Somewhere between learning long-division and intro calculus someone inserted a mental virus that replicated and persisted until you found yourself justifying your D+ in math by mindlessly repeating the idea that math is not useful or needed in your career as a DJ/Event promoter. (In case you're wondering, I never got above a C+ in math from seventh grade until I learned that I loved it in a college.)
Wait! Don't stop reading! I know you think you know where this is going. I'm not going to list all the ways/professions in which math is used heavily with fantastic salaries. Nor am I going to give some contrived reason that learning to calculate P values will help you balance your checkbook. Rather, I'd like to articulate how math is a vehicle for a more important skill set: problem solving.
The process of solving a problem is one that can be taught and learned and it is the real skill to be learned through math. You see, somewhere in the process of attempting to fit a curriculum to fit all students, public education lost the teaching of math as a process of solving problems and developing critical thinking skills and reduced it to repeating steps given to us by an instructor.
By doing this, we have been robbed of the opportunity and pleasure of learning concepts, applying them to problems, and seeing results. We haven't learned to ask the crucial questions and methodically evaluate problems in order to solve them. Noted mathematician and professor George Polya wrote in his book "How to Solve It":
The worst may happen if the student embarks on computations or constructions without having understood the problem. It is generally useless to carry out the details without having seen the main connection or having made a sort of plan.
I can't think of a more perfect description of why math seemed tedious rather than interesting to me growing up. Rather than seeing the course of solving a problem to be exciting and stimulating (as I do now as a programmer) I felt as though I was learning a complex set of directions to a destination without description; a contest without context; a job with no satisfaction, like digging a hole only to fill it up again.
When it comes to professional and personal success, being capable of solving problems others can see will make you appreciated and valuable while solving problems that people don't even know exist will make you truly exceptional. Exceptional people have the exceptional ability to identify and clearly define problems that others don't see, and then work to solve them.
So how to develop this? Successful strategies may range from finding fun math word problems to solve, to picking up programming, to gamifying math through competitions. Once you begin to train you mind to see things as collections of knowns, unknowns and missing pieces, the process become transferable and replicable.
A note on the philosophical side:
The truth is, that regardless of whether you intend to be an entrepreneur, figure skater, programmer or stay at home parent, your day to day life will be filled with problems. Those who understand and undertake life's problems will feel empowered rather than victimized by life. They will find that their greatest accomplishments come from solving their biggest problems. It is our mandate as inheritors of this earth to overcome.
The payout of victimhood and being a product of our environments is meager, but the task is easy. True happiness and fulfillment comes at the high price of realizing our personal power through trial, tribulation, and triumph.
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