works is that if you want to achieve a goal, think how people who already have that goal, believe what those people believe and take actions like people who already have that goal and you will achieve that goal.

Pretty simple process, though not always easy to implement. My goal lately has been to create multiple passive streams of income, a la 4-Hour Work Week, totaling up to at least $1000/month requiring less than 15 hours a week to maintain and/or grow. There’s been a lot of beliefs, fears and so forth to root out so I’d like to discuss them. A lot of the actions that need to be taken are fairly easy, physically, but to become the kind of person who takes those actions on a consistent manner is hard. That’s what personal development is about, IMO.

I’ve read a lot about money beliefs and the one thing that I’ve been looking for more than anything else is a simple list of the various false beliefs we may have and a list of target beliefs. I have yet to find it and the lists that I have found have not resonated with me. For myself, I’ve never felt that money was evil or the root of all evil, my concerns have been more about how to earn that money, but working or what have you.

A large part of what I’ve done is projected my worst case scenarios and tried to figure out why they affected me. Looking back, I can say that most of the things I was afraid of were people saying things about me, my character and my identity. I’d initially tried to disregard them as being worried what other people might think and low self-confidence. However, I realized that what I was afraid of people saying had to do with my principles. For example, I was afraid that people might say that I failed to deliver what I promised, or portrayed myself as an expert when I did not know it all (I’ve written about this before). I realized that I was really interpreting the imagined threat to mean that I had lied, been deceitful or at least withheld the truth. This was a direct “attack” on my sense of integrity, values and honour and that’s why this imagined threat affected me as such. The solution, I believe is to look to Steve Pavlina. I believe that Steve Pavlina has created a great model of honest, authentic and honourable marketing and I want to learn more about that from him.

I also realized that I was hesitant to promote my work, including this website or a lecture about beating procrastination for students. I also feel incongruent writing about a subject others have covered in a way that I feel is better than I could. At first I misinterpreted this as simply having low self-esteem or low regard for my abilities or performance, but I realized that one of my principles is to do what is best for all involved, or win/win. So, I had trouble really recommending something that I feel is inferior simply because it will create income or benefits for me. Instead of thinking of this as a mistaken perception of my work, I’m now taking it at face value and considering that I really don’t believe my work is very good (it may be average or mediocre) and that it can be improved. For example, I am hesitant to promote my blog on personal development and related issues because I feel that promoting Steve Pavlina’s blog is better for the people who are interested. Perhaps I can promote both. I think that my general honesty is telling me I should be thinking about this.

I realized that I was expecting a lot from paid activities after reading a wonderful book called Your Money or Your Life based on a recommendation by JD over at Get Rich Slowly. You can read an excellent summary of it here. There’s very few books that I go out and buy after reading them from the library, but this is one I will be picking up soon. I generally judge a personal development book based on how many “aha” moments and shifts in thinking I’ve had, and I had a lot with Your Money or Your Life. Gushing aside, I learned an important lesson from this book: paid employment is not all of your “work” in the world. One of the chapters in the book is devoted to pointing out that we expect a lot from our jobs (which I will say means the same as paid employment), including self-expression, a sense of identity, authenticity, fitting in with your values, integrity, respect, recognition, achievement, feeling of power, contentment, absorption, real fulfillment, cooperation, competition and finally, getting paid. The authors point out that these things don’t have to come from paid employment; that you can get those things from things that you do voluntarily such as games, sports, family/community, volunteering, being active in a community, etc. The only thing you don’t get from those is getting paid. I realized that my attempts to create passive streams of income were riddled with the unspoken assumption that my income-producing activities should reflect the kind of person I am, and that they are acts of self-expression so they should be authentic and original, unique and undefinable, creative and growth-oriented. While this isn’t a bad or incorrect way of looking at it, I would rather look at creating these businesses more like doing my laundry. I don’t do my laundry in a crazy unique and original way, I just do my laundry for a specific goal: to have clean clothes. I can think of my muses or businesses the same way, almost as chores. Ironically, if I stop expecting all those things from a job AND to get paid, a lot of inner tension loosens up and my expectations are easier to meet.

Value can be created by just getting people with a need in touch with the way to fulfill that need. Thus, value does not have to be unique, entirely original, and I don’t have to be the very best or original provider of it, but if I was trying to create an artistic or self-expressive work, I might want to do that. Additionally, those things would indeed put me in a fantastic position if I was trying to build a strong market position but they’re not necessary to be in a middle position in the market. I’ve written about this before in greater detail.

