Rote Is The Way To Go

People see results.

I care about results. You care about results. Even reclusive groups of monks deep the mountains care about results.

You would think that it’s pretty intuitive and obvious to produce results, but why do people still fail?

It’s because they do not accept rote strategies as the optimal strategy.

For me, rote has always gotten me results*. 100%. No exceptions.

*for realistic goals

The Scenario

When I was in first year of middle school, I had this teacher who was very specific — to put it nicely — about instructing people not to look down when typing on the keyboard.

She also told us not to use the backspace key.

Now I don’t know about you but I always had trouble positioning my fingers in exactly the correct places.

I also made mistakes even while looking down at the keyboard which sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.

Just imagine a sixth grader trying to locate the keys and still typing incorrectly and you’ll get the basic picture of what I was doing in that class.

Anyways, to make things more troublesome, the training program they used for typing subtracted from your speed if you made a mistake.

So, if two people typed the same four-lettered word within the identical amount of time, the one that corrected the mistake with a backspace would be marked as slower.

I ended up failing that class, but not for the reason you’d think.

Trying Out Rote For The First Time Ever

Eventually, in my little middle-school mind, I made the decision that if I had approached this normally, I would not have learned how to type.

It was a decision between incompetence in the eyes of the teacher and incompetence in general, and I whole-heartedly decided I should disappoint my teacher rather than myself.

My dad worked at a computer parts shop at the time, so I borrowed one of the keyboards. It wasn’t attached to a computer and I didn’t have a monitor at the time.

So I just took the keyboard, USB cord and all, and went to the library to borrow a book.

My visual memory was strikingly strong — I mean I remember that I would scan the book for a few sentences or paragraphs at a time and then just type.

You can bet that I looked down and pressed backspace as much as I wanted.

The Results

And I just kept doing it until I could type sentences. Then paragraphs. I decided it was enough when I could finish different pages.

The number of times I pressed backspace didn’t matter to me I focused all of my energy into doing it over and over and over again.

At the end of the quarter, I was typing faster than anyone (backspaces included).

I’m not a vindictive person either, but I’m certain that I also typed faster than that teacher who took ages to correctly position her fingers and not make mistakes and not look down at the keyboard.

Results matter.

Generalization

The rote strategy is simple. But you need the right mindset first. A mindset or framework where you consistently move forward is absolutely key.

Have a gut feeling about how to solve a problem.
Justify and consider if your feeling is reasonable.
Repeat your strategy as many times as it takes for it to succeed.

That’s it.

The caveat here is that you have to have strong common sense and decent intuition. Always double check results as the last step of the rote strategy.

Here are some examples to demonstrate the general idea.

You don’t understand a sentence that you just read.

Read the sentence again.
Read the sentence five more times.
Look up all of the words in the sentence that you do not know.
Read the sentence again.
Read the surrounding sentences.
Read the sentence again.
See if your understanding matches with other people (result check).

2. You suck at drawing trees.

Draw a tree and ask yourself what’s wrong with it.
Draw the same tree again.
Keep drawing that one tree until you can draw it with your eyes closed.
Pick another tree.
Repeat the process until you understand the concepts behind good tree-drawing.
See if other people acknowledge your drawings as trees (result check).

3. You want to run faster than Usain Bolt

Pick another goal.

Results come through action, and not enough people realize that they are quitting too early on a correct idea or result-checking.

As for me, whenever I misspell or misplace a word I still individually press backspace multiple times to correct for it.

But I bet I can still type faster than most of you.