The World’s Fastest Typist Is 17 Years Old, And His Next Trick Is Topping 305 Words Per Minute
In the classic 2003 movie Bruce Almighty, there’s a scene where the titular Bruce (played by Jim Carrey) types on a keyboard. Bruce, who has recently been granted the unlimited power of god, is attempting to respond to millions of prayers via email—a task he accomplishes by typing so outrageously fast that his fingers become a blur and text spills across his monitor faster than your eyes can read it.This scene is obviously a work of fiction, but it’s not as far-fetched as it might initially seem. As it turns out, there’s someone here in the real world who could give Bruce a run for his money. That someone is a 17-year-old kid who goes by the name MythicalRocket (or just Rocket, as he preferred to be called during our Zoom interview). Despite the fact that he hasn’t graduated high school yet, he’s already one of the fastest typists in the world.How fast, exactly? Watch him break 300 words per minute (WPM) in the video below.
To put this in perspective, remember that 40 WPM is the average typing speed for most people. At 300 WPM, Rocket is well over seven times as fast. Faster, even, than most courtroom stenographers, who use specialized keyboards and phonetic shorthand to achieve speeds of around 225 WPM. In contrast, Rocket uses nothing more than a standard QWERTY keyboard, and yet, if he could maintain his maximum speed for long enough, he could type the entirety of The Hobbit in just under six hours.He wasn’t always so fast, though. He had to push to get to where he is today.“It’s kind of hard for me to remember at this point, but I would say around three years ago was when I started to really get into it,” he explains. “We never really had a dedicated [typing] class when I went to school,” said Rocket, although he did admit he played some typing games he couldn’t remember the names of. “Something happened between then and now that caused me to get, like, 140,” he says. “I guess that gap can be attributed to gaming. I played a lot of Minecraft, and I talked over chat a lot. At some point, I realized that I was kind of fast, and I wanted to become just a little faster. It was sort of a challenge for me. So I aimed for like 150 WPM, and then once I hit 150, I aimed for 160—all the way up to like 200. And then from there, I think I stopped for a while. I was like, ‘OK, I hit my goal.’”But of course, he didn’t stop forever. Like a song that won’t quite leave your head, the allure of getting faster kept nagging him to give it another go. “I just kept practicing and practicing,” he says, “and now we’re here, I guess.”
What exactly does “practice” look like for someone who’s already blazingly fast on a keyboard? Well, according to Rocket, in order to climb from 200 WPM all the way up to 304.76 (his current record), he mostly relied on two free online typing platforms.“All my practice is on these two websites, Monkeytype and Typeracer,” he explains. Both sites are fundamentally just typing speed games, but with a key difference: While Typeracer pits players against each other to type full English sentences as fast as possible, Monkeytype simply presents users with a random string of words to type within a given time limit. “So every day I would load [Monkeytype] up for maybe like 15, 30 minutes, and I just type, go ham, and I’d just keep doing it and then I’d get faster,” Rocket says. “I have the 60-second world record right now,” he adds. “I also have the 15-second one. I have other ones, too, but people don’t really care about those.”This begs the question: If practice took him from 200 to 300 WPM, could more practice take him further? “I definitely think it is possible,” says Rocket, on pushing past the 305 WPM barrier. “I definitely know that I am capable of breaking my record.”
But even though he’s confident he can top himself, he also concedes that it might take more than practice to push beyond the 300 WPM mark consistently.
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When asked if he’s ever tried different keyboards, specialized components, or non-QWERTY layouts, Rocket seems to recognize that doing so could offer a path to faster speeds, but he remains averse to making big changes due to how difficult it is to re-learn everything.“I switched keyboards, like, once in my entire typing career. It was probably the slowest I’ve ever felt. I was struggling.” Rocket started typing on a Steelseries Apex 7 before eventually swapping to the Apex Pro. Both keyboards share a similar layout, but the subtleties in their construction were enough to throw him off.“In the end, though, I’ll say it was worth it. Now when I try to type on my old Apex 7, it’s kind of just weird. I don’t feel as fast on it. So I’m happy I made the switch, but switching keyboards is the slowest thing; you forget everything.”So what’s next for the world’s fastest typist? Right now, Rocket is taking a hiatus from the speed typing scene as he gets ready to finish high school and start studying software engineering, but he’s also interested in graphic design and cybersecurity.While he’s got his eyes set on the future (maybe as the world’s fastest coder?), speed typing is never too far from his mind. He still plans to beat the records in other categories he’s not currently ranked in.“I might have some things that I want to do this summer, but I’ll definitely be more active in typing.”
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