Another of my beliefs was that money comes from work and cannot come without work. This is just a belief about my impression of how the world works, rather than a normative belief about what “should” happen. Money actually comes from all sorts of ways, but the most consistently successful manner is to exchange value for money. I realized that if my blog suddenly got, say, 30,000 visitors a month (100-fold increase in traffic, approx.) and started making some decent money without my having to do anything including writing more posts, I’d feel really weird just sitting there and accepting the money because I felt I would not be working for it and thus not “deserve” it. Additionally, there was a subconscious fear that’s been around that I’ll become dependent on a source of income and it will dry up and I won’t be able to meet my future needs. I felt that work activity consistently leads to income, so I’m not working, there is no garuntee for the income to continue, but then, there’s no garuntees period. This is simple operant conditioning, conditioned when I’ve worked at a job before and gotten paid, not worked and not gotten paid. I’d assumed business is the same. Making seriously consistent money has to be decoupled from both time and effort and recoupled to value created.

I’ve previously felt that I’d nailed all of my resistence but then discovered a reluctance to move forward, so I don’t know if this time I’ve got it, however, I can feel that the only thing standing between me and moving forward are my fears and excitement over doing something new that I may fail at. One of the ways I’m dealing with the procrastination is to remember that I have only a limited amount of time on this planet and I have no way to tell how long that will be. The next few weeks should be instructive.

Main Points:

I felt that others may perceive me as unethical, a liar or deceitful in certain ways in providing value directly through a business model, especially in my marketing or my claims. I do believe I can market and conduct a business with honour, but I was afraid that people might still accuse me of that, but I will be the judge of that and I can’t control what other people think or feel.
I believe in the “highest good for all” involved, so I wasn’t promoting my work really because I didn’t feel it was very good or original. This will push me to do better. I really did feel people will be better off going somewhere else.
We expect our jobs or careers to give us a lot of things, including a sense of identity, fulfillment and challenge, as well as paying us for it, too. I believe it is more honest to simply accept that real reason for jobs is to get paid, stop expecting all those things from jobs and seek them elsewhere to build a more fulfilling life.
I recommend reading Your Money or Your Life. Fantastic book.
I believed that money comes from working, and if there is no work, the money may disappear because there’s no garuntees of getting the money and I will be left penniless, broke, and unable to fulfill my needs. A pervasive fear about a lack of control.
There may be more beliefs related to making money, but I feel like I’ve tackled a lot of the big ones. The next few weeks will let me know how things are going because my actions and results will change.

Why “I want to have enough” is a Bad Money Goal

2008-11-09T17:26:48Z

Actually, there’s three bad money goals:

“I want to have enough”

“I want to be comfortable”

“I want enough so I don’t have to worry about money”

The obvious problem with all three of these goals is that they’re not well defined. Good goals are well-defined and can only have a binary interpretation. That is, either you’ve reached your goal or you have not. A good goal formed like this might be, “I’m making $50,000 dollars a year and my expenses are less than $35,000 dollars, I save $10,000 dollars a year and spend the other $5,000 on whatever I like by 2010″. You can read more about forming clear goals in Steve Pavlina’s wonderful article, “The Power of Clarity“. All of the above three fail this criteria by using feelings to gauge whether you’ve reached your goals. That would be fine if feelings were at all objective, but they’re not, so you find some curious patterns people go through for each of the above goals.

“I want to have enough” is a goal I had in mind for a while as an overarching goal in life, but the problem with that is that as my income has gone up (I’m making at least twice what I was making last year), I have found my expenses to increase in step, so “enough” which was generally having enough to cover my expenses is pointless. Every year, there’s lifestyle inflation as my income goes up, so what’s “enough” increases every year. I have some ideas of why this happens, including that I believe I have a belief that prevents me from having much more than necessary for my survival, so as my income goes up, my belief unconsciously pushes my expenses up.

This is actually an excersize I learned from Brian Tracy and I’d like you to do it. I hope I’m remembering this correctly. He asked some seminar participants to ask themselves how much money they would like to have and most of them quoted something two to three times more than what they’re making now. Then he asked them how much they were making when they first started working and they often quoted amounts two to three times less than what they’re currently making. I drew a couple of lessons from that. The first is that a lot of us are stuck in this rat race and don’t keep things in perspective. More about that in the next section:

“I want to be comfortable” is another thing people often cite when asked how much they want. The problem with this is again that what you consider “comfortable” increases every year. Last year you may not have had a dishwasher, but this year you bought one and now you feel you are living in greater comfort, even though that’s an additional cost. Of course, internally, you’ve probably habituated to the washing machine so you’re no longer thinking it’s a “comfort” item, it’s just a necessity.

