Hello everyone,

Recently I noticed that many people start blogs to write how unmotivated or unconfident they are while solving problems or participating in contests. For this reason, I decided to use my experience and spend couple minutes on writing couple tips that have helped me become better programmer. Although some of my points are not tips but mindsets, I believe that developing them will help you understand what it takes to keep or start improving.

1. It is not about a reward or rating, it is about the experience you get

If you recently graduated from high school, chances are you have covered the famous Myth of Sisyphus in your literature classes. It discusses the absurdity of doing the same thing, with the silver lining being the values and skills you get during your journey.

One thing we can certainly conclude is that the journey of doing something is much more valuable than reaching the final point. For this reason, I highly recommend focusing on improvement over winning a medal or reaching certain rating value.

2. You must be confident in your skills

Many people seem to become disappointed when they fail a contest or couple contests, I believe that this is mostly to not being confident in your skills.

The only way to become confident in yourself is to start being comfortable in the failures. You must understand that you wont perform good in every contest you sit, and that you might have a bad days too.

One thing I would advise you to do is to try to learn a lesson from your failures. Try to write down the reasons why you failed the contest. Then think about how you can improve these mistakes. Is it because you didn't know some algorithm or data structure, if this is the case set your goals to learn this technique. Doing this will help you become more self-aware of your own skills, but it will also help you to start noticing your weak points, and help you to improve these weak points.

3. Taking small steps is the best way to improve

When trying to learn something new, it would be very hard to tackle the big concepts at once. Because of this, I advise you to try to take small steps and take your time. Things take time to fall in place, and because of this it might take you longer to understand certain topics.

Take your time and start with baby steps in order to become more and more experience programmer.

Thank you for reading my first blog. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions.