Exeunt Motivation
Here We Go Again
It’s over. The honeymoon phase that is, not that actual road to 2000. Although I’ve been radio silent for two months, the challenge isn’t over yet. In this post, we’ll be talking about why I’ve been gone for so long and what I’ve learned through this hiatus.
School
For everyone that didn’t know, I’m in dual enrollment. This means I get busy work from not only high school classes but also college classes! Two for the price of one, how could I possibly resist? Having half my schedule be college classes also entails having half my schedule changed completely which messed up my entire routine. Adjusting to this new schedule and more coursework has taken me a while, but I’m finally getting back in the swing of things.
Entitlement
I’m sure a lot of you read the heading and had no idea how this could possibly
relate to CP well neither can I. Over winter break and January, I fell prey
to feeling entitled to results. I spent most of my time on CP during November
and December, so by the time the late December contests rolled around, I was
prepared to see big increases in rating. Just a quick glance at my rating graph
reveals that didn’t really happen. With these mediocre performances in the back
of my mind, I took the USACO January contest. My result here was more
soul-crushing than the December CF contests, as the mistake that cost me the
promotion to gold was trying to use binary search on a brute force problem. The
perfect storm of a result oriented mindset with a chain of narrow failures
decimated my will to continue practicing and sense of purpose.
Infinite Recursion
So even writing this blog made me not want to write this blog if that makes any sense. It sucks enough to burn out; fail to hit your goals; and miss promotion by small margins, but it sucks even more to publicly admit it and make a blog post about it. In the end, what got me to write this post is the hope someone else in a slump gets inspired to come back and give it another shot. I know it’s SUPER cliche, but even if you took major L’s and feel like a complete and utter failure, it’s never too late to bounce back and come back stronger than you were before. Plus, you can’t have an epic redemption arc without going through some hardships first right? :p
Outro
So what does the future for the blog and me look like? The blog is pivoting to more USACO focused content, as I prep for the Open contest. But what about your road to 2000? Ok, ok. I’m getting there, calm down. I’m also going to try and fit more CF and AtCoder contests in my schedule going forward ,so look forward to contest recaps and maybe mini editorials in the near future. I’m off to start practicing USACO, so until next week, Ivy signing off.
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