[jhck]

I share that sentiment. I've been practicing Competitive Programming off-and-on for some years now. I still struggle a lot with it. But sometimes I manage to come up with a nice solution, and that makes it all worth it to me.

When I make no progress at all, I take comfort in an anecdote I once read about the statistician Jimmie Savage [1]:

"Jimmie had what he called 'a long-standing neurosis about Pólya-Szegö' (the most famous and long-lived problem book in analysis). Even when he was working on his first (and major) book in Paris, he was spending evenings on that neurosis. 'Pólya-Szegö humiliates me', he wrote. 'I never really know what's going on, but I can now work quite a few of the problems and seem to learn thereby some things of general interest.'" [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Jimmie_Savage

[2] Quote from Paul Halmos's Automathography