During a long bus ride, I asked one of my most cracked coding friends how he practiced for upwards of 6 hours a day without getting demotivated or feeling unproductive. His response was quite simple, “whenever you feel terrible, just take a shower.” To that I replied, “you can’t shower 5 times a day.” The small group listening in all laughed, and while I smiled at the joke, it masked the reality that I actually meant what I said. See, whenever I practiced competitive programming, or did anything for that matter, I would expect a decent level of progress. So if I spent an hour on a problem just to find the solution to be simple, or “wasted” time debugging a single line, it would kill any motivation I had. And unfortunately, the inverse doesn't hold. The feeling of gratitude from every hard problem I solved quickly, or a cool concept I learned, was disproportionately short-lived. In general, I think it's a lot harder to lose than to gain momentum. And while this seemed unfair to...
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