This is one of my favorite hobbies. It all started when I discovered an old Rubik's Cube at my mothers house when I was a teenager. It was around the time we had internet access for the first time, so I decided to make use of it and check online how to solve it. It didn't take long until I discovered Youtube videos teaching a very simple "layer by layer" method. I was hooked.
My first solves (while looking at a cheat sheet with the algorithms) took around 10 to 15 minutes. A few days of practice later I improved to times around 1 to 5 minutes and shortly after even times below 1 minute. Unfortunately I wasn't really able to get any better with the system I was using at that time—it had too many steps to perform.
I then discovered the Fridrich/CFOP method. It was much faster but it also had a lot of new algorithms to learn. Eventually I was able to learn all of that and join my first competitions around Germany and some other places in Europe. I lowered my times to be always below 30 seconds, averaged somewhere around 20 seconds and had personal best times close to 10 seconds.
Nowadays I don't attend competitions anymore but I still solve all kind of different cubes/puzzles every other day. My current focus is on solving it blind. You can check my blog post about it.