Tips for improving my math/algebra/etc skills?

[Reincarnate]

I strongly disagree with that logic and think it's a widespread misconception, IMO.

If a kid is staring blankly at a problem, it's because he/she has absolutely no idea where to begin or how to work through it. I don't think it's a matter of "willingness to accept difficulty." It's because the teacher may be trying to shoehorn that student into a particular approach or way of thinking that simply doesn't compute. Remember that Feynman video about "Ways to think" and his example of the internal ticking clock?

I honestly blame teachers for much of this because most teachers are shitty empaths / communicators. The challenge is explaining something in a way that is sensitive to the student's state of mind.

One skill that isn't taught at all (or at least not well) is how to ask the right questions. Determining what your goal is / what you want to solve and what you need to know to get there, and how you can break each one of those problems down.

I'm of the mind that something is only hard when it's taught poorly. A lot of people find statistics really hard, for example, but that's because *everyone sucks at statistics*. Things become much easier when you have a good teacher.