Personal Experiment 8: Left-Hand Writing (Being Ambidextrous)

Xue Zing
4 min readJul 27, 2021
Image from UnSplash by Kelly Sikkema

Most of the personal experiments I have written all seem to be semi-success stories.

That’s cause no one is interested in failure.

However, after much consideration, I think failures should be explored just as much as successes.

The concept or idea might still spark someone’s line of thinking.

Hence, the article today will be about one of my failed experiments.

Awareness of the issue,

Table tennis was my choice of a competitive sport as readers may know.

The experiment on that can be read here.

One of the interesting rules in table tennis was that you can switch hands during a match.

This means that players can choose to play a rally with either hand or even switch hands halfway during a rally, usually in desperate times.

Of course, at a high level, it doesn’t matter which hand you use. However, at the more amateur level, switching hands before a serve do cause a little confusion to the opponent and affect the spin of the ball as well.

I had a friend who did just that.

So that got me thinking, could I learn to be ambidextrous?

Besides having the ability to improve the usage of my non-dominant hand, I was excited at the prospecting of improving my right side of the brain which is rumored to affect creativity.

Goal Setting,

So how would one go about improving the skills of a non-dominant hand?

I figured by improving the fine motor skills in the left hand, it would automatically give more control over the muscles in that hand.

Hence, I chose…. writing.

Using my left hand to write English words to be exact.

The end goal would be able to write neatly enough to be understandable and not painstakingly slow.

The time frame given by myself would be relatively shorter this time, 6 weeks since it didn’t seem too hard.

Process Building,

Xue Zing

Writing about thought provokers that go against conventional self-help