My sad story.

To start, I'll give a personal story as to not seem like I'm talking from a high horse. Self-deception can affect anyone. Let me tell you something about my practice history. Somewhere in late 2019 and early 2020 I started to really like doing virtual contests. I enjoyed the process of doing them and started doing them every day, usually in the morning. For a while it was very fruitful. You can see the linear increase in my rating between January and August of 2020. I also upsolved, of course, but the rise in rating was in no small part due to these virtuals.

After a while, something happened though. For whatever random reason, I became slightly less interested in CP stuff, but I still did these daily virtual contests. However, something changed: I started to treat the virtual contests as a chore and got lazy. It is an exaggeration, but sometimes I felt like I slogged through them — just kinda did them, with overall less interest in solving the very hard problems. I still did the virtual contests like before and from the outside, it may seem as though nothing had changed. But in the inside, I no longer made a so serious effort to study and understand the problems so deeply.

What are the takeaways from this story?

It is easy to lie to yourself about practicing and spend time without actually doing meaningful practice. From the outside it is impossible to tell the difference: no one can look at your practice and tell you for sure that you are deceiving yourself. The second point is why it is fruitless to write blogs of the type "why am I not improving". No one can see inside you...