There is just one skill that I have that I want to pass on to my children*.
Typing.
Back when I was a junior in an advertising agency they paid for me to do a speed touch-typing course. Which I hated. Mostly because I suspected they had already written me off as a really shite copywriter and were funneling me into the typing pool.
But I was wrong.
Even in 1990, back in the dark ages before the internet or email was even a twinkle in a fax's i, those good folk seemed to know that typing skills were going to come in really, really handy no matter where my career led me.
They were so bloody right they were almost left.
To this day my 100+ WPM (with about 6% accuracy, but let's not go there) touch typing skills have been the backbone of everything I've accomplished. Whether it was hammering out a 7,500 word essay through the night before a due date because, yes, I'm that big a procrastinator; or racing against a deadline at work to get an important email out the door whilst simultaneously watching Oprah on the flatscreen; or visiting and saying hello to over 100 blogs in the space of about 2 hours all up the other day; my speedy gonzales typing has always seen me through.
I'm fully intending to enrol those Tsunamis of mine in a touch typing course as soon as they can... ah, write. Soon we'll probably all be using that (very long promised) voice recognition typing thingy anyway, but I don't care. A typing course will always be an important investment in their future. They won't look back. They'll be so 99.9% accurate they won't need to!
How fast do you type?
* Oh, okay, that's probably selling myself a bit short but then again...
[I found this image here ages ago but the credit no longer clicks through...]
