My entire life "tinkering" has always won out. However, right now I am doing the exact opposite in my attempts to learn math - working through a textbook from c

My entire life "tinkering" has always won out. However, right now I am doing the exact opposite in my attempts to learn math - working through a textbook from cover to cover. Math seems like a difficult thing for a beginner to "tinker" with. You can go into Visual Studio and tinker with C#; you can open Chrome Dev Tools and tinker with CSS; you can go to Sublime and tinker with JS or python; and you can sit down and tinker with sketching or painting or building a wooden box. But how do you tinker with a tool which has so many rules and concepts and no compiler or runtime log to let you know when you've done something wrong? So far my extent of "tinkering" with math has been completing the exercises at the end of each textbook section and Googling answers to various equations or examples of proofs I want to try out based on an assumption I've made from the things I've just learned. I guess that is a form of tinkering also, but it comes after the entire reading part.