I would have been so much better now if I had stuck with cubing back in 2007, when I first learned beginner's method. I was at around 1:30 when my stickers wore off, leaving me without a cube for a good year and a half. I used to think when stickers wore off, you had to buy a new cube, hahaha, so for the longest time, I just didn't have one. Then, I finally got one again, and found Dan Harris's book, "Speedsolving the Cube" and started learning Fridrich from that. I didn't yet know about you tube tutorials, or DIY cubes. So, I learned F2L between that book and his website, cubestation.co.uk, and took quite a while to master them. Then, I copied every single LL alg onto paper, and spent the next 6 months or so learning them. It took forever. Then, I found out about you tube tutorials. I started finding better LL algs, and changed a few of the ones I was using, as well as how to solve F2L without strictly using algs. I didn't know you could do this, for some reason. I thought you had to use the algs, hahaha. After a while, I started finding my own ways of changing the F2L algs, so I could do the cases faster. One day, I saw a video about DIY cubes and Eastsheen cubes, and thought "why would anyone want to buy a crappy copy version of a cube when they can get the real, original Rubik's?" hahahha. I wouldn't buy anything that wasn't Rubik's. Then, I got the Rubik's 2x2, which was supposed to be really small, but ended up being the size of a 3x3, and I freaked out thinking they'd sent me an eastsheen, until I found out that they'd changed them. It sucked so badly that I gave in and decided to try an eastsheen, and started buying DIY's. This all happened around September 09. I was around :45 then. I quickly started getting faster, breaking into the 30's, and freaked out when I hit the 20's. Once I got to around 22, I just stayed there forever. Now, I'm finally averaging around 17 to 18 sec, with more and more sub 15's recently, but still get lots of crappy 23's, 25's and even some 27's on really bad solves. That's just when I make stupid mistakes though, and really depends on which cube I'm using, even though, I've gotten sub 20 on all 20 of my cubes. I'm so glad that learning time period is behind me. I think I would kill myself if I had to go through it all,again.