BenChristman1
Legend
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2019
- Messages
- 3,601
- Location
- in my room doing math
- WCA ID
- 2019CHRI11
Not sure how it is other places, but I had to take a speech class, and one of the speeches I wrote and performed was a speech on how the cube has changed my life, which is pretty cool. It’s a hobby that really nobody knows that I do, except for a few of my very closest friends. A lot of people in the class were impressed by my official sub-10 single, and I didn’t even mention my two sub-8s at home!
I go to a pretty small school, so I’m by far the fastest in my school (maybe even the fastest in the county), but we just got a foreign exchange student from Italy, which is super cool! He’s quickly become one of my closest friends because he’s living with another one of my friends. anyway, I actually just learned today that he can solve the cube too, in about a minute. I haven’t found the right time to bring up the hobby to him yet, but I’ll update when I do!
**The friend mentioned in this speech is different from the other two that I mentioned above.**
This is a Rubik’s Cube. I learned how to solve it almost five years ago and have been practicing and getting faster and faster at it ever since then. I haven’t really told many people about this hobby of mine, but it’s a really important part of my life that I wanted to share. While learning to solve the cube, I’ve also learned a lot of life skills along the way. Firstly, I’m going to tell you about how I started this hobby, as well as how I learned those soft skills, which include how to pick up and memorize new things, time management, and persistence.
To understand how the Rubik’s Cube has taught me life skills, I’m going to give a brief explanation on what this hobby is and how I started it.
Speedcubing, or just cubing, is the hobby of solving various kinds of twisting puzzles as fast as possible.
I was first introduced to the Rubik’s Cube when I was nine years old. My great uncle gave me a cube for my birthday, along with a guide on how to solve it. I worked for days, but I never even got close to solving it. After those few days, I put the scrambled cube in my drawer and didn’t touch it for a very long time. The cube came with us when we moved to our new house two years later, but still hadn’t been solved. As I got older, I would sometimes try to solve it to no avail. I’d grab it out of the drawer, mess with it for a few minutes, get frustrated, then put it away again.
Now we go to a bleak February day in sixth grade. I was sitting in the lunchroom with my friends waiting until eight o’ clock when we could go to our lockers. (insert friend’s name here) walked in the door carrying a Rubik’s Cube. He was staring down, twisting the colorful cube. He sat down at the table and we all crowded around him, asking “can you actually solve that?” We watched intently as, turn by turn, the cube became solved. We were all amazed. The next day, I came back to school with my dusty Rubik’s cube from my drawer at home and watched him solve it. For the next few weeks, every free waking minute that I had would be dedicated to learning to solve that cube. In the next few weeks, (friend’s name here) had gotten his best time down to 39 seconds, and I had learned to solve the cube, but I was nowhere near that mark. That was my goal. 39 seconds. Not too hard, right? It proved to be much more difficult than I had originally thought. By the time I had gotten my time down to the elusive 39 seconds, I realized that nobody was really messing with the cubes anymore.
I have kept up the hobby for the past five years, and eventually went to my first competition in the summer of 2019. I didn’t perform very well, but that made me realize that there actually is a competitive atmosphere for this hobby, and all the people who do it are very easy and fun to socialize with. Competitions were canceled during Covid, but the lockdown gave me a ton of practice time. My first competition since the pandemic was this past August. I finished the competition with an average of five solves of 13.15 seconds and my best solve was 9.23.
That was kind of a long rambling story about how I started, but now I’m to my main point, which is all the life skills that this amazing hobby has given me. The first is pretty obvious, but it helped me learn how to learn things. I taught myself how to memorize things and how to improve them. This is going to be a great asset to me when I get new careers throughout my life, because my employers will not have to spend very much time teaching me how to do the job.
The next skill is how to manage my time. In the last few years, I have learned how to balance my favorite hobby with all my other responsibilities. I have learned to get the more important and urgent things done before moving on to enjoying myself. I’ve also learned how to manage my time while learning things, which combines both of the last two points. While it may seem like a relatively simple hobby, there are various different aspects to it, all of which need to be practiced, improved, and perfected to be good at it.
The last skill, and maybe the most important one, is persistence. Solving the cube, and learning to solve other types of puzzles, has taught me that you can do anything that you want to if you put enough work and time into it. I will be able to use this in my future by telling myself that I can do a hard task, and that will help me succeed in doing that. This will make me a great employee because I will believe that me and the team that I’m working with will accomplish our very hardest tasks together.
