Hi Everyone,

Apologies if this post is not formatted properly or does not fit certain cf blog standards as this is my first blog post and I do not read many blogs.

I have been doing codeforces and USACO for over a year now, and I've always practiced just by doing problems and when I get stuck I read the solution, implement etc. I've been told to just do more problems above your level so that's what I've tried to do. However, although I saw fast improvement initially, I feel like I've just hit a certain point where I can't solve questions rated above 1200 and USACO Silver problems and beyond. I've noticed many of my classmates who were worse than me now pass my level after preparing for a much shorter amount of time and I am not sure what I need to change or fix (admittedly this is a little more selfish though and does not matter as much, my main point is that I am putting in effort but feeling stuck at one level).

I've read and been told that after missing a problem, you need to think about how you would arrive to the solution. However, everytime I can't solve a problem (which I attempt for 15-20 min), I read the solution and it just becomes so obvious that I can't think about how I would approach it. Like the key observation just seems so obvious to be made and I can't understand how I didn't see it before so when I consider how I would arrive to it, my only thought is that you simply see it because it is so obvious.

One thing I did notice, however, is that for many of the problems I did not solve originally, if I go back to them some time later (even 2-3 weeks later), I will forget how to do them even though, at the time, the solution made perfect sense to me.

So I guess in short, I have been trying to just do problems around my level and implement those that I miss, but now I have reached a plateu. For those that followed this (intuitive) strategy and it worked, is there anything you notice that I am doing wrong? I feel that possibly my whole approach or even mindset is incorrect when it comes to learning and improving in competitive programming as I followed the standard advice but am stuck. For more background information, I did competitive math up to AIME level but also hit a plateu prior to doing competitive programming.

Thank you so much!