Everyone knows what a Rubik’s Cube is, but not everyone knows how they work. Growing up (in the days before the Internet), I just assumed that they were more for amusement, but not actually possible to solve unless you just happened to exactly reverse the sequence that had scrambled it in the first place. I had no evidence to dispute this belief. No one I knew could solve one. Everyone who claimed to solve one soon caved and admitted they had just taken all the stickers off and fixed it that way.
So you can imagine my surprise during a college track trip when my seatmate was fiddling with one for a bit and solved it! (Incidentally, this was future South African Olympian Werner Botha). I freaked out a little and demanded (half-politely) that he teach me. I was a slow learner, but fortunately for me Werner is a very patient fellow.
For years afterward, I was fairly hesitant about passing this knowledge on to others. The more people who know how to perform a trick, the less cool it becomes. I actually equated it to vampirism – if you’re a vampire, you want to be very careful about who else you turn into vampire, because if they turn everyone they know into a vampire, suddenly it’s not so cool to be a vampire anymore.
I’ve finally gotten over my vampire-Rubik’s self – and realized withholding knowledge is never cool… and with the Internet nothing is secret anymore anyway. There are plenty of Rubik’s Cube tutorials online, but here’s mine. It’s the method taught to me by an Olympian! Let’s see anyone else say that.