What Happens When a
Teacher Truly Believes in You
One hundred voices. Thirty years. Seven thousand lives changed.
“Any person who has him as an instructor, even if only for one course, should count themselves among the luckiest people in the world.”
— Sarah Mueller, former student
A Year of Growth
A year has flown by, and here I stand,
With lessons learned, and dreams in hand.
From Excel formulas to Word’s clean page,
Each skill I mastered set the stage.
I’ve tackled taxes, accounting’s core,
Payroll, QuickBooks, and so much more.
Access databases and PowerPoint’s might,
Each challenge pushed me to new heights.
But Attila, you — stood in a class of your own,
Your wisdom was the foundation, the cornerstone.
Your patience, like an endless tide,
Held me steady, always by my side.
Your stories, they weren’t just tales to tell,
They opened doors, they broke the spell.
Each word, each pause, with such grace,
Made the impossible seem within reach, in place.
You made me believe in my own might,
And gave me the courage to take flight.
In every lesson, you saw what I could be,
Not just a student, but a force to see.
With you, I didn’t just learn — I grew,
You believed in me when I hardly knew.
Your heart, your spirit, the care you gave,
Taught me how to rise, how to be brave.
So now I stand, proud and ready to go,
With everything you’ve taught me, I’m set to grow.
Attila, thank you, from the depths of my soul,
For shaping me, for making me whole.
In their own words — unedited, unsolicited
He made learning fun again. I absorbed everything that he taught, which is not an easy feat considering my age. I managed to lock down a great career in my field immediately after I graduated.
Sarah Jenkins
Being a mature student brings its own challenges, but you made it so much easier to cope with! I truly wish there were more Attilas out there. ❤
Tracey Crosby
Thank you for making my back-to-school experience so memorable and rewarding! Cheers to the most compassionate, sincere, and knowledgeable teacher there is!
Marnie Newbery
Brilliant Mentor! We are blessed to have you and have learned so much from you. Thanks, big time, Attila Farkas! Best wishes!
Sydney White
Truly the best teacher I’ve ever had!
Jessica Winter
Attila Farkas, you are one of a kind. Amazing teacher. So true — wish they were all like Attila.
Sharlene Browne & Jacqueline Shelley Hughes
One of the best I’ve ever had!
Christina St-Laurent
Who knows what I could have accomplished if I had had you in high school?
Marnie Newbery
If you have the opportunity to have Attila Farkas as a teacher, you cannot fail.
Sarah Jenkins
These are not just reviews.
They are what education can look like.
Every student who wrote these words came in carrying doubt, fear, or a wound left by a previous experience. They left with something they did not expect to find: belief in themselves.
Learn More at Ati ProjectsAttila Farkas is a veteran educator, author, and Microsoft Office User Specialist with more than 30 years of teaching experience and over 7,000 students trained across Hungary, the United States, and Canada. He teaches computer and business software courses — including Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Sage 50 — using platforms including Adobe Connect, and holds Microsoft Office User Specialist certification.
A Hungarian-Canadian who escaped communist Hungary in 1986, Attila holds US citizenship and has been based in Orillia, Ontario, Canada since 2002. His early years in a system where survival required careful reading of institutional behavior shaped a lifelong capacity for pattern recognition — a skill that runs through his teaching, his writing, and his public work.
Attila is the founder of officeshortcuts.com, a digital education and content platform offering courses, tools, and resources for students and professionals. He is the author of three published books: Patterns of Deception, a non-fiction examination of manipulation and institutional behavior; The Blue Harvest, a thriller; and The Maplewood Bakery.
His ongoing research and writing explores emotional contagion, the invisible forces connecting human beings across distance and culture, and the historical roots of digital manipulation. These themes emerge from his classroom experience, including a September 11, 2001 near-miss that he traces directly to an act of teaching, and are supported by cross-cultural research and modern science.
His students have described him as someone who “genuinely cares — sees them as people, not just students,” who “made learning fun again,” and who gave them “hope and confidence” to achieve goals they had not believed possible.
The Thread That Connects It All
For thirty years, my classroom was where I learned to watch a mind change. I’ve spent that time teaching Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Sage 50, and, more recently, the AI tools reshaping how all of that work gets done. But underneath the software, I was always teaching the same thing: how to notice a pattern before it costs you something. That instinct is the same one behind my books, my writing, and the way I approach a blank page.
I studied Biology with a minor in Psychology before I ever stood in front of a classroom, and that combination has shaped almost everything since. I’m drawn to the places where creativity, technology, and human behavior overlap: why people trust the systems they shouldn’t, why real learning looks different from performed learning, and why the same manipulation patterns show up whether you’re dealing with a person, an institution, or now, an AI. That thread runs through my books (How to Arm-Wrestle Your AI and Win, The Blue Harvest, The Maplewood Bakery), through the “Competence Paradox” idea I keep returning to in my writing, and through the training I build at officeshortcuts.com.
What’s changed recently isn’t the thinking. It’s the speed. Thirty years of teaching gave me a very specific kind of pattern recognition, the ability to see where a system, a lesson, or an argument is about to go wrong before it does. For most of my career, turning that instinct into a finished piece of writing took real time. This past week, I wrote two full-length posts in a single day, each one carrying the depth of research and structure that used to take considerably longer to get right. AI didn’t hand me the insight. It gave me back the hours I used to spend translating insight into finished prose. That’s time I spent thirty years earning, and now I get to spend it differently.
Two Recent Pieces
The Website That Was Lying To Me — What started as a simple grievance about a misleading web platform turned into something more universal: a look at how systems (and people) can be warm and reassuring on the surface while quietly working against you underneath. It’s a story about my own migration off GoDaddy, but it’s really about learning to recognize that gap between appearance and reality before it costs you.
You Could Be Invisible and Never Know It — This one grew out of a real discovery: opening up my own website’s HTML and finding it completely empty to a search engine crawler, despite looking perfectly complete in a browser. From there it became a broader piece about the millions of people who trust a dashboard’s numbers without ever testing whether those numbers are real, and about ideas that fail not because they were bad, but because the feedback loop lied.
The same week both of those went live, I watched something happen in my own classroom that said all of this better than either post did. Students who had never touched a blogging platform or opened Google Analytics signed up on the spot, not because I assigned it, but because they felt, in real time, what happens when creativity, technology, and thirty years of teaching stop working against each other and start working together.