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bogdan » beyond medals: why real problem-solving is more than competitions

08:17 am on Sep 10, 2025 | read the article | tags: life lessons

at a recent all-hands, i felt a prick when the hr department proudly announced hiring multiple «olympiad medalists». don’t get me wrong – winning a medal in math, physics, or computer science is a real achievement. it takes talent, discipline, and hours of training. but it made me pause, because i’ve lived on the other side of that story.

when i was about seven or eight, i scavenged parts from my grandfather’s attic and built a working landline phone. my family wasn’t thrilled (i used it to call the speaking clock more than once), but that spark set the direction for my life. teachers noticed i had potential in math and science, and they pushed me forward.

but here’s the truth: raw intelligence alone wasn’t enough.

for years, i struggled at competitions until a dedicated teacher invested in me. he trained me like a coach trains an athlete: hours every day, six days a week, drilling problems until the techniques became second nature. with that support, i placed first in a national mixed math-physics competition and later ranked third in the math national olympiad.

and here’s another truth: talent and hard work aren’t enough if you’re poor.

my family often didn’t have enough food. we didn’t have proper heating in the winter. we had barely any money for school supplies. looking back, scarcity shaped me: no video games, no vacations, no distractions. my entertainment was stripping down broken radios and tvs, trying to make them work, or reading my grandfather’s stash of technical books. during summers, i fixed neighbors’ appliances for pocket money. it wasn’t glamorous, but it was real.

that experience taught me something competitions never could:

• how to solve problems when resources are scarce;
• how to make trade-offs when nothing is ideal;
• how to learn fast, because failure had real costs.

olympiad problems, for all their difficulty, are carefully designed puzzles. they reward pattern recognition and sustained focus. but the world doesn’t give you cleanly bounded puzzles. real problems are messy, incomplete, ambiguous. they involve people, trade-offs, and constraints you can’t control.

so yes – olympiad training builds focus and stamina. but so does fixing a broken stereo when your family can’t afford a new one. so does reverse-engineering electronics with no manual. so does navigating scarcity while still pushing forward in school.

that’s why i’m skeptical when medals are held up as the ultimate signal of ability. they show that someone had talent, and access to the resources and mentorship to polish it. but they’re not the only signal, nor the strongest one for long-term success.

the skills that last – resilience, adaptability, resourcefulness – often come from outside the competition hall. they come from life.

and in my case, they came from a cold attic full of old components, a hungry stomach, and the stubborn belief that i could make something work, even when nothing was given.