“I want enough so I don’t have to worry about money” is a goal I personally thought was a worthy one until I realized what that meant. Basically, I was willing to be disciplined about spending and making money and doing a broad budget for the hope of some point at which I did not have to be disciplined at all and I could spend money however I wanted. I didn’t notice the problem with that for a long time, but it was that I will always have to be disciplined with money, and I may have to deny myself things because I don’t have the money at any income level. The thing is, while today I may have to deny myself a 5 dollar item, when I’m making much more than that, I may have to deny myself a plasma screen TV or a new car. I will still need to be disciplined, probably in broad strokes, while still giving me enough to enjoy life and indulge every once in a while. That is, say I put aside 10% of my income as play money, which I can do anything with, as my income grows, this amount will grow, but I will always have to stay within it. You can read more about it under the number 3 tip in “8 ways to prepare to be a millionaire” at Getting Finances Done.

If you’re reading this blog, odds are that you are rich. Read that again. Read that over and over again if you’d like to. I often forget this, and I need to remember it as often as anyone else. Compared to someone somewhere, I am rich. I have many of the amenities that money can buy, including a house, a computer, a cellphone, good food, clean water, I’m getting an education, I have clothes, warmth, friends, various technical goodies, access to great healthcare. Odds are good that you have access to all of these as well. That’s enough to survive and then some. Think about it, does that not make you rich?

All of the above leads to a curious conclusion, I believe feeling rich is an internal state, as is being comfortable or having “enough”. There are some people that spend their whole lives acquiring and making more and more because they feel poor on the inside and their pattern says that having more will make them less poor and thus they will have more of the “good life”. The pattern essentially says, “if poor or not rich, make more to become rich or well-to-do”. Because feeling rich is an internal state instead of an objective situation, I can feel rich and grateful right now. In general, people want money because of how it makes them feel. For different people, its different things, it could be security, it could be self-validation as a member of society, it could be the ticket to the “good life”, freedom, the end of self-discipline, etc. It means all of these things and none of these things. Money is money, but your relationship with it causes you to feel certain things.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer for you, yet. I can’t tell you what’s a good money goal, or a good motivation for making much more than necessary for your survival, only what I feel are bad goals. In short, I can’t tell you why you should be rich. All of the arguments I’ve heard so far have not been compelling, but that might be because I have some beliefs that make them so. I’d love to hear your perspective on these things, so please drop me a line in the comments and help me figure this out. Thanks in advance! Any thoughts are appreciated, honest.

The Irrational is Infinitely More Interesting

2008-10-28T22:27:31Z

I spend a lot of time thinking. Lately, I’ve been doing less of that. I havd long believed that human beings are irrational but I haven’t spent much time with the irrational. Until now. I’ve been learning to dance lately and have actually looked up dance videos. It’s ineffable in a lot of ways and I don’t have to justify my preference unlikd rationality which requires support, evidence and argumentation. The arts are something that you just do and feel.

Lately, I’m impressed by river and highland dances. Check this out:

I’ve also been getting more into stories in movies and books and even comic form. Humour is something else I am experiencing, and music. Like really listening to music with my eyes closed and not thinking about anything else. It’s like a meditation of its own.

I encourage you to relax and live outside your head for a bit if you have a tendancy to think too much like me. Take a dance class, learn to draw or just listen to complex music. All of these things are uniquely human and create certain experiences within us. As a science-minded person I have had a tendancy to discount personal, subjective experience in favour of an objective, dispassionate observer and this has caused me to miss out on some of the great experiences of being human. After all, no matter how much scientific knowledge we may acquire, we are still locked into our personal experience. So enjoy it! It most likely will improve your quality of life.

Sometimes I Feel like I Don’t Matter…and Like it

2008-10-21T19:20:25Z

I like to pretend I’m a ninja sometimes. That I’m completely unnoticed. I don’t even cast a shadow. I don’t know why. One of my favourite characters is Will from The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman (part of a trilogy I heartily recommend), because of how he learned to blend in and go unnoticed. There are times I feel like I don’t have an impact on the world, and I like it.

