prepare your curriculum (concepts, problems, contests etc) to be high variance to learn the most. do the vcs to evaluate your improvement. youll improve the fastest this way and is general for any X rated person.

Ill explain my thought processes. You dont have to take me for true or false, evaluate possiblities and understand implications of it yourself.

What is high variance in our context ? When the things you are trying to improve rating like solving tasks, contests, learning a concept, trying a strategy/trick, judge, reading/not reading editorial etc (many things) are far apart / newer than anything you did earlier. For a beginner doing anything would be strictly be high in variance. But it is not the same with non-beginners and gets worse if you are not aware of your actions.

A person who is not a beginner has already tried decent to significant stuff, so theyll have to understand the redundancies in their curriculum, optimize it for more variance, things which you havent tried before and are far apart. It sounds painful, but perhaps getting used to dealing with it is most beneficial according to me. If something in your curriculum is too redundant, try to find them and optimize them.

Dont confuse difficulty with variance

You can absolutety nuke a high rated problem when your experience of solving problems was relavant for it. Asses a problem with things like

• how much of was it a known algorithm
• a known concept
• no of concepts composed
• how much in depth a concept was required
• how many subproblems were required to solve the full task etc

Why VCs ?

I dont claim vcs are the only thing, but any particular measure of improvement that shows you can do better at contest time. Random VCs are best way of measuring it according to me, you can take up any number to measure your improvement, ill leave the choice to you.

Why should it work ?

The argument is simple. If i said try everything to increase your rating, and you did do it you'd have landed the rating. But time is precious, you cant do everything. So youll need to construct a optimal strategy to improve. And my argument is to try things you havent earlier and to keep it far apart, and as time goes you'll get better and comfortable to the idea of trying new things, it gives you more information per hour instead of being stuck or repeating the same idea 6 times on a problem. You get more understanding of the nature of problem solving under many different conditions.

Due to the general nature of problem solving, cp concepts it will all come together over time. But the more practical version is that you can generate many compositions of earlier ideas, ideas that matter for the problem.

Developing understanding - Can you asses difficulty of a problem yourself ? - Can you tell why something worked for you and why something didnt - Can you spot your mistakes/blunders and tell if something genuinely was too hard for you ? - How freely can you express your problem ideas openly ?

If your understanding is poor about the entire idea of problem solving, youll hurt yourself. Dont make actions blindly, develop more and more understanding of actions you are taking, their outcomes. Spend more time understanding the nature of problems, contests, ideas, concepts yourself initially. Perhaps this part is what people who love CP spend more time on.

Dont let your choices be someone elses

Learn to be rational and be complete control and awareness of choices you make. Most of the time, your choices are someone elses choices and you wouldnt even know when you lost your way in the way you did things. At the same time, dont pretend or lie to yourself, be honest with the actual work you put in.

Dont measure in work put in, measure it in improvement / work put in.

You will hurt yourself practicing for hours while measuring little to no improvement, and to know your have wasted time spent in this sport could have ended beautiful and not just you showing one sided love to it will hurt you even more. Some variable is not acting the way you wanted it to in your strategy and spend time understanding it well.

Im open to any of yours arguments / comments / discussions. There are many other ideas to improvement that help, and i dont want to talk about them. They saturate as they go in time.