"Go down deep enough into anything, and you will find mathematics"

Since you can find mathematics in anything, application of mathematics is the key to motivating you to improve. Whatever concept you are trying to study, find the direct applications of it and implement it if possible. Completing a project is a lot more fun than solving math problems on the white board.

• For example, a lot of people struggle with differential calculus because they have no idea how it can be used. One way it can be used is in population growth. Simple linear equations cannot be used to calculate population growth as it grows exponentially. Find out the population of your town, city, country over the last 20 years. Fit it into a differential equation and estimate the population of the country after 20 years.
• Do the same for any resource. For example, look at the water consumption over the last 20 years; and how it relates to population growth.
• Think about other ways to apply differential calculus and other topics.
• If you are really struggling to understand any math topic, it could be that you are missing more basic knowledge. For example, if you are struggling with statistics, it could be that you have a weak knowledge of linear algebra that’s holding you back. If you cannot figure out what you are missing, I would suggest consulting with a good math tutor to help you out.
• Once you have a reasonable knowledge of the topics, look up sample exam questions online or at your library. Start working on them and see how you find them. Even if you are able to work them out, make sure that you are able to do them with the required time. If you are struggling with time, you need more practice with the problems that you are stuck on. If you run out of exam questions to practice on, you can look up the next level of exam questions to get ahead. For example, if you run out of year 9 exam questions; you can start looking at year 10 problems that are based on year 9 syllabus. Of course, you can skip the ones that are not in your syllabus.
• If you are struggling with word problems, learn how to break down the problem into sentences and start solving them. You can even draw them out to better understand them. If you have a tutor, have him/her change the order of the word problems to have a different meaning so you can challenge yourself.