In summary, the Rubik’s Cube has been a big part of my life for a long time, just like some people have been playing basketball or volleyball since they were little. I’ve struggled with learning soft skills for my whole life, but learning how to solve the cube helped me acquire some major ones that I will be able to use forever.
This is a Rubik’s Cube. I learned how to solve it almost five years ago and have been practicing and getting faster and faster at it ever since then. I haven’t really told many people about this hobby of mine, but it’s a really important part of my life that I wanted to share. While learning to solve the cube, I’ve also learned a lot of life skills along the way. Firstly, I’m going to tell you about how I started this hobby, as well as how I learned those soft skills, which include how to pick up and memorize new things, time management, and persistence.
To understand how the Rubik’s Cube has taught me life skills, I’m going to give a brief explanation on what this hobby is and how I started it.
Speedcubing, or just cubing, is the hobby of solving various kinds of twisting puzzles as fast as possible.
I was first introduced to the Rubik’s Cube when I was nine years old. My great uncle gave me a cube for my birthday, along with a guide on how to solve it. I worked for days, but I never even got close to solving it. After those few days, I put the scrambled cube in my drawer and didn’t touch it for a very long time. The cube came with us when we moved to our new house two years later, but still hadn’t been solved. As I got older, I would sometimes try to solve it to no avail. I’d grab it out of the drawer, mess with it for a few minutes, get frustrated, then put it away again.
Now we go to a bleak February day in sixth grade. I was sitting in the lunchroom with my friends waiting until eight o’ clock when we could go to our lockers. (insert friend’s name here) walked in the door carrying a Rubik’s Cube. He was staring down, twisting the colorful cube. He sat down at the table and we all crowded around him, asking “can you actually solve that?” We watched intently as, turn by turn, the cube became solved. We were all amazed. The next day, I came back to school with my dusty Rubik’s cube from my drawer at home and watched him solve it. For the next few weeks, every free waking minute that I had would be dedicated to learning to solve that cube. In the next few weeks, (friend’s name here) had gotten his best time down to 39 seconds, and I had learned to solve the cube, but I was nowhere near that mark. That was my goal. 39 seconds. Not too hard, right? It proved to be much more difficult than I had originally thought. By the time I had gotten my time down to the elusive 39 seconds, I realized that nobody was really messing with the cubes anymore.
I have kept up the hobby for the past five years, and eventually went to my first competition in the summer of 2019. I didn’t perform very well, but that made me realize that there actually is a competitive atmosphere for this hobby, and all the people who do it are very easy and fun to socialize with. Competitions were canceled during Covid, but the lockdown gave me a ton of practice time. My first competition since the pandemic was this past August. I finished the competition with an average of five solves of 13.15 seconds and my best solve was 9.23.
That was kind of a long rambling story about how I started, but now I’m to my main point, which is all the life skills that this amazing hobby has given me. The first is pretty obvious, but it helped me learn how to learn things. I taught myself how to memorize things and how to improve them. This is going to be a great asset to me when I get new careers throughout my life, because my employers will not have to spend very much time teaching me how to do the job.
The next skill is how to manage my time. In the last few years, I have learned how to balance my favorite hobby with all my other responsibilities. I have learned to get the more important and urgent things done before moving on to enjoying myself. I’ve also learned how to manage my time while learning things, which combines both of the last two points. While it may seem like a relatively simple hobby, there are various different aspects to it, all of which need to be practiced, improved, and perfected to be good at it.
The last skill, and maybe the most important one, is persistence. Solving the cube, and learning to solve other types of puzzles, has taught me that you can do anything that you want to if you put enough work and time into it. I will be able to use this in my future by telling myself that I can do a hard task, and that will help me succeed in doing that. This will make me a great employee because I will believe that me and the team that I’m working with will accomplish our very hardest tasks together.
In summary, the Rubik’s Cube has been a big part of my life for a long time, just like some people have been playing basketball or volleyball since they were little. I’ve struggled with learning soft skills for my whole life, but learning how to solve the cube helped me acquire some major ones that I will be able to use forever.
I go to a pretty small school, so I’m by far the fastest in my school (maybe even the fastest in the county), but we just got a foreign exchange student from Italy, which is super cool! He’s quickly become one of my closest friends because he’s living with another one of my friends. anyway, I actually just learned today that he can solve the cube too, in about a minute. I haven’t found the right time to bring up the hobby to him yet, but I’ll update when I do!
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