Part of the “What I Wished I Knew” series. A ten-years-later look back at what I didn’t understand growing up, and what I’ve learned since.
Math and Money
Math was a foreign subject to me. I struggled to understand anything past basic arithmetic, and to this day I still get tripped up whenever letters and numbers show up together in a formula. Yet math, things like rate of change, area, the quadratic formula, exponential graphs, and basic economics, turned out to be valuable enough that I chose to retake it in my thirties, just to better understand the world.
The older I get, the more I understand how I learn. Back then, I was too anxious to even try. But when I put my mind to something, I eventually get it. That’s why the economy, mortgage rates, inflation, the stock market, and basic personal finance and budgeting aren’t foreign to me anymore. I still only have a basic grasp of it all, but I’m no longer left in the dust — and I wish I’d had this understanding straight out of high school.
Math is also a universal language. Every country runs on the same equations and functions, and once you understand math, you start to understand other countries’ economies too.