Why did you get into speedcubing?

Everyone had a cube in 1981, so no explanation needed there. I learned "The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube" from a book, and mostly got off on the attention, solving everyone's cube. The fad blew over, and the cubes got packed away.

Until 1999...when I happed to be reading Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter--there were two very solid chapters on the cube in there and it made me want to get my cube out and play. It was like riding a bike and I got nicely warmed up...and I thought to check the Internet for upgrades. Fridrich had some wacky notation that you don't see today, and it was hard to follow. Petrus' Java applets didn't match my color scheme. The Internet said to get an "Assembly Cube" for smoother turning; Remember this is 1999, so I ended up buying Mefferts Worst Cube On Earth, which turned me off sharply and I gave up, defeated, thinking "meh...nobody cubes anymore anyway."

Fast forward to late 2008 and a friend shoots me a YouTube video of someone solving a mirror blocks cube. I expected to be mildly entertained for a few minutes until the guy pauses to check something on his regular Rubik's cube and does a 4-flip faster than I've ever seen anyone do a 4-flip, ever. Everything changed in that moment...cubes cannot move like that...people cannot move like that...that's insane...all false ideas, self imposed limitations. Very jealous of this guy I started researching aggressively and found that the cube had suddenly blossomed. Well, alrighty then! Game on!

I think was shooting for 30-40, but by the time I got that far I saw how deep the rabbit hole really goes. I wanted sub-20, and got it, but more interesting to me has been the learning process...people say CFOP is boring, well...they aren't multi-slotting hard enough. And I adore the dexterity aspect, and it keeps yielding fresh techniques that freshen up old algorithms...and I keep my entire alg set fresh by replacing something every week. I sense a plateau is around here somewhere, but I don't think I will ever completely stop.
 
Last year, my brother learned how, but I had no interest what so ever in it. A few months later, my brother kind of forced me to. I then got in to it. For a while, he was far faster than me, but he seemed to have stalled at 30 seconds but I continued improving and finally surpassed him.

I now average around 15 seconds and I think that once I learn full OLL and full PLL I can get sub-15 or Maybe even sub-10.
 
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When I was quite a bit younger, my dad had an old cube from the '80s that he used to be able to solve in under 40 seconds, and would give it to me occasionally and tell me to try solving the first layer. (I failed miserably.)

On my 11th birthday, one of my cousins gave me a cube and I tried solving it for maybe a week, then gave up. A few months later, I picked it up again and said to myself, "I want to learn to solve this," so I tried for maybe a week without looking up a solution and got the first two layers. I used the little booklet that came with the cube (i.e. Dan Brown's method) to solve the last layer. After solving the cube for the first time, I solved it a few more times, then put it away and didn't really touch it for a few months short of two years (I would solve it whenever I saw people playing around with them or when I went to someone's house and saw a scrambled cube, but nothing apart from that). In around December of 2009, I got a megaminx and square-1 for Christmas and that sort of got me interested again. Then I saw Erik's 7.08 WR video in around January (I had seen it when I first started getting into the cube but wasn't really motivated by it) of 2010 and thought it was really cool and I wanted to be able to do it, so I started practising.

Now I average around 16-17. I guess not too shabby for a little over a year of speedcubing, unless of course you compare to someone like Faz.
 
I started cubing because a lot of my friends knew how to solve it. I also looked on youtube and saw Toby Mao do a 10.48 sec solve which was World Record at the time. Watching a 3 year old solving the cube also inspired me to learn. I already started to time my first 2 layers before learning how to solve the entire cube. I was able to get a sub-1 min f2l before learning the last layer.
 
Learnt to solve a rubiks cube from my cousin. Got down to under a minute then stopped. About a year later I saw feliks in the newspaper and started again.
 
I wanted to be the best in my class. Then I just wanted to get better and better. 7 months later I'm around 18 sec (I took a break from aug-jan worst decision of my cubing life)
 
I had a friend could solve the 3x3 and at the time I thought ,"I bet I can do that". So I went out and bought a cube and figured out that I could repeat a move to put corners in a "side"( this later turned out to be the sexy move). Then I went to look for a tutorial and found a ripoff pogobat tutorial. After that I solved it a few times and then wanted to get faster. But I stayed with that method for 3 months before teaching myself f2l then choosing to do 3 look LL. Afterward I expanded to more olls and it took me a year to drop to 25. And now here I am stuck at 20-19. My story is boring.
 
When I learned to solve the cube, my reason for sticking with it was to beat my friend (now attending UPenn).
Once that was complete (sub35), it was out of boredom.
Once sub30 and under, it's been essentially entirely for the socialization. I like cubers.

I just cube now because I like cubers, and it kills time.
It's just become "what I do." I don't question it any more. It's like how I'm "white" or "male." It's just become another ongoing attribute that I can't *really* change.
 
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I had been playing with one since I was five years old and one day in 6th grade I thought it would be cool to be able to solve it. I saw a video the year before of a kid doing it in about 2 minutes, and I was like "Woah, I want to be able to do something unique like that!" So I learned. And now I'm like the "Rubik's Cube dude" to everyone at school who doesn't know me well.
 
A kid in my class could solve one in ~2 minutes. Being the arrogant straight-A-without-trying student that I am, I couldn't accept that someone knew something that I didn't, so I learned to solve one. From there...I don't know how I found out about speedsolving.com or the wider cubing world, I really don't...
But anyway, to answer one of the other questions of the OP, I didn't have any set limits in mind, and still don't. I just like improving, and I know with the wide variety of events that exist to practice when I get frustrated with one, improvement is not going to stop for me anytime soon.
 
Well I was part of the original craze in the early 80's with a suitably crazy beginner method of solving it. At various times over the last 30 years I had picked up a cube and solved it remembering the beginner method and the (4?!) algorythms I still remembered from that original method. I had often thought of learning Friddich but never really kept hold of a cube or had the inclination to try learning that method.

Last Christmas my wife bought me a cube which again I solved a few times and then timed myself. Unfortunately the addiction had taken hold. A short Google search later I found Speedsolving.com and also some good learning materials. So I decided I would learn CFOP after thinking about it for so many years and my aim was to get a pb under 30 seconds. Suffice to say my goals soon changed when I got there. My ultimate aim now? Grey haired Sub 15 averages :)
 
A friend taught me how to solve it at a sleepover. After that there was a guy in my music class in high school who's best time was 35s and I had to establish that I was faster than him. :p After that it really just became an obsession.
 
My story is similar to yours.
I got a cube for my birthday, I solved it like once following the guide that came with the cube.
Then I picked it up, a year later, and started memorizing the algs for basic method just to be able to solve the cube without guide.
Then I came across Fridrich tutorials on Youtube and started learning that.
From that point, I became naturally faster like you.
 
i was bored one summer and I remembered a cube I got for my 7th birthday. It took me three days to learn from dan brown's videos. then i found chris and lance and tristan, and I was hooked.
 
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