I’m not a candidate master, nor am I solving Div 2 D problems in 10 minutes. I’m still a beginner, still getting TLEs, and still struggling with basic logic.
But instead of giving up, I tweaked my mindset recently, and it changed how I practice:
1. The 15-Minute Paper Rule Earlier, I used to stare at an empty IDE for an hour feeling dumb. Now, if I can't figure out the logic on paper in 15 minutes for Problem A or B, I don't ego-grind. I look at a small hint or dry-run test cases manually.
2. Learning from Clean Code After a contest, I open the shortest accepted submissions for Problem A/B. Seeing someone solve in 10 clean lines what took me 40 lines of messy nested loops is a huge eye-opener.
3. Rating Doesn't Matter (Yet) Focusing on + delta or — delta was ruining my focus. Now I only track my up-solved problems.
If you're also struggling at the bottom of Div 3/4, you're not alone. We're all learning.
What’s one thing that helped you most when you were just starting out?
Auto comment: topic has been updated by ashutosh2711 (previous revision, new revision, compare).
just grind 800-1000 rated problems daily mostly all of them are based on some greedy observation.Once you have solved 40-50 such problems i feel you can move towards 900-1100.simlarly keep growing best of luck
As you've said, "I'm not a cm, nor am I solving div.2 D problems in 10m" (which you don't necessarily need to do to be considered "good") Then what you have "discovered" is likely mostly known by everybody.