What’s a “Good Tip” You Learned Too Early That Ended Up Hurting You?

[aquila_zyy]

For me, it was "cube rotations are bad". I took this advice too literally and thought it meant I should never cube rotate / as few as possible during F2L. I was so afraid of cube rotations that I ended up learning lots of rotationless algorithms for F2L, even advanced ones that solve trapped pieces! This hurts look-ahead so much, as I would often use an algorithm to solve a pair into a front slot rotationlessly rather than rotate and solves intuitively. This made me do a longer alg that shifted the pieces like crazy when I could have done a much simpler alg that also gives me an open front slot. I ditched this habit after I came across some of Dylan Miller's example solves a few days ago, when I noticed that he cared a lot more about solving to the back than avoiding rotations. That was when I realized I had been thinking it all wrong! By getting rid of this bad habit, my time improved from low 30s to mid 20s literally overnight. I think I still got one valuable thing by taking that wrong turn though: I can now recognize EO like the back of my hand, which I imagine would help me make more informed decisions about cube rotations when my look-ahead gets a little bit better.

What was one piece of "forbidden knowledge" you wish you hadn't learned (or took it the wrong way) when you were sub-X? When did that knowledge/tips/advice actually become useful to you?

 

[Mastermind2368]

When I first started learning CFOP, I was under the assumption that the best practice was to learn F2L, learn 2 look OLL/PLL, and then immediately start grinding full OLL/PLL. I thought that if you didn't know full OLL/PLL, you basically weren't a real cuber (I was 11 at the time). So I learned both alg sets for my first comp and got like a 1 minute average, using full OLL/PLL but with terrible F2L.

 

[Fred]

I learned (intuitive) 3-style too early. I read about it and thought it sounded cool because I like commutators, but the amount of pausing to think about how to solve a case and the rotations made it slower and a lot less safe than Old Pochmann. It was fun and challenging, but not worth it (yet) for going fast. I was also doing floating because I didn't realize having a fixed buffer made things easier. Nowadays I'm using good 3-style edges and Orozco corners, and I'm still a lot slower than many M2/OP users. I typically enjoy learning new stuff too much, instead of drilling stuff I've already learned.

 

[Michael Wimberly]

I learned that efficiency is better than TPS a little too early, and even though it's a good tip, I took it too seriously and started trying to learn more advanced techniques too early which hurt my lookahead.

 

[Caleb Valenzuela]

I didn’t really have one “good tip” that harmed my solves, but i had more of “dang i should have learned this earlier” type of mistake. One of those was not focusing on lookahead earlier and not being the competitive freak that i am now. All i did to improve from a 20 second average to a 11 second average were solves, learn some algorithms, watch a guide, then more solves. There was zero targeted practice at all. It was only until the 10 second barrier that i started targeted practice, and that brought my averages from mid 10 to mid 9 INSTANTLY. The specific drill that i did was the “plan cross, solve it blind, plan some F2L pairs, solve it blind, etc”. Also, I wasn’t really so competitive before, so my drive to practice wasn’t so strong as it is now. If i had the same drive before i probably could have gotten sub-10 in like 1.5 years.

 

[Martyt7777]

About half a year ago when I was averaging 15 seconds, I tried to get 1% better every day. I got disappointed when I wasn’t averaging 11 seconds after a month, meaning I wasn’t on pace to average 0.4 seconds in a year. /j

 

[Caleb Valenzuela]

About half a year ago when I was averaging 15 seconds, I tried to get 1% better every day. I got disappointed when I wasn’t averaging 11 seconds after a month, meaning I wasn’t on pace to average 0.4 seconds in a year. /j

nah i think the biggest mistake was getting coaching when you were averaging 25 seconds

 

[qwr]

About half a year ago when I was averaging 15 seconds, I tried to get 1% better every day. I got disappointed when I wasn’t averaging 11 seconds after a month, meaning I wasn’t on pace to average 0.4 seconds in a year. /j

this reminds me of a story in one of the diary of a wimpy kids books where he tried to jump 1 inch higher every day so that after a while he could jump 6 feet into the air