Maybe I’m scared to think that I have a real impact on this world that we live in. Maybe I’m hoping I can be a dispassionate observer of this world without corporeal form or force. That way, I won’t have to be responsible for my actions. Maybe that way I don’t even have to justify my existence, which caused my mother suffering when I was born and created suffering for countless other beings since then. Our lives cannot exist without suffering. From the plants and animals killed to sustain me and my lifestyle to the suffering of the fellow humans that work so hard to make my lifestyle possible. The truth is, I do have an impact. If I died tomorrow, my passing will have an impact, emotionally on everyone around me and on a grander scale as there is one less mouth to feed, two fewer lungs to fill.

Maybe in the face of having a real impact on everything and not knowing what sort of impact I’m having, I would rather believe I don’t really matter. That I can hide away from the world and not really have an impact. But I do. All the damn time. Even breathing, eating, sleeping have an unknown impact on everything around me. If I can accept this and raise my consciousness, the next question would be, knowing that I have an impact, what do I do about it? Do I calibrate my life to have a smaller impact, or a largely positive one? That is, do more good than the bad I cause? What are my options?

Do I have to justify my existence? The existentialists knew this. They talked about being thrown into this world without having a choice in the matter. I’ve been thrown into the world, pushed and pulled by forces I don’t understand, both internal and external, and I have to deal with it. Accept it, make some sort of meaning out of it and figure it out. Therein lies my salvation. If and when I figure it out, I can follow it however I choose to. Morality and almost every conception of the good life may be relative and abitrary, I still have to pick one to be able to do something. In this case, not choosing is a valid choice and almost certainly the wrong one.

But I will figure it out. I will figure out my place in this world and know that I am having an impact all the time and that I can choose a lot of the nature of my impact.

This may be an existential crisis. Thankfully, I am not alone. Others have dealt with this issue and I will search their answers out. Steve Pavlina has another perspective, as always.

Stuck on a Problem? Take a Nap!

2008-10-14T16:58:31Z

Sleeping and napping help integrate new information into your brain. For example, if you are studying something and take a nap afterwards, your recall of the material is much higher. This principle also applies to exercise where the actual growth takes place after the workout when you’re resting. Similarly when learning a new physical skill, you can often notice a marked improvement the next day. You might also notice a worse effect if you keep at it too long, and might notice better results from short periods of intense learning alternating with lots of rest.

The lay-theory that I’m aware of is that dreams help understand the day’s work. Another interesting theory for dreaming is that it is a testing and improvement of our ability to model the world. In any case, this is a fairly robust finding. I’ve personally experienced this many times when I didn’t understand something before I went to bed but did when I woke up. Recently, I’ve been learning Dvorak, a new keyboard layout, and every day there is a marked improvement overnight. For example, yesterday I was typing at 12 words per minute, today I’m upto 21, overnight.

This seems weird if you think about it because our mental model of our minds is that it’s like a computer (a consequence of the cognitive revolution in psychology) but we don’t and we have to learn how to work with our minds to get the best results.

Here’s an XKCD comic for you:

Some Diseases Just Have Better Marketing

2008-10-05T19:25:00Z

I know of women who are worried about getting breast cancer. Not for any specific reason that relate to their odds, such as having a family member with it, just worried about it. Knowing that human beings suck at probabilities, I decided to look up the actual odds of getting breast cancer and try to create a “rational” scale of fear of possibilities. Turns out breast cancer is around 35th of killers, behind people voluntarily taking their own lives and road traffic accidents. The highest (other than old age) is heart disease. So, if you’re more worried about dying from something, worry about everything on the list until you reach that thing. So, for example, if I had a “rational” model of fear, and I was afraid of say respiratory diseases, I have to be afraid of cardiovascular diseases (almost 30% of all deaths), infections and parasites (~19%), Ischemic heart disease(~12.5%), cancers in general (~12.5%), and strokes(~10%). Adding all those up, I’m already 84% scared for my life. Breast cancer accounts for about 0.84% of killers globally.

Now, I don’t really want to suggest that women are more afraid of breast cancer because breast cancer has better marketing (which it does), but I believe that, ironically, though, the pervasive fear with breast cancer (unless you’re actively facing it) seems to be not that you will die, but that a mastectomy will be required. This is particularly scary for a few reasons: our sense of identity tends to include all our body parts, but gender-specific body parts more so and this applies for both men and women. This may well be presumptious but I believe it is a loss of something fundamental to your identity that causes this fear.

