How to Become Insufferably Ambidextrous

How I Used the Energy of a Bad Break Up and Jealousy of Leonardo DaVinci to Learn a Thing that Routinely Makes People Say “Oh. Huh. Neat.” And You Can, Too!

In my mid-twenties, I went through a terrible and humiliating break-up. It’s difficult to recapture my emotional state now, but it’s fair to say that I… uh… didn’t take it very well. That’s a story for another day.

I knew right away that I needed to spend all of my time doing incredibly distracting, crazy stuff that would continually require my total focus or I’d spend literally every moment stalking her on Facebook. Which, I’m proud to say, that I never did even in my lowest moment. The amount of emotional energy I had at the time was incredibly intense so I had to put it into all kinds of other activities.

In the course of five months I lost a hundred pounds, got LASIKS surgery, and weirdly decided that I should become left-handed.

This post is about how to become annoyingly ambidextrous.

On one fateful day, when Amazon delivered a pair of woolen mitts to my home, I promptly opened the package and then threw the left mitt into the garbage can. I put on the right mitt, and there it stayed for two weeks for every moment I wasn’t working.

STEP ONE: FORCED NON-DOMINANCE

I wore a wool mitt on my good hand for two weeks. I forced myself to do everything with my left hand. I brushed my teeth with my left hand. I performed the other hygienic activity you’re thinking of with my left hand. And yeah, the other one too.

You’re probably still thinking: “Wow, he did everything except for like five critical activities with his non-dominant hand.”

Wrong. I did everything with my left hand.

This was by far the hardest and most frustrating step in the process. At every moment my right hand was in that mitt, screaming “Hey, that’s my job!” And you have to force it to stay in there as you fumble around like a monkey trying to throw a football.

STEP TWO: WRITE THE ALPHABET LITERALLY TEN THOUSAND TIMES WITH YOUR NON-DOMINANT HAND

The other thing I did was that every moment I spent sitting, or otherwise being idle, I’d bring out a Yellow legal pad, a pen, and just start writing the alphabet over and over again. This really sucked at first and my hand became sore. I’d let it rest for a bit and then continue as soon as it felt better.

Start with the block letter alphabet then somewhere around the five thousand iteration mark, switch over to the cursive alphabet.

I also used this as practice to memorize a bunch of really emo poetry about other people in history who were incredibly sad.

You’re probably not as dedicated as I am, but my guess is that I completed these first two steps in about a month?

STEP THREE: OKAY, YOU’RE AMBIDEXTROUS, BUT IS THAT ENOUGH? HINT: IT’S NOT

At some point during this journey, I read that Leonardo DaVinci frequently wrote in two notebooks at the same time. I became frustrated and jealous that Leonardo DaVinci, one of the most creative and intelligent men in all of history, could do something that I could not. It helped that I was completely unaware at this time that I have a really big ego.

You’re thinking “Oh, so he wrote ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ in two notebooks at the same time? That’s pretty cool.”

No, reader! No! Leonardo DaVinci would write ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lady dog’ with one hand and then with his other hand, simultaneously, write an entirely different sentence like ‘Sally sells seashells down by the seashore.”

Instead of being mad at myself for failing to face my own problems head on, I displaced all of that feeling into a rivalry with Leonardo DaVinci.

I tried doing this at something like the one month mark. I was more or less fully ambidextrous at that point but I failed miserably. This was something entirely different that needed more training.

So I started Mirror Writing, which was really easy. Once you’re ambidextrous, writing ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ with both hands at once is actually not that hard. Still, you need to train your hands to both be writing at the same time.

STEP FOUR: TWO PEN-STROKES AT THE SAME TIME

One of the things I am really good at, to the point I don’t realize that I’m really good at it, is breaking down a process into small steps that people can actually do. I started with “I want to be able to be able to maintain two separate streams of thought at the same time” and I reduced that down to:

Take out two pads of paper, one for each hand. Grab two pencils or pens, or whatever you want to write with.

With my left hand I’d write “|” and with my right hand I’d write “—“ then switch. I’d do the opposite pen-stroke with each hand and turn each of these into a cross.

Then I’d write “\” and “/“ switch again and turn these into an “X.”

Then do the left half of a circle and the right half of a circle. Switch and complete the circle.

Then do the top half of a circle and the bottom half of a circle. Switch and complete the circle.

Then I’d write a “.” And a “—“ or a “|”

The idea here is that you take any motion your hand makes while writing, then find the permutation where you force yourself to do it.

Here’s an idea for what looks like

. — | \ / Top of Circle Bottom of Circle Left of Circle Right of Circle

But you need to do each permutation so make a grid. Use the top as a row and the column as the same to get each permutation.

.

—

|

\

/

Top of Circle

Bottom of Circle

Left of Circle

Right of Circle

You’re still not done! You also need to account for when you’re starting at a different place in each character. So draw a sloping line from top to bottom and bottom to top, etc. And this introduces yet another permutation to the above chart.

You might find it easier to write M’s that have pointed tops instead of rounded tops since that eliminates an entire pen stroke type. O’s are a bit different as we’ll see in step six.

Once you’re ambidextrous, this is not hard to do in isolation for any particular combination.

I spent about two months doing this. The point isn’t that it should be easy with effort. The point is that you need to make this effortless.

STEP FIVE: BOTH HANDS, ONE SENTENCE

This next part is also pretty easy.

