Hi everyone! I'm writing this blog to hopefully throw out a bit of inspiration.

With any measure of skill such as rating, people are always going to tie up their self-confidence with it. Unfortunately, that means when rating is lost, people lose confidence and/or motivation, which always sucks, especially with huge rating losses that seem impossible to overcome. But I want to demonstrate with an example that in the long run, even the largest rating losses won't affect much.

We'll use my performance on Global Round 7 as an example. A whopping -166*. Devastating, right? Well, let's see about that...

Let's look at the alternate timeline where I didn't participate in the round and the rating loss never happened (but my performance in the later contests was the same). Thanks to sjsakib and cfviz for allowing me to break the rules of the universe (probably not an intended use case, but you never know with users...).

Initial rating: 2281
After round 631: 2244 (-37)
After round 633: 2309 (+65)
After round 635: 2226 (-83)
After round 641: 2276 (+50)
After round 647: 2283 (+7)
After Global Round 8: 2365 (+82)

After just 6 rounds, my hypothetical rating is only 25 points higher than my real rating currently (edit for posterity: 2340). Over time, that enormous rating loss was diminished more and more, until now it's become almost nothing**.

So the point I'm trying to make is, take it easy! The more you freak out about performance/rating for individual contests, the worse you'll do, and ultimately it won't matter much anyway. And skipping contests to save rating is even worse because you lose the experience you'd get from doing the contest and attempting the problems. There's no reason to stress about other alternate timelines and thoughts like "if I hadn't screwed up that contest so badly, I would be two colors higher right now :(". That being said, I know it's often hard to get out of a bad mindset (for a long time, I was stuck with one myself), but I hope this helps, even just a tiny bit :)