I Spent 7 Days Solving A Plastic Puzzle… Here’s What It Taught Me About Myself

How learning a new skill taught me how to be a beginner again

Photo by Dylan Teboe

At least once in their lives, everyone’s tried to solve a Rubik’s Cube. The colorful plastic toy has been a staple in the world of puzzles since its release in 1980, and in the decades since, it has entertained, confused, and stumped hundreds of millions of minds. But for the dedicated few who do their research and learn the steps required to overcome the challenge, a new question arises… “How fast can I solve it?”

Photo by Dylan Teboe

At least, that’s what happened to me when I got my first Rubik’s Cube in 2013, at the age of 8. Hours of trial and error lining up colored stickers led nowhere, and not even the printed step-by-step guide provided with the Cube was able to help me. It wasn’t until days later, when I followed an online video tutorial, that I began to understand the puzzle, and after a few minutes of twisting and turning… I had solved my first Rubik’s Cube. From there, it became an obsession. I spent my free time memorizing algorithms (the sequences of moves needed to solve pieces of the cube), learning new techniques to solve the cube more efficiently, and practicing the skill of speedcubing, all with the goal of shaving seconds off my best times. 2 minutes. 90 seconds. 70 seconds. 65 seconds. The best part? There was already a growing online community of equally dedicated puzzle enthusiasts, sharing tips, breaking records, and organizing competitions around the world. Fast forward to today, and I can reliably solve the standard 3x3 Rubik’s Cube in about 10 seconds, placing me among the top 1,500 solvers in the United States. But as I’ve honed this skill, improving every detail of my solving process in smaller and smaller ways, I’ve begun seeing diminishing returns — put simply, I’m not improving as quickly as I was when I started out.

Missing this feeling of fast improvement and early breakthroughs, I went to my local bookstore in search of a new challenge, a brainteaser totally unlike any I had cracked before. What I found was the Pyraminx Marble. It’s a pyramid-shaped puzzle where the goal is to arrange 20 balls so that no two balls of the same color are on each face. My mission was simple: solve this puzzle 12 times per day for 7 days, measure each solve time with an online timer website, and see how fast I could improve at a new skill as a complete beginner. In doing this, I would be documenting the learning curve in real time. More importantly, I would rediscover the excitement of starting fresh.

Photo by Dylan Teboe

On Day 1 of this journey, after taking the puzzle out of its packaging for the first time, I was able to solve it in an underwhelming 9 minutes. With further practice, however, I was able to apply some of my preexisting knowledge on how pieces move around in puzzles like this, and pare my solving time down to 2 minutes, then 90 seconds, then 70. I realized that the balls at the tips of the pyramid behaved differently than the ones at the edges, and this compartmentalization made the process of solving it less daunting. By the end of Day 1, my average solving time* was 75 seconds, and while I was optimistic about how much further I could go, I had no idea just what I would be capable of in just a few days.

(*During this 7-day challenge, I used the median of my 12 results each day to calculate that day’s “average,” in order to minimize the influence of outliers.)

Photo by Dylan Teboe

As the week went on, I slowly picked up on techniques, shortcuts, and steps I could take to optimize my solving method day after day. For example, I could save seconds by focusing on the edge pieces first rather than the corners. By Day 2, I could complete the puzzle in under a minute on average, and by Day 4, I could reliably complete it in under 20 seconds. I had expected to improve at my newly developed skill fairly quickly, but I never could have anticipated for my progress to be this steep. By the end of the week, I could solve the puzzle in around 12 seconds (quite fittingly, my last attempt of Day 7 was my fastest of the entire week, at 7.24 seconds).

Created by Dylan Teboe on Google Docs

To visualize this data, I first thought to encode it by area, using triangles to represent not only the shape of the puzzle I spent 7 days exploring, but also the metaphorical mountain I had to climb in that time in order to reach my peak results. Every 10,000 pixels would denote 1 second, and each day’s piece of the pyramid would get smaller as I improved my times. However, there was a fatal flaw with this visualization: some of my daily average results were so close together that the triangles overlapped, making some days’ triangles — such as the ones for Day 4 and Day 6— nearly invisible.

Created by Dylan Teboe on Pixlr

So, for my next visualization idea, I made each day’s median result a separate line and encoded by length, with every 10 pixels representing 1 second. I much prefer this method of visualizing my data, since I inadvertently created what looks like a set of stairs getting steeper as one climbs higher, a perfect parallel to the learning curve I experienced through this challenge.

Created by Dylan Teboe on Pixlr

I chose to embark on this week-long journey to rediscover what it feels like to be a beginner. To start from scratch. Anyone who’s learned a new art form, started playing a new video game, or gotten into a new workout routine knows how satisfying it is to quickly get better at that skill as they begin, starting from zero and seeing their practice pay off. That’s the exact feeling I was chasing this entire week, and it’s precisely what this challenge gave me. Nevertheless, what surprised me was just how much I was able to improve in such a short time. Going into Day 1, I didn’t have any specific goals for how I wanted this challenge to go, but I could never have guessed that in just a few short days, I’d be able to solve this puzzle nearly as fast as I can solve the original Rubik’s Cube. In that way, this week taught me that I can far exceed even my own expectations if I put my mind to it.