It took me a few tries to learn that lesson! I feel pretty lucky that I finally found math that I enjoyed and made sense after hating it for so long. I didn’t

It took me a few tries to learn that lesson! I feel pretty lucky that I finally found math that I enjoyed and made sense after hating it for so long. I didn’t do a ton of memorization/drilling and I never really got into the world of fun math puzzles, so in high school I was both underprepared and never got to do the cool stuff. It’s much easier to convince myself as an adult that fluency in algebraic computation is useful because I now have examples that I care about being able to work through.