I agree. I've noticed this issue where your anticipated difficulty of something ends up determining your experience of its difficulty. With math—most of the tim

I agree. I've noticed this issue where your anticipated difficulty of something ends up determining your experience of its difficulty. With math—most of the time—there's nothing intrinsic in what you're learning that would make it more difficult than say, learning the rules to a complex board game, or the structure of one's government—and yet, people go into learning math with knowledge of its reputation as only being suited to certain special kinds of minds. If you suspect you're one of the chosen you can go into it with relish; if not, you respectfully put in your time, knowing you're in someone else's territory, and sort of meekly do what you can. I think most of the difficulty is 1) determined by your expectation of it 2) initial foreignness and the invisibility of the gap between the concepts you need to understand something, and the ones you already have (i.e. when an outsider just looks at some mathematical statement they have no comprehension of, it's not clear that there are a few layers of concepts underlying it which could be smoothly traversed, as long as one puts the time into it and is given some direction.)