I charted my progress learning DVORAK every day for a year

Another common misconception is that people fear that they will for some reason "unlearn" Qwerty, which is not the case at all. In fact, after this many years, for me it is easy to look at a qwerty layout, with the actual layout on the OS set to Dvorak, even while typing.

The best thing about learning dvorak is how it taught me things about how the brain learns concepts, autonomously. For example, I remember how, after an hour of practice, I went to do something unrelated, and every now and then I became conscious of how my brain was still processing the previous hour of practice. So I would see images in my mind's eye of pressing letters on the dvorak layout.

I also noticed how smoothly I started to type dvorak in the beginning of a practicing session, and, after a while, seemed to become more frustrated because the number of mistakes increased as time progressed. That made me realise that I should stop practicing when that moment of frustration would hit me, and then "let my brain take over from here". Then, once I stopped, there came the images, letting me know that the brain was still processing what I was trying to teach it.

It took me about a month of practice and the better I became, the more natural dvorak started to feel. Now I can type on both qwerty and dvorak, although qwerty does make me realise every single time, how bad that layout really is, in comparison. But what's also fun is that the brain seems to associate layouts with the actual computer -- if I was typing on a school computer, I'd start typing in qwerty without even realising it. Then, when I came home and continued behind my own PC, I continued in dvorak.

So for me, the most important thing that made me continue practicing it, was that this experience of learning dvorak in itself was already a lot of fun. It taught me how awesome the brain is, especially if you don't force it to do what you want with a timeframe in mind - learning dvorak at a speed that was good for me, and letting the brain carry on without "me" forcing it to become better, is how I learned more about how the brain is able to program itself with newly introduced concepts.