Rubik Cube

No one’s childhood would have passed without being fancied to the Rubik Cube. I would not be surprised that the generation who did not see its inception during their childhood, ended up playing in their adulthood. For whatever reason, nobody reads instruction manuals. If you buy a new Rubik’s Cube, there’s usually a set of instructions that come with it, explaining the algorithms that you need to use to solve the cube.

What do we do when we encounter something- be it a personal, business or academic struggle- that seems completely over our current level of competence? How do we evolve as a person, learn new skills and accomplish increasingly harder goals without losing confidence in ourselves.

I think the answer is in learning ‘What’ & ‘How’ to learn.

In the context of the Rubik’s cube, this began with me researching how the cube was constructed and learning that it wasn't just a random combination of colored squares. There are actually ‘Algorithms’ which help to solve the maze.

Self-coaching to give yourself immediate feedback is just as effective. The first step to the process is having an end result in mind, then using deliberate practice to get there. For me this meant learning all the 8 sequential algorithms to the Rubik’s cube one-by-one and repeating them individually until I was proficient at solving that specific piece of the cube. My focus at this point was not solving the cube, but mastering the one specific algorithm I was working on which was, incidentally, a step in the overall big picture.

It’s all about filling in the gaps, the first stage is about figuring out what you don’t know. But once you know what you don’t know…then you need a specific strategy for filling in these gaps. Most people would make the mistake of trying to do more generalized study or practice harder here. The main way to fill in gaps is to attempt to actually teach what you've learned to someone else and see if you’re able to transmit the information in a logical pattern. You’ll usually find that the things you think you understand by grasping in the dark, guessing and checking, assuming the whole time. While communicating they are much harder to explain & transmit to others.

For me, this really broke down to trying to teach someone else how to solve the cube. Once I learned how to actually teach and transmit the information, I became much more competent in the skill. There’s a big difference between knowing how to do something yourself and knowing how to teach somebody else the same thing.