Then again, I may be wrong about all this. I am indeed way out of my depth and feel a little like perhaps Steven Levitt the economist felt when trying to tell people that after 2 years of age, a seat belt is just about as safe as a complicated and expensive car seat in saving kid’s lives and injuries at TED.

Forget Gay Marriage…

2008-10-05T19:06:40Z

This is a call on all religious groups that have been led astray by the current debate over a menial matter. This is only part of the Liberal-Gay agenda, to guide is away from the issues that truly matter!

We must all band together and get back our right to have slaves! And to stone adulterers! Those rights, God-given and explicitly allowed and even commanded in the Bible. Abraham held slaves! Who are you to say that Abraham was wrong? Who are you to say that Noah was wrong to banish his grandson and his descendants to slavery and make it easy for you to tell who they are by colouring them black? We have been misled and have let the liberals make slavery illegal and look where that has led us! To women’s rights as equal to men, and to the current debate to gay marriage.

Rise and recognize the folly of your ways, it was a slippery slope to let the liberals abolish slavery, and gay marriage is what was next! Remember! No society has lasted with an “anything goes” attitude. We must push this line of liberal encroachment on the Bible back and get back our God-given rights to have sex slaves!

__________________________________________________

In case you’re wondering, this is a satirical parody, a form I’m revisiting after a long while. I am parodying arguments originally found at iProtect Marriage.com. I love that site, because they went back to everything Hollywood and major advertising knows about influencing young people and used it for their own goals. If you check out the video called “A Fine Line”, you will see a young teenage heartthrob leading prayers and speaking. You can also find them on social networking sites like myspace, facebook and twitter. It’s quite amusing how they don’t miss a beat.

Before anyone makes assumptions about my own positions on religion or gay marriage, etc, I want to assert that my point is to simply expose one type of argument that ends up being abused: that the Bible is a final, literal and assertive moral authority. Societies change. Slavery is totally hated now (for good reason) and yet allowed in the Bible. If you’re going to take a literal, all-inclusive reading of the Bible, then make sure you get into the parts with the slavery and the sex slaves, and fight for your right to do that today. Otherwise you risk being an inconsistent hypocrit, which, of course, isn’t all that bad a thing if you’re not interested in being rational. You can find some interesting points about following the Bible literally at this TED talk by AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically:

Other than the blatant hatred of the following page, they do have an interesting point of what sort of family values the Bible promotes with regards to using marriage to bond a man forever or sex slaves.

Keyboard Improvements

2008-10-08T05:04:31Z

I want to make typing easier because I do it so much, so I am making small improvements to how windows recognizes my keystrokes. So far, I’ve turned the Caps Lock key into a backspace key (and love it) and just need to find some way to get the delete key in there. The reason I did this was that I had to move my entire hand to use my middle finger to hit the backspace key, too big a movement. I used a program called SharpKeys. To enforce it, I’ve also disable the backspace key to do nothing so I get out of the habit of using it. A minor interrupt.

I’m looking into Dvorak keyboard layout which has the most common keys on the home row so there’s less movement involved. In case you’re interested in knowing, the standard keyboard layout called QWERTY (cause of the letters on the top row) was created specifically to slow down typists because old typewriters were jamming. Last I heard, the current typing speed world record is using Dvorak.

I’m also looking into AutoHotKey scripts, there’s some interesting ones. For example, there’s a script that turns your layout back to QWERTY when you hit a modifier key like cntrl or alt. This is cause of shortcuts like Ctrl-C (copy), Ctrl-X (cut), Ctrl-V (paste), which are really made for the bottom row of the QWERTY key, but on Dvorak, those keys are all over the place.

I also found an onscreen keyboard someone made for QWERTY but I modified it for Dvorak. It shows a keyboard on the bottom of the screen and shows which key was pressed. Lemme know if you’re intested

I’m interested in a script that would take a modifer like Ctrl-Shift and use the JKLI keys for arrow keys cause I often have to navigate toe another part of the text I’m writing and I write a lot often. Found it.

There’s another issue that I think AutoHotKey could fix, which is that when my computer comes out of sleep mode, the wireless radio doesn’t turn itself back on and reconnect. I’ve discovered that the button on the front of my laptop to do that sends a specific key code to windows and then a program within windows handles it, so I could create a program to send that keycode everytime my computer comes off standby.