From my experience of being a low-rated coder, I think that high-rated coders derive intrinsic pleasure from problem-solving while the low-rated coders are (generally) doing it for some other reasons — maybe the glory, maybe to grab the opportunity to work for a big-tech company. Also, persistance and challenging themselves constantly are also things that high-rated coders have but low-rated coders generally do not have.

It's fine, I am a Newbie, go ahead and downvote my comment if you want to. :)

I've noticed that higher rated users are (usually):

• Not looking for a magic trick, secret sauce, magic roadmap, magic problemset or whatever kind of shortcut, but putting the time/effort instead.
• More confortable spending more time struggling/thinking on problems before giving up or looking at the solution.
• More interested in problem solving and deeper understanding, rather than chasing AC's, or counting problems, or passing tech interviews.
• Enjoying CP while being less stressed out about having X rating.

The main difference is that they have trained their minds well such that they feel humble towards their position whereas low rating people usually freak out on seeing tough questions. Instead they ponder upon questions calmly saying this is easy but doing this is a big challenge that's why we can see these common practises in the top coders.

I think they are more effecient in their learning from their mistakes and they are more engaged.

As a high (medium?) rated user, bored enough to write useless comments, I think you won't receive a good answer because different people think differently regardless of their rating. The more interesting question is strategy, I think low rated users usually don't read most problems and try to solve problems more or less in the order they appear, of course I don't expect a newbie to solve problem F,G... yet sometimes you might be able to solve D and not C or B.