Write one sentence using both hands. It’s fun to do this with two different colored pens, so you can tell which hand wrote which part. Once you’ve done the above steps, this almost feels like a relief. You’re finally writing something that makes sense!

Again, this is a good way to memorize poems.

Do this a lot. And then do it some more. Then keep doing it.

For like a month.

STEP SIX: DIFFERENT SHAPES

“O” was a hard one to get right. You don’t write that the way you write any other letter. It’s one circle. If I tried to write it as two half circles it was ugly.

So, with one hand I drew a circle and the other, I drew a square. Or a square and a triangle.

This was rough, because I was doing full objects that needed a different number of pen-strokes to complete. This is the hardcore version of rub your head and pat your stomach.

Square and Triangle was easiest, so that’s where I went first.

When I tried square and circle I got two round squares.

So I drew a half a circle and a square. I really felt like I was grinding some important gear in my brain by doing this. At some points my eyes would literally water. If I told myself the circle didn’t have to be perfect but the square did I finally was able to do some practice that felt like it was actually productive.

And a few weeks later, lo and behold I could draw a circle and a square at the same time.

F*^# you, Leonardo DaVinci.

STEP SIX: DIFFERENT SINGLE SIMILAR WORDS, BOTH HANDS, SAME TIME

This felt like painfully changing the Waters of Life in Dune and to be honest this is where I started to think that Leonardo DaVinci might actually be fundamentally different than me. To this day, I have to practice for at least a week to be able to do it passably well and I lose the ability pretty quickly after I start.

I started with short words that were relatively similar.

“BRAIN” and “PAIN” were funny and a good start. “BRAIN” takes longe to write but it’s the best expression of how much this hurts your noggin.

“MIND” and “HURT” were also fun.

It was strangely easier to do antonyms of synonyms. Words that were conceptually linked.

“EARTH” and “FIRE” were easier than “TRUCK” and “KOALA.”

It was at this point I think my brain most changed in the course of this training.

STEP SEVEN: THE FULL DAVINCI

At this point, I started to write my own poems.

One hand wrote the first line

SMASH SIMULTANEOUSLY THE SILENCE AND THE SOUND OF MY MANY CONSIDERED AND THINKFUL THOUGHTS

One hand wrote the second

WHEN THIS WILLFUL WORLD, IN REFUSING REASON, FLIES FREE TO SPIN AND SPIN ITS PLOTS

Poems were my favorite and this was another I wrote during the period:

ONCE I DREAMED I WAS A FOREST

WITH EYE OR EAR OR NOSE OR MOUTH

YET FROM OUT MY BRANCHES AROSE A CHORUS

IN NOTES OF AMBER SAP AND CINNAMON BARK

I SANG THE SUN, I SANG THE SOIL

I SANG THE WIND, I SANG THE LIGHTNING

I SANG TO NORTH, EAST, WEST, AND SOUTH

AND EVERY SEASON, GROWING, HEIGHTENING

IF I’D EYES, MY QUIET DARK

FOR THE WEARY TRAVELERS RESTING

OR HOW EACH OF THEM, ALL TO A ONE

WATCHED ME GROW, EYES TESTING, TESTING

I WOULD HAVE GROWN A MOUTH TO SPEAK

AND SAY MY SOUL WAS GREATER

AND I MUCH MORE UNIQUE

THAN A SUM OF BARK AND LEAVES AND WOOD

BUT BLIND I SANG ON IN SWEET SILENT SONG

FOR I HAD NO MIND TO CONDEMN OR PREACH

IT WAS ONLY FOR I, WITHOUT ARMS, TO REACH

TOWARD THE HALF-REMEMBERED FACE OF MY CREATOR

ALL THE WHILE I STOOD, I GREW

AND THAT IS AS PROUD A WAY TO BE

THROUGH WINTER OR SPRING, HOWEVER LONG

AS IS DREAMED IN THE DIGNITY OF TREES

AT LAST I DREAMED I TRIED TO BEND

AND DODGE THOSE FATAL CHOPS

BUT A FOREST CANNOT STILL BE A FOREST

IF IT BENDS UNTIL THE MUSIC STOPS

THOUGH ALL DREAMS MUST SOON END

WERE I GIVEN SUCH A DREAM AGAIN

NEVER ONCE WOULD I REFUSE IT

FOR IN THOSE HALF-IMAGINED MOMENTS

MY SOUL WAS MADE OF MUSIC

I was best at this during the period I originally started and could do whole sentences consistently, but it was clunky and I was slow. I never got super smooth with it. Anything I wrote this way also typically needed to be from the same piece or be linked somehow. Thinking totally different things at once was within reach but I didn’t want to get there anymore. I was, finally, getting over my breakup. Writing up receipts and poems to maximize dissonance no longer seemed as appealing as it once had.

I did experience “thinking different thoughts at the same time” a few times, and it was weird enough that it stopped me from wanting to continue this with the same passion. You might be thinking, “Fool! You have all kinds of thoughts all the time!” Wrong. This was like having two different executives in my brain, both able to operate independently of one another. It genuinely changed the way I think that brains work, and heavily influenced my thinking on the necessity of having a body in the production of an agent. For instance, I think the prompt window is ChatGPT’s body in a philosophical sense.

I did something with my hands that changed the way my brain worked, which is both weird and not weird when you think about it.

I’ve never had a person be sad enough to make it all the way through step four, but you’re welcome to try.

If you want a video of this, follow me on Substack Notes and I will try to make one this weekend.