44: Rubix Cube

If at first you don't succeed, try, and try again. Now this was a fun challenge.

This challenge didn’t originally exist on my list. I think I had something like “learn a song on guitar”, but when my girlfriend hurt her back after our surfing lesson on my birthday, I bought a rubix cube to pass the time while she was immobilised. Lucky I didn’t have “win boyfriend of the year award” on the list otherwise I would struggle. Anyway, to make things extra spicy I set myself a challenge to do it in less than 1 minute.

A few weeks after my birthday I started a summer subject – entrepreneurship and the law. The content was interesting, but it covered topics that I had already learnt about in other subjects. There was only one cure for the long 8-hour days - the cube. During this time I mastered the beginner method of solving the cube. I could regularly solve it in less than 5 minutes, but I was still a long way off my goal.

My parents then returned from South East Asia where they purchased me a new speed cube. The new cub made the movements much more fluid and cut my time down to about 3 minutes. However, after practicing for hours and hours after work each day I could not cut my time down bellow 3 minutes. I practiced and practiced but something needed to change.

I started to do some research on different cube solving techniques and there was one special method used by all professional cubers called the Friditch CFOP Solve. It was around this time that I purchased another speed cube online, to be shipped to me by the end of the month. The CFOP method requires a bit more skill and a lot more memorisation. Altogether I learnt about 20 different algorithms to use based on the specific stage of the solve. But the trickiest bit, and where the time was cut down the most, was on the 2nd stage the “F” stage or “First Two Layers”. This stage required intuition and the most practice. I would spend hours each afternoon just practicing this F stage to cut down my time by 4 seconds, by 3 seconds, 2 seconds but I still couldn’t break the 1 minute mark.

I eventually plateaued at around 1 minute and 20 seconds. Despite the hours and hours of work I couldn’t break through the 1 minute barrier. It was around this time that my new speed cube arrived from overseas. This cube was slick, it was smooth and on the very first try, I completed the solve in 59.2 seconds. It was not a fluke either, from the next 5 times I tried to solve the cube I did it in under a minute on 3 of them. Mission accomplished! I even got a high distinction for the summer subject, thanks cube!

I learnt a lot from this challenge. Even though persistence and practice is key, you will hit a brick wall. Instead of trying to run through that wall over and over again, try finding another method another way around the wall. The answers may not all come at once, but you can’t stop searching for them because they do exist.