🐬 Rules

Not technique. The mindset that has to be right before any of the technique matters.

Towards others

• If you cheat in a contest, there is something wrong with you.
• If you plagiarize someone else’s solution and claim it as your own thinking, there is something wrong with you.
• If you look up the editorial before the contest ends and pretend you solved it yourself, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’d rather have a rating number you didn’t earn than one that’s actually yours, there is something wrong with you.
• If you make multiple accounts to dodge your real rating, there is something wrong with you.
• If you hide things from your friend, there is something wrong with you.
• If you help a teammate only when it makes you look good, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’d let a teammate submit something you know is wrong just to avoid an awkward conversation, there is something wrong with you.
• If you take credit for a team’s solve that your teammate actually found, there is something wrong with you.
• If someone genuinely asks you to explain your solution and you refuse because “figure it out yourself”, there is something wrong with you.
• If you share a private contest’s problems before it’s over, there is something wrong with you.
• If you mock someone for a wrong submission, there is something wrong with you.
• If you look down on someone because their rating is lower than yours, there is something wrong with you.
• If you explain things to sound smart instead of to actually be understood, there is something wrong with you.
• If a beginner’s question annoys you instead of reminding you where you started, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’ve never once helped someone for free, with nothing in it for you, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’d sabotage a teammate’s chances to look better by comparison, there is something wrong with you.
• If you take an upvote, a “congrats”, or a top rank more seriously than whether you actually earned it, there is something wrong with you.
• If you blame your teammate for a loss before asking what actually happened, there is something wrong with you.
• If you can’t be happy for a friend who outperforms you, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’d rather see a rival fail than see yourself succeed, there is something wrong with you.
• If you never say thank you to the people whose blogs, editorials or notes you learned from, there is something wrong with you.

Towards yourself

• If you don’t think competitive programming is a fun activity, there is something wrong with you.
• If the only reason you solve a problem is the rating gain, and you feel nothing when the idea actually clicks, there is something wrong with you.
• If you only ever do problems you already know you can solve, there is something wrong with you.
• If a problem you failed doesn’t make you curious how it was meant to be solved, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’ve stopped being excited by an elegant proof or a clean piece of code, there is something wrong with you.
• If you blame the judge, the setter, or the internet before you’ve actually read your own code, there is something wrong with you.
• If a rating drop makes you quit instead of making you curious about what you’re missing, there is something wrong with you.
• If you can’t watch someone weaker than you solve a problem you couldn’t, without feeling something ugly, there is something wrong with you.
• If you never go back and actually fix the bug that cost you the contest, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’ve “finished” a topic and never return to it once a harder problem needs it in a new way, there is something wrong with you.
• If you understand a solution well enough to upsolve it but not well enough to re-derive it a month later, you haven’t actually learned it — and if that doesn’t bother you, there is something wrong with you.
• If you avoid a topic because you’re bad at it instead of because you’ve actually mastered it, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’d rather feel smart solving easy problems than feel stupid attempting hard ones, there is something wrong with you.
• If you give up on a problem the moment it looks hard, before trying a single idea, there is something wrong with you.
• If you measure yourself only against your rating and never against who you were a year ago, there is something wrong with you.
• If reading someone else’s elegant solution makes you resentful instead of impressed, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’d quit a problem the instant it stopped being fun, when you know ten more minutes of boredom would have found the answer, there is something wrong with you.
• If you don’t feel at least a little bit alive during the last ten minutes of a close contest, there is something wrong with you.
• If you treat practice as a chore to survive rather than something you chose to do, there is something wrong with you.
• If you’ve never stayed up late because a problem wouldn’t leave you alone, there is something wrong with you.
• If you can’t tell the difference between “I don’t know this yet” and “I’m bad at this”, there is something wrong with you.
• If winning matters to you more than understanding why you won, there is something wrong with you.

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None of this is about being good at competitive programming. Plenty of people are good at it and still get every one of these wrong. This page is about the only part of it that isn’t technique — the rest of this site is.