Yesterday, I had my best performance in a codeforces contest, I reached max rating of 2236 (100+ my 2nd best rating) and my best rank in a round (20th). I was really happy. I checked the rating of my friends and compared myself to others and thought, there must be a mistake, there is no way I am better than these people and concluded that yesterday I was lucky and that the problems were so easy.
This is not a one time thing..
In a previous round (my 2nd best) which lead me to have my best rating (at the time) of 2078. I had similar thoughts, "I was lucky today, this contest was supposed to be Div3 (true story and I just abused the fact that it is rated for me".
Another incident was the first time I became a master, it was around the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, I entered multiple contests in a short period of time and my rating steadily increased until I became master only by solving by 4 problems in Div2, and I thought to myself, "Well, at this period of time, the number of participants was much larger than usual, which means that a normal performance will increase my rating and I was lucky to abuse this fact".
These are 3 incidents where I think there must be some mistake, I don't deserve this rating, I just "abused" the circumstances. These show what is known as "Impostor syndrome" which is the idea that my success is not a result of work but a result of luck, I thought about the matter and here are my ideas.
The situations I mentioned earlier were indeed true (at least the first two), however this shouldn't devalue the achievement that I made. Why? because these situations are experienced by everyone, so if there is an easy contest, but someone puts a good performance then he deserves what he achieved compared to someone who entered the same contest but did not do so well. You might also think, "What about the people who missed the easy contest?" and my answer to that is the idea that luck is not purely random, the more you be proactive, the more you enter contests, the more likely it is to stumble upon an easy contest.
