The most rewarding part about hard work is the notice of growth and change you go through while doing so. Notably, when you work items that you have neglected or not payed too much attention to. Taking breaks from work is a good thing in a sense where you are doing so to actually adjust your chemistry and make sure your body is in good condition. Taking long breaks from work where you need to think about something else is usually a sign that you are obsessing over matters that are not giving you any rewarding results.
A lot of people fear rational things like Math, and do not give it that gentle push it needs to make it interesting. Math stands out as a subject of study simply on the accumulative nature of it, and that you need to understand its basics to master its higher elements. Most failures in higher level math is not of the higher level maths such as complex integrals and differential equations, it is because a lot of the algebra and elementary rules have been forgotten or not understood properly. If you go through the exercise of getting comfortable with mathematics, you will find a lot of recurring patterns in its problems that will cause you to reflect on all those previous tests you were subjected to during your studies. Being good at math is an exercise like playing an instrument. You will need to practice and will be making some bad notes most of the time, but you will gradually gain confidence and start to be able to improvise, or use it to your advantage when you understand how you control the numbers.
The odds of losing should not be your obsession. Improving your odds of winning should be what you think about while you are working towards any goal. No one is going to be a good swimmer if he takes too much notice of the risks of drowning.
I find arts, programming, music and math to be related in a lot of ways. We as humans are attracted to the rhythmic patterns of music, just like we are attracted to the rhythmic patterns of math and logic. Why that attracts us, has largely to do with our basic animal nature of following forms and patterns to find food and shelter to increase our chance of survival. This obsession with predictability and to be able to calculate where things will be in space and time has given growth to numerous strengths and most of our creative/destructive works. But this neurological quirk of ours does also make us look for patterns where there are none, or to fill in the gabs so that there seem to be some.
But, you should be making efforts of finding them especially when they will improve your odds of getting to where you are going.
Hard work is what you should notice and what you should encourage people to be comfortable with. Don’t give them false hopes of less work for their clever insights or natural understanding of particular items, for they will find reasons to do less work since they think they can get away with it. People that get too busy with being clever can find themselves becoming stupid in relation to hard workers, because the hard workers actually produce a lot of results in contrast with the nirvana crowd that produces a lot of promise.
Promise vs. Practicality is much like Faith vs. Science.
Science is the winner. Don’t be a subscriber to the impractical and cheap tricks.
V 