I Spent 52 Days on Math Academy—Here's What I Learned

I spent the last 52 days learning math, something I hadn't seriously attempted since college.

Going in, I expected it to be painful. Coming out, I learned a few things that surprised me—not just about math, but about how I think about learning difficult things.

I took a non-traditional path into tech.

In college I studied Sports and Recreation Management, treated math as something to get through rather than understand, and after graduation went into tech sales.

After a few years of cold calls, I taught myself to code and made the jump to software engineering.

But I kept running into a wall.

The interesting problems in tech—machine learning, AI, the stuff that seems to matter—require mathematical thinking I never developed.

I could build web apps, but I felt like I was missing something fundamental.

After struggling with some coding interviews, I was studying Neetcode 150 problems and researching better learning techniques.

I came across Justin Skycak's writing and podcasts about how people actually learn math effectively, which led me to try Math Academy.

Their diagnostic test placed me 3% through their Mathematical Foundations 1 Course.

Perfect starting point.

Over 52 days, I spent 104 hours working through problems—exactly 2 hours per day on average.

I tracked my time because I was curious how long it would actually take.

The experience was different from what I expected:

It wasn't as painful as I thought.

I'd built up math as this impossibly difficult thing, but most individual problems were manageable.

The difficulty was cumulative, not individual.

The hardest part wasn't the math—it was changing my relationship to being stuck.

For years, when I hit something I didn't understand, I'd either skip it or conclude I wasn't smart enough.

Learning to sit with confusion and work through it systematically was harder than any specific mathematical concept.

Prerequisites matter more than I realized. Every time I got truly stuck, it wasn't because the current problem was too hard—it was because I was missing some foundational piece.

Once I learned to ask "what am I missing?" instead of "why am I stupid?", everything got easier.

The biggest surprise wasn't that I could learn math—it was realizing how much of what I thought was "being bad at math" was really just having gaps in my foundation.

I don't think I was "bad at math", I think I just never learned the prerequisites properly, then gave up when the advanced stuff didn't make sense.

The practical changes are obvious: I can solve problems I couldn't before, I'm less intimidated by quantitative reasoning in general.

But the bigger change is how I approach difficult things.

I used to treat confusion as evidence that I wasn't capable of something.

Now I treat it as information about what I need to learn next.

This applies beyond math.

When I'm stuck on a coding problem, instead of feeling frustrated, I ask: What concept am I missing?

What simpler version of this problem could I solve first?

It's a small shift in mindset, but it makes difficult things feel less personal and more systematic.

1. Prerequisites are everything:

Most learning problems aren't ability problems—they're missing foundation problems.

When you can't understand something, ask what you're missing, not whether you're smart enough.

2. Active beats passive:

You can't learn math by watching someone else do it, just like you can't learn to code by watching tutorials.

You have to struggle with problems yourself.

3. Consistency beats intensity:

Two hours every day for 52 days worked better than any cramming session ever did.

The daily habit became automatic.

Hard to say definitively after just two months, but I think so.

Not because I'm now "good at math"—I'm still pretty basic.

But because I learned something about how to learn hard things systematically instead of giving up when they feel overwhelming.

I'm planning to continue with more advanced topics on Math Academy, partly because I'm curious where this leads, and partly because I think the skills matter for the kind of work I want to do.

I keep thinking about how many people assume they're "not math people" the same way I did.

Not because they lack ability, but because they had experiences similar to mine—trying to learn advanced concepts without proper foundations, then concluding they weren't capable when it didn't work.

At minimum, I learned that my own assumptions about what I could and couldn't learn were worth questioning.

That seems like useful knowledge.

The system I used was Math Academy. I'm not affiliated with them, but if you're curious about learning math systematically as an adult, it's worth checking out. They have a money-back guarantee, so the downside is limited.