Three Ways To Study

You have three months and about ten hours a week. Four people you respect describe four different methods. Which one produces the largest gain on problems you have never seen before?

Read editorials for hard problems daily without attempting them first, on the theory that exposure to many techniques matters more than solving any one of them.

For each new problem: restate it in your own words, work the smallest cases by hand until you find a property the answer must satisfy, and only then ask which of the tools you know can exploit that property.

Learn the standard patterns (sliding window, two pointers, monotonic stack, binary search on the answer) and, for each new problem, decide which pattern it matches before starting.

Work through a list of 300 well-known problems with their solutions, re-reading your notes on each until you can reproduce the solution from memory.