Cubed - The Puzzle of Us All - Erno Rubik

Highly recommended.

"At last, I had managed to put all the pieces of the 3x3x3 wooden cube into place and the construction appeared to be stable. Imaging the cube as you know it - but monochromatic. At this point, all the sides looked the same, bleak, abstract, flat. No vivid colours inform you of your actual position. I wanted to see what would happen if I moved it. I imagined moving the top layer, not in a full revolution but just halfway, just 45 degrees. What would happen at the end of that move was clear, but I was also curious about that in-between state when the turn was not complete and the edge-cube had already left one arm but had not reached the next. I could see that, in this position, the edges were connected to only one middle. I realized that they were held also by the edges in the middle layer, which was still held by their two middle neighbours. There was an interdependence among all the parts that I had not expected, that I discovered was an essential part of the structure of what I had made. It's strange, isn't it? The cube suggested things to me that I hadn't anticipated, even though I had created it."

Dad was a master designer of aluminum gliders, even winning a patent dispute with the Soviets at one point - more a moral victory than a monetary one.

"My transition to middle age was not without some challenges, some important moments of reckoning. Certainly, the small measure of fame and fortune that I achieved in my 30's was unlikely to be replicated. But, it was only when I had gone through the storm and the calm that followed that I felt able to process what success really meant. Was my success rooted in the great commercial popularity that the cube had achieved or did it occur long before that when I had discovered it and realized that I could solve it? I suppose a bit of both. Success is a strange phenomenon. It seems everyone hopes to achieve it. But what does it mean? The commonly accepted definitions - having a high position, being part of some elite order, being rich, having the admiration of others, may constitute what is generally understood to be success, but, for me, it does not even get close to the most important aspect or significance of the term. Other definitions come closer to the mark. Success is the achievement of something you have been trying to do - which means, that something works in a satisfactory way or has the intended result. This resonates more for me, because it suggests a relationship between an individual and his work, rather than how an individual is regarded in society, or in any public sphere, which involves many other factors that have nothing to do with achieving something. Since I am fascinated by contradictions, I enjoy the fact that cube is a healthy microcosm of both success and failure. As a product, of course, it was, and is, a great success. But let's distance ourselves from conventional measures of success, which tend to be those that are easiest to count. What if the cube had never become a worldwide sensation? What if it had a small measure of success in Hungary but then disappeared? I would have continued teaching. I would have continued to design. I would have travelled less. And I would have continued to consider the cube an accomplishment. For me, the very creation of it, in itself, was also a success. Each phase of the process contained many triumphs and moments of exuberance. When I was able to make all the cubies hold together, for instance, or the moment I discovered how to make it move in so many different directions, or the moment I watched the colours scramble and then the moment when, after working on it for a month, I was able to bring order to the chaos I had created, but suddenly solving it. It is a special experience of success available to anyone that is repeated millions and millions of times. In popular science, a writer described her triumphant feeling when she first succeeded in solving the cube. Back in the office, she wrote, "I can't say for sure what I've learnt. If I kept practising, would I just get really good at Rubik's cubes or would I find that other related skills grew as atrophied parts of my brain bulked up and all manner of spatial solutions made themselves known to me? I don't know, but, in that moment when all the pieces locked into place, when I'd restored order to this scrambled shape, my mind was clear for a moment. Instead of the worries of the day, I was filled with a sense of endless potential." I know exactly what she means. My cathartic experience of success occurred almost 50 years ago when I was a young man in my room, earning next to nothing, trying to figure out what I had just created.