Lessons from My Math Degree That Have Nothing to Do with Math
Hmm,I'd be slightly leery about taking advice from someone who admits they actually didn't do well learning math. Looking at the points, most of the advice sounds good but a couple seem a bit off.Especially: "I can tolerate ungodly amounts of frustration".Math isn't always easy but my hunch is that if it feels hard, you're on the wrong track. The best moments in math for me are the "it's obvious" times, points where everything just flows from first principles.I've always "found math easy" 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'd get there. I think that attitude might help some fieds but I don't think it helps math.This isn'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 until it feels easy (and fun and creative). Work really "hard" to attain a state of productive laziness. But that work shouldn't be a continuous grind either, rather a careful survey of all the ways one can approach the topic.And certainly being able to tolerate frustration is certainly useful in many fields, programming among them. But I'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.