Lessons from My Math Degree That Have Nothing to Do with Math
Hmm,<p>I&#x27;d be slightly leery about taking advice from someone who admits they actually didn&#x27;t do well learning math. Looking at the points, most of the advice sounds good but a couple seem a bit off.<p>Especially: &quot;I can tolerate ungodly amounts of frustration&quot;.<p>Math isn&#x27;t always easy but my hunch is that if it <i>feels</i> hard, you&#x27;re on the wrong track. The best moments in math for me are the &quot;it&#x27;s obvious&quot; times, points where everything just flows from first principles.<p>I&#x27;ve always &quot;found math easy&quot; and occasionally tutored people who had trouble with it. It always seemed like those who got stuck would make the mistake of thinking math was a grind, that if they pushed through enough frustration they&#x27;d get there. I think that attitude might help some fieds but I don&#x27;t think it helps math.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say math really is easy. Rather, I think the appropriate approach is to spend a lot of time and approach from multiple angles <i>until</i> it <i>feels</i> easy (and fun and creative). Work really &quot;hard&quot; to attain a state of productive laziness. But that work shouldn&#x27;t be a continuous grind either, rather a careful survey of all the ways one can approach the topic.<p>And certainly being able to tolerate frustration is certainly useful in many fields, programming among them. But I&#x27;d say that intellectual problems that benefit from overt are problems where a person has all the knowledge necessary for the solution and merely has to engage in a long, frustrating process of putting them together - like a large but not hugely sophisticated, computer program.