My wife and I stumbled across “The Speed Cubers” on Netflix a few months ago and found it pretty fascinating. These elite competitors are able to solve Rubik’s cubes in less than 10 seconds.
The current Rubik’s cube world record stands at just 3.47 seconds. That’s pretty amazing.
As a joke, I got my wife a Rubik’s cube for Christmas to mess around with. Neither of us had ever played with one before and we spent days just twisting it around. The farthest we got was to solve one side of cube to make one color match.
Finally, I decided to watch a few YouTube tutorials to see how to solve it for real. Long story short, after a few weeks of practicing, I am now able to solve a Rubik’s cube in around 5 minutes.
What Do Rubik’s Cubes Have to Do with Making Money?
I know, solving a Rubik’s cube doesn’t sound like it will be able to make money. On the face of it, you’re right. You won’t get rich by just learning this skill and doing nothing else.
However, I realized that there are lessons to be learned through my cubing experience. Those lessons can be translated into making more money and setting yourself up for financial success.
Here are some of the things I learned while starting to cube.
1. Understanding the Cube
The first step to learning to solve a Rubik’s cube is to understand how the cube works. This isn’t always intuitive to new cubers (it certainly wasn’t to me), but is important to be able to solve a Rubik’s cube.
The key information to understand is that the middle square on each face always stays the same relative to the others. This means the white face is always opposite the yellow face. Red is opposite orange and green is always opposite blue.
By knowing this information, it becomes easier to find a solution since you know where the colors should go. Without understanding how the cube physically works, I would have been stuck for days twisting the colors around with no progress.
Lesson Learned: Take the time to study the problem and learn how things work. Lay the foundation for your knowledge and then you will be able to build off of it faster. For example, if you want to make money by building websites, spend time learning the basic principles of websites (hosting, domains, HTML, etc.) before you do anything else.
2. Use Basic Algorithms
The next step to solving a Rubik’s cube is understanding what an algorithm is. An algorithm is a series of moves that are performed to move squares in certain patterns.
An example is the right-hand algorithm that can help to orient a corner to the correct position. Other algorithms can swap edges and rotate the orientations to match up correctly. By knowing just a few simple algorithms, it is possible to solve a Rubik’s cube.
If you don’t know how to move the pieces of the Rubik’s cube in a progressive way, it will be very difficult to solve for the ordinary person. While the puzzle may seem random at first, there is a very logical progression of algorithms to solve the cube correctly.
Lesson Learned: When you are trying to make more money, learn the “algorithms” to get there. This means learning the interim steps needed to reach your overall goal and being as efficient as possible in your method. If you are trying to sell an online course, that could mean learning social media marketing, how to start a blog, and how to get organic traffic.
3. Learn from the Best
When I first tried my hand at solving the Rubik’s cube, I had no idea what I was doing and it showed. The only reason I was finally able to figure out how to solve it was from learning from a pro.
In my case, it was watching Cubastic’s YouTube videos and following his tutorials. He has step-by-step videos that shows the thought process and how to solve the interim steps needed to get to a completed cube. Not only were the tutorials very easy to understand, Cubastic earned my respect by being able to solve a Rubik’s cube in 10 seconds.
Lesson Learned: Especially if you have no idea where to start, learn from a professional or someone who has already had success. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel when you can follow in someone else’s footsteps that has already done it. Try to find a mentor you can ask questions of, take a course from a professional, or find free material from someone who has done what you want to do.
4. Grow an Audience
When I started looking for a tutorial to learn how to cube, I came across Cubastic on YouTube. His videos were simple to understand, engaging, and were professionally made. This has helped him to gather 566,000 followers and millions of views on his videos. Some of his top videos have over 10 million views.
Cubastic’s followers and video views allow him to make money off his videos. Just by growing his audience and monetizing them through YouTube, he could make $20,000 to $40,000 per year in passive income. As his views and followers grow, he’ll be able to earn more without having to do any more work.
Lesson Learned: Even in a very targeted niche, such as Rubik’s cubes, people are able to make plenty of money. As long as there is an audience interested in your topic, there are ways to monetize videos and content. This can be through ads, products, and services. YouTube videos are a great example of assets that will generate passive income once they are posted and require no further involvement.
How to Make Money with Rubik’s Cubes
Once you know how to solve a Rubik’s cube, there are ways that you can monetize your skills. While we are talking about this specific niche, it is possible to make money from other skills using similar ideas.
- Create tutorial videos on YouTube. Create a following and get more views to be able to get paid for ads on your videos.
- Grow a social media following. Use other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin to grow your following. Once you have enough followers, you’ll be able to sell sponsored posts and promote affiliate products to make money.
- Start a blog. Cross-post your videos on your own website and create other content to engage your visitors. You can then sell ad space, include affiliate links, and promote your own products.
- Create a paid course. Free content is used to build a following but premium content will help you get paid. You could create a paid course that will show your visitors how to get better results. In this case, it could be solving a Rubik’s cube in under 2 minutes.
- Build a brand or sell other brands. If your name starts to get recognizable in your niche, you can sell t-shirts and other products based around your brand. It not, partner with other companies that have products or services related to your skill.
How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube
If you’re interested in learning how to solve a 3×3 Rubik’s cube, here is the method that I learned from Cubastic.
To do this, start by solving a white cross with matching edges and middles. This should be opposite the yellow center face, as shown in the first cube above.
Then, solve the corners by doing the right-hand algorithm. The next step is to solve the first two layers by moving the middle edges to their appropriate locations.
Once you have the first two layers complete, you’ll need to solve for the top yellow face and then move the corners and edge to their final positions.
It’s difficult to explain all the details, so I’d recommend checking out this tutorial from a true pro:
While solving a Rubik’s cube started as fun challenge for my wife and I, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the experience. Most of all, it shows that you can make money from almost any niche if you get creative.
Now go challenge your brain with a Rubik’s cube or pick up a new skill, and work on making some extra money from it.
