It has been a tiring week.
You look forward to the weekend. It’s your safe haven, your temporary escape away from ‘reality’. Given the current situation, you need a break. Your boss hasn’t been kind to you at all this week.
So today you’re going shopping with your son.
These days, kids are so much more fortunate. Well, at least kids that you know. They have all the toys they can even imagine. Actually, wrong—desire by definition is unlimited and beyond imagination. At least beyond what you can afford anyway.
When you look back to your childhood, you didn’t really have any fancy toys. Throwing around a beanbag would occupy you for a good few months. Yet, these days, kids seem so different. You get showered with so many gifts when you throw a birthday party for your son, and your son faces peer pressure when he doesn’t have the same things all his other friends have. One way or the other, he gets a lot of toys. And when he doesn’t get what he wants, all hell breaks loose. It does seem like by having more, there is actually more to lose.
At least for now, you can still afford it (and he knows it), so off you go to the toy shop again. Consciously or sub-consciously, you just want to give your son more than he deserves. You don’t know if that will make your son happy, but it certainly does make you feel good.
As you walk into the toy shop, you see something you haven’t seen since your childhood. A Rubik’s cube. Yes, those 3×3 puzzles that no one ever seems to be able to solve, unless you count peeling the stickers off and moving them to the right places. But, once or twice, you gave it a real shot. One time you got lucky and solved two faces. You also remember that none of your friends from primary school could solve it either.
So, along with all your son’s expensive toys doomed to be instantly forgotten, you buy your Rubik’s cube.
After he falls asleep in the afternoon, you have a chance to unpack the cube. You don’t dare scramble it up. The fact that every face is probably solved is an amazing view to you.
“Maybe I should try to do this!”
In today’s age of instantaneous information, you go straight to Google and YouTube to look for answers. The old days were full of secrets. You needed to learn the secrets from the masters. Many businesses came into existence simply because there once were secrets. But not now. With a few clicks, you have the answers. You literally have all the answers in the world. There’s no more excuse of not knowing how to do something. It’s now all about whether you’re motivated enough to do it or not.
Of course, it’s not easy to go through thousands of guides and solutions. While some of them are decent, most of them are downright confusing. You read more. You watch more.
“Why were we playing this when we were kids? This is so difficult!”
As you are about to give up, just like most of the people you know around you did, you stumble into a video showing the world records of Rubik’s cube solving. These guys solve them in seconds – six, to be precise. Typically, when you see someone do better than you, you come up with excuses for why. You reckon these guys are only good at solving cubes and nothing else. You love simplifying other people success.
“Nerds.”
Your attitude to other successful people in this world is also similar.
“Their successes are only down to their money, or just good luck. Whatever, they got to where they got to simply because of some random, unimportant reasons.”
It makes you feel less small.
Then you see a video of a three-year-old solving it around one minute. It’s harder to find an excuse now.
“Hey, I am a busy man. I have better things to do. I shouldn’t be playing this stupid toy anyway.” No, there is one more excuse.
So you pick up your phone. Whenever you want to deep dive into some healthy mindlessness, you check your phone for messages. A Whatsapp message just arrives.
“Hey, what are you up to?” Keith. He’s a single guy who has nothing much to do over the weekends. Just like most young people these days, they stay at home and play with their phones.
“Nothing much. I bought this stupid Rubik’s cube,” you say, making sure you don’t sound like you’re too serious.
“Wow, Rubik’s cube! I used to play it a lot when I was young too!”
“Could you solve it?”
“Of course not, no one does. Only those crazily talented people!”
“No, I checked on the Internet, it doesn’t look that difficult,” you offer in a desperate attempt at redeeming yourself.
“Cool, I’ll get one too. Talk to you later!” Keith, always his energetic self.
Now you have no choice. You really have to solve this. There is no way you’ll see Keith showing you how to solve it. After all, it was you who initiated that whole conversation.
Alright, back to Google and YouTube then. Take a deep breath. You’re going to solve this like a business issue. Start off with the basics. You use your business instinct to pick which tutorial you should spend time reading. Naturally then, go to the official guide, and work from there.
