[cosminro]

One important aspect of leetcode/coding contest problems is that they have a input size constraint and a time limit constraint.

You can use the two to figure out what is the time complexity for a solution that would work. This simplifies the search for a solution by quite a bit. Here's a blog post about this idea (going from the input constraint to the possible algorithm): https://www.infoarena.ro/blog/numbers-everyone-should-know

Other than that, understanding a set of frequent data structures and algorithms helps a ton. Here's a short course from stanford on preparing for coding contests http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs97si/