Tricks to Improving
Intro
Distraction, the harbinger of frustration and bad performances; but also, a great segue into an idea I recently read about in “How To Be A High School Superstar” by Cal Newport. The idea he introduced was how studying is a lot like swimming in terms of technique triumphing over pure brute force. The beauty of this concept is that not only does it apply to swimming and studying, it also applies to competitive programming. Good technique would be keeping constraints in mind to see what runtime you need to meet and methodically dissecting a problem; whereas, bad technique is akin to me in real contests where I submit to the judge and pray I pass pretests. Sorry for the long queue times in the recent Div. 2s. But this also got me thinking, what’s preventing people from always performing with “good technique”? This led me to two core ideas: anxiety and focus. This week I’ll go over some tricks that have helped me with these two facets of my performance that you’ll hopefully be able to apply too.
Real Contests
There’s no replacement for the good stuff. While the next few tips can help you focus better and relieve a bit of anxiety, experience is the ultimate anxiety killer. Do every contest you can even if you aren’t super confident you’ll get a positive delta.
Diversify
If you’re feeling a lot of pressure to perform in CF contests, try practicing and competing on other sites to alleviate the pressure of performing on CF. Although I got this trick from my mentor before the post went out, I didn’t feel confident putting it in here without getting results first, so I decided to put it to practice before the next contest: Codeforces Round #629 (Div 3). I spent the 2 days before the contest doing virtual contests and practice on AtCoder which really helped calm my nerves for the actual contest and ended up netting me a #329 place finish and +146.
Virtual Contests
Speaking of virtual contests, the little brother to real contests: VCs. What better way to prepare for the real deal than by emulating the same conditions? For the more unfortunate of us who can’t make a lot of real contests, VCs provide valuable practice for strategy, pacing, and experience for real contests. They’re also a pretty streamlined way to expose yourself to a wide breadth of topics and ideas too for just general practice, so what are you waiting for? Get your paper and pencil out, your pants off, and your setup ready because it’s time to compete.
Friends List
In the midst of worldwide social distancing and complete isolation, I’m going to suggest deleting your entire friends list. Not in a figurative manner either, just go ahead and delete their CF account. Now that you’re the highest rated person in your friend group, let’s get back on topic. As ludicrous as this idea sounds, getting rid of your friends list gives you the potential to unbelievable amounts of comeback potential. I’ll be the first to admit, the friend’s standings page can be a great source of motivation, but as they say, “I brought you into this world, I can take you out”. Being outperformed by lower rated people, especially your friends, can make you feel pressured to act faster and make more blunders as a consequence.
Dashboard
The plan is simple: open up the problems then ignore that tab. Much like the friend’s list, seeing the number of people that have solved problems that you haven’t solved yet applies the same pressure of going faster and potentially making more errors or silly mistakes that cost you valuable points. There does lie an iota of merit in using the dashboard to see if the difficulty of problems is out of order and you should be working on a later problem (Ex. D1F is easier than D3A, a true classic), but this really doesn’t hold true for many contests and doesn’t constitute more than the occasional check to see if a later problem has more solves.
Outro
As always, I hope you enjoyed the post and can take some of these techniques and use them to get better performances in practice and contests. Although these all seem like micro-improvements, I’ve found that even just the friend’s list clearing helped remove the anxiety of doing worse than others for me. Also, get hyped for THE KAUNTA COLLECTION - the first series I’m going to be starting on this blog. I want to keep the details a surprise, but feel free to leave some comments on what you think this could be. Until next time, cheers.
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