first thing to happen to me related to cubing, (not speedcubing, but just cubing) is when i got my first cube back in 2004, i always had fun with it, whether when i couldn't do it or when i got one side, but no f2l. And at the tie i was getting far, i could get to f2l but i would use keyhole, without even knowing that i was using it!! anyway and after that i found out that my cousin had some free time on his hands, so he decided to look up how to solve a rubiks cube, surprisingly enough it was dan browns tutorial that got me started. Now that i look back at it i think to myself, holy **** that's to bad.....besides that point i started to solve it, eventually within a week i could do it in 1 minute, i slowly but surely got to 30 faster than anything, within a week. After the learning and solver curve started to attack me, it would be from then on a hard to achieve sub XY to do. I even remember me telling my dad that i'd never be able to be sub 20, and look at me now, i'm sub 17!! i was a slow cuber at start because i had no other ways of getting information. I Never went on speedsolving, until 2008, when i was approximately sub 30. At that comp i found otu alot of ew stuff, including the site Speedsolving.com, i was spending more time on this site then cubing, and because of that my learning curve became easier, and i flew by my times of 30 and within a week's time, i went from 29 a average to 20 average. After that i am kinda stuck on 17, until another thing comes my way to help me for further.
hope that made sense.