> For those who disagree, how do you explain the very large number of people who spends tons of time and energy trying to get good at maths but fails to even gr

> For those who disagree, how do you explain the very large number of people who spends tons of time and energy trying to get good at maths but fails to even grasp simple concepts like calculus? Are there really a lot of these people? Everyone I know who is good at math likes it and spends a lot of time on it. In school I was one of those kids who got it pretty easily. I skipped a year in math, I did my exams a year early, I won a math contest, and I went to top uni. But then I also went out of my way to buy extra math texts (not cheap for me) and had extra lessons to learn more stuff. The kids who didn't do so well were the ones who just saw it as a bunch of riddles to be memorized. That works briefly for an exam or two, but if you don't pick up the ideas properly it gets pretty easy to run into a question that can't be answered. > Contrast that with the much smaller but still considerable number of people who aren't really passionate about maths, don't put in the work yet still aces the class? My brother told me he never saw me studying. This is true, why would I have him around when I was studying? I did a fair bit at night when he was asleep. Or I'd think about things on the train. Also at uni there was a culture of pretending you made no effort but did well anyway. It was childish. Clearly people were studying, because there are very simple things you won't know in any other way, such as the names of concepts or people associated with them.