Have you ever watched someone younger learn a new tool at work in five minutes, and thought, “I’m too slow for this”?
Sound familiar?
I thought about that feeling recently, because I filmed a video where I tried to solve a Rubik’s Cube from memory.
When I was a child, I never solved one. So I did what everybody did. I peeled the stickers off and put them back in the right order. Many years later, I learned to solve it properly, by following an online tutorial and learning the algorithms. An “algorithm” is a fixed sequence of moves that you memorise and repeat.
Here is the part I find interesting.
There are people called speed cubers. They solve the cube in a few seconds. At the time of writing, the reported world record is about two and a half seconds.
“I was never a speed cuber. Not at 15, and not at 53.”
And I think the people who seem so much faster and sharper than me are not speed cubers either. They are like us. Perhaps they are simply more open to new things.
Watch me recite the alphabet backwards!
To compare yourself with a speed cuber is like comparing apples with oranges. (meaning you are comparing two things that are too different to judge fairly.) It feels like a test, but it is not a fair one.
So how do you stop making that comparison?
1. Name it. Ask yourself, “Who exactly am I comparing myself with?” Very often, the answer is a person you have imagined.
2. Change the measure. Compare yourself with you last month, not with the fastest person in the room.
3. Try one new thing, and keep the stopwatch out of it. Five minutes is enough.
There is one more thing I noticed. The cube algorithms fade when I leave them alone for a long time. But they become easy to recall when I try again. I think skills are often like that. They are not gone. They are waiting.
So if there is something you put down years ago, pick it up again this week.