People give luck too much credit for bad results at competitions. Especially if those competitions appear random/subjective initially.
In middle school, I was really bad at quizzing. Credit to my school though, they kept letting me go to quizzes anyway. I saw the same teams winning again and again. I figured there must be a method to this madness - quiz questions are about as arbitrary as something can get. I made a few friends on the circuit who told me how they prepared. I began reading the newspaper, tech-crunch, learning about pop-culture, browsing Wikipedia…
In high school, it paid off. I finished 2nd In Karnataka in the Grand iCube quiz, won a zonal iteration of Derek’s quiz, and in college finished 2nd in TCS TechBytes quiz and won a KQA event.
I applied the same thought to every other competitive event I took part in. Debating, Scholarships, Interviews, Aeromodelling.
Hackathons also seemed really subjective, but then there were people who’d won multiple of them. So I studied past submissions, read blog posts, refined my approach. Ended up winning SIH, Rakuten Rakathon, Dassault Systemes Aakruti, Hackman etc.
Later, I went one step further. If I could think from first principles and beat the competition, then I could help others think the same way. So that’s what I did, and created
@pointblank_club. Unlike me, my juniors didn’t have to start from zero. They could draw from the experiences of me and my peers. So they did things better than me. Like going to CERN, keynoting at conferences abroad, winning on the biggest stages in the world multiple times. All from a tier-3 college.
In a world where everyone is studying for the paper, study the paper. Don’t just shoot your shot in the dark, analyse the competition. It’ll put you ahead of 90% of the people on the field. The other 10% are your real competition.