Learn · Level 4 · habit
Practise like the sport counts
Five solves, drop the best and the worst, keep the middle three: that is your number. Milestones below are computed from every official average ever recorded.
The sport measures speed the same way you should: the average of five. Solve five times; throw away the best and the worst; the mean of the middle three is your number. One lucky solve proves nothing and one fumbled cross forgives itself. Do an average of five at the start of every session and write it down. Improvement you can see survives the weeks when it feels like nothing is moving.
Structure beats volume. A half hour that helps: five minutes of finger-trick warm-up, one timed average of five, then twenty minutes on the single weakest thing the timer showed you. Cross too slow? Cross-only solves. Last layer hesitant? Ten minutes in the trainer on your slowest reads, which it keeps for you. Learning the full system? Take one family of cases a week.
Expect plateaus, and expect them to end. They tend to arrive where a new skill has to take over from a maturing one: when beginner corners give way to pairs, or when two looks at the last layer need to become one. A stall usually means the next thing is ready to be learned.
For honest calibration, the official record is hard to beat. People arriving at their first competition already average about 35 seconds, because most wait until the cube feels easy before entering, and 86% of everyone with an official average has beaten a minute. None of this is a bar to clear. Competitions welcome five-minute solvers, and a five-minute solve is as welcome on the timer as a five-second one. But if you are wondering whether thirty seconds is slow, the answer from 279,085 solving careers is: it is the middle of the pack.