imagine waking up tomorrow and noticing something is different you found yourself unusually sensitive to numbers upon arriving at school you're met with a math test quickly scanning through the exam you felt that all the questions in your head simply make sense and the answers just come to you this is definitely not my experience Hi friend my name is Han I graduated from Columbia University engineering school that's my I majored in math and operations research as someone who is pretty skilled at math and even enjoy studying math people often have the impression that I'm very intelligent and they think the reason they're bad at math is because they're not as smart as I am little do they know that I really struggled at Mass growing up I am originally from China when I was in high school all students has to study math English and Chinese it could pick between two paths liberal arts which had history politics and geography or natural science with physics chemistry and biology with a slightly harder math test consider hearing the fact that I studied a math and Engineering in college lots of people assumed that I must have chosen the Natural Science track surprisingly I did not I chose the liberal arts track because that was really bad at math and science they just seemed so hard to me I couldn't understand what the teacher was talking about in the lecture I didn't know how to do my homework I still remember my first high school math test I had no clue what's going on and I told myself maybe it's just because the content is really hard maybe if I don't get it no one else will get it either but I was so wrong I got a 49 and I still remember the average was 78 and the highest was 96. by U.S standards I was definitely getting C's and B's in my math classes and I thought maybe just because other people are smarter than me and I'm just bad at math I got stuck in this segua I hate math so I'm avoided studying it and then I got really bad scores and I hate math even more and then just felt so defeated and just plain stupid if you're struggling with math right now I fully get you so in this video I'm going to show you how I went from someone who hated math to becoming someone is really good at math and even enjoying and loving math so what I did when I was in high school if I saw a very hard problem I would look at a math problem and have no idea how to approach it so I had to take out my notes and textbooks and try to figure it out after a while I would have some idea and write down the first step however as soon as I move on to the next step it gets stuck once again finally after 30 minutes I would manage to complete the question only to check the answer and find out it was still wrong so at the drop down the correct answer and just move on there's no way it's going to be enjoyable for you if you keep running into problems and getting stuck every single step this experience will only leaves you frustrated and feeling defeated here is the system that I use in college and it actually works when I encountered a question I don't start writing immediately instead I take a moment to mentally walk through how I'm going to solve it if I realize I don't know how to solve it or foresee myself getting stuck I just gave up yes you heard me right just gave up instead I look at the answer I take the time time to thoroughly understand the answer key and its Approach at each step once I've grasped with the answer key I set the answer key aside and try to solve the question on my own now I know precisely what the question is asking about write down each step this time don't give up too easily and make a general effort to apply what I've just learned from the answer once I've completed the solution I compare it to the answer key once again if I realize I've done it incorrectly or I'm stuck at a point I cannot quite recall I just repeat the process understand the answer key answer the question again independently until I get right a couple reasons why this is so much more effective than the first one that I did when I was in high school first of all it triggers positive feelings instead of feeling frustrated or don't know where to start you get to complete the question correctly on your own this will give you a sense of accomplishment which is my favorite part of being a math major that I get all the hard questions right I know how to do the hard questions and make me feel good good it would just boost your confidence and intellect secondly this will save your time and spend all the time effectively before you were spending all the time to try to figure out the question on your own but actually you may not be even on the right path you might be completely wrong or just even not even in the right chapter of the book but the second approach allows you to spend the majority of the time of learning the answer keys which is the correct way if you didn't understand how the answer key did it but you would immediately found the correct chapter or the right part of your note to study certainly it's so important that you get to write the solutions completely on your own from start to finish that will give you a comprehensive understanding of how to approach this question from beginning to the end that next time if you see similar questions you will know it because you already know how to do it completely on your own this time why math makes no sense to you sometimes technical things has barriers unlike history and literature objects that you may be able to have an understanding of a term that you never heard of before very fast but for math you just cannot for example if you've never heard of chinchu Huang Wikipedia tells you oh was the founder of the Qin Dynasty and the first emperor of unified China you immediately have an understanding of who hate is what did he do was he famous for and he looked like this but if you want to know what is linear programming and then you Google it and the Wikipedia tells you Lincoln programming also called in your optimization is a method to achieve the best outcome such as maximum perfect or lowest cost in the mathematical model whose requirements are represented by being relationships who someone first time hearing the term linear programming they may go what the hell is this this is how is this helping me to understand what is linear programming so when you try to learn a math topic you're not just learning the topic itself you are also learning all its fundamental concepts and what's it built upon so when you are in your Calculus class and do you feel like oh my God I have no idea what's the teacher is talking about how come the teacher jumps from one step to the other step that everyone else seems to get it and I just don't it's probably because there are stuff that we missed from pre-calc were the previous lessons that the teacher didn't mention now we know you don't get it it's only because you're missing a note of knowledge so you cannot connect a path together all those no's and paths connect together become a giant Network don't worry about it too much if you feel like you missed a lot of the knowledge before or you're just way behind I'm going to talk exactly how can you put your giant Network as fast as possible together and the plan found some practice problem sets that have relevant questions you can ask your teacher or professors or just Google it online make sure it has answer keys and the more thorough of the answer key is the better the 20 Questions a day using the process I just mentioned above I know it might be a lot but I promise you it's really worth it working through practice questions you're zooming in on what truly matters what what you're unsure about instead of reviewing a whole old book or your note from last semester when you found a step you're not getting that's a clue about what you're missing you're learning as you go and you're putting it into practice straight up you will see the stuff that really matters more often and the stuff that doesn't matter might not even show up so when I was in my senior year of high school I did two extra hours of math problem sets in addition to my math homeworks within one semester not only that I caught up all the materials I left it behind before but also I become one of the best students in my math class my math teacher really liked me I was one of her favorite I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to have favorites but I was her favorite and I love her the beginning is always the hardest part it might take you forever to understand the answer keys after you build this jelly Network truly your mind will work completely differently obviously you still need to pay attention to the lectures and do all the math homework but you no longer will be the person that hates math and have no idea what's going on so thank you so much for listening I really hope this will be helpful to you