It comes down to principles. And that’s the same in real life. You need to understand and appreciate fundamental principles. But it seems like these days sometimes people over-emphasize principles without moving to real solutions for real issues. Principles can only help so far—just like the principles in a Rubik’s cube.
There are different ways to solve the cube and the most common way is actually to solve it by layers. All the effort you tried when you were young to solve the cube face by face was wrong.
So you carefully learn how to solve the first layer. Make the cross first, then the corner pieces. Within a few minutes, you got it!
Hey, it’s not that difficult!
Yes, it took you the more time than a three-year-old took to solve the entire cube, but that’s not the point. You solved one face!
On to the second layer. You recognize from this point onwards, there are notations you can follow to effectively solve the cube. Some notations are short, some are pretty long. You try to reach ahead by reading all of them.
URU’R’U’F’UF. UL’U’LUFU’F’. FURU’R’F. RUR’URUUR’. R’FR’BBRF’R’BBRRU’. FFULR’FFL’RUFF.
There are actually thousands of them if you want to solve the cube really quickly. But you only need to know these to solve the cube.
“There’s no way I can remember all these.”
Your son’s just woken up and you need to take care of him. Perfect timing. You can leave this till another day.
Over the weekend, as you meet your friends and family, you couldn’t resist bringing it up. It seems like everyone you talk to has tried the cube at least once before, but no one has ever solved it. This gives you a bit more motivation. The interesting thing is, after you asked whether they have solved it, everyone likes to give you an excuse to why they haven’t.
“No, I only messed around with it when I was young. It’s just a toy, I never really wanted to solve it.”
“Oh, I haven’t solved it but I heard it’s real easy as long as you remember some notations.”
“Some guys can solve it in seconds. Those guys are crazy.”
“I have only managed to solve 5 faces one time”, okay, these are the bad liars.
The classic sticker-manipulation comes up once or twice. People generally are interested to solve it. But no one wants to say it’s too hard and no one wants to admit they couldn’t make themselves having a serious try. Maybe it’s a show of people’s character, their attitude to life even.
You decide you want to be different, at least this time around. You want to be able to achieve this ‘childhood dream’. When people ask you whether you can solve a Rubik’s cube, you want to be able to simply say Yes.
“Hey, I solved the first face!—it’s really good fun,” perfect timing, as you receive a message from Keith. You need his enthusiasm (and the peer pressure).
So off you go—you learn, you practice, you fail. The cycle continues. It’s more frustrating than you think. You spent ten minutes following instructions all the way up to the last step—and messing it up. And the cube looks just like the beginning when it’s all scrambled up.
“This is the most frustrating thing I have ever done.”
But the more you think about it, perhaps it’s really because you haven’t faced much adversity in your life. Until that counselling session and this damned cube.
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thanks, Edison! You could be closer than you think. You push yourself forward as you recall this quote. You gradually make yourself follow all the notations, literally one step at a time.
Finally, one night, you solve it. Without looking at the notations that you printed out. Your wife has been complaining for more than a week now, that you’ve been suddenly devoting so much of your time into such meaningless little kid’s toy. But you know this is not about a Rubik’s cube. It’s not just a meaningless little kid’s toy. All your life you have been told to dream big. The world is huge and no one should ever put limits on anything—including the potential and achievement to which one can aspire. As in the old Chinese saying, never be the frog under a well, because there is only so much sky that can be seen.
But to dream big is intimidating. It’s so intimidating that it makes it more convenient to tell yourself not to do it at all. “Wow, people solved the cube in six seconds.” That just sounds like the perfect reason to not bother ever learning how to do it. But everyone’s different. You know you don’t need to be compared to every other person in the world all the time. You are only accountable to yourself. And it’s OK to set the goal to simply solving a cube, regardless how many minutes it takes you. What makes you better—and, more importantly, fulfilled and happier—is that you have achieved something, something that has been your dream for a while. And by starting small, you are actually much closer to getting it done, simply because you’ve started in the first place.
Yes. Dream small.
And suddenly it seems you’ve also solved all the questions about your job too.
I am not going to just sit around. I will take the initiative and do something.
All from a meaningless little kid’s toy.
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