Sometimes our dislike of something can be explained by our unknowing of it

It's been several years now since I finished high school and I can safely say that throughout the entire time I absolutely hated mathematics. That was also the case in elementary school. I hated my teachers, I hated the subject itself, the tests, everything.

Later in life I encountered cases where I had to use different mathematical formulas to calculate certain things, one of the most prominent one being percentages. I had very little idea of how to work with them in high school, but as I grew older, and as I encountered situations that required me to know how to work with percentages, I slowly began learning, out of necessity.

In time I got to understand how to do it fairly well, and I even began liking it. Then as time passed by I had to keep on learning all kind of other things, but nothing too complicated. Whenever that happened I realized that after properly understanding a certain concept that I didn't understand before I suddenly began to like mathematics a bit more.

This happened to me multiple times. It happened when I first started coding with proper programming languages like JavaScript, or Python, or C#. I had a really hard time understanding certain concepts, sometimes even simple ones such as "for" loops. I even got to the conclusion, while learning Python a few years ago, that programming simply isn't for me.

The fact that I'm a stubborn person helped me here, because I didn't like the idea of giving up that easily, so I kept on trying to learn, moving from Python to JavaScript and then again from JavaScript to Python. I eventually got to understand "for" loops a bit better, and when I started learning C#, things finally clicked, and I fully understood how to use it.

Since then, my insecurities regarding programming began to disperse a bit. I'm nowhere near being good at programming, let alone close to being able to call myself a proper programmer, but that type of situation happened so many times that it made me get to a conclusion - a lot of the things that we think we don't like might be the result of us simply not understanding a part of the whole, or the entirety of that particular thing.

It's not that I never liked mathematics, but I had teachers that didn't want to take their time and explain things until everyone understood properly. Because of that there were a lot of concepts, even simple ones, that I didn't understand as a kid. Later in school when mathematics became harder, the fact that I didn't know those simple things in the first place made everything even worse, and so I got to the conclusion that I don't like math.

But because I was forced to relearn certain concepts for my job after I finished school, or for my freelance work, I began to like it more and more.

As I mentioned before, the same happened with programming. I had a hard time understanding a simple concept and that made me think I simply don't like programming, or that programming just isn't for me. That changed immediately as soon as I actually understood that simple concept that I couldn't grasp at first.

Another example could be Excel. I never liked it in school because the teachers who forced us to use it were boring and were giving us boring projects, while poorly explaining how to use the software. And so I spent most of my life up until this point avoiding Excel. Once I got a job in 2019 I was forced to use Excel for certain tasks, and while I was mostly just writing things into cells, I quickly saw, through others, how useful it can be to learn how to use other things such as formulas.

I eventually found a course on YouTube about Excel and I watched it all, while following the instructor and building the same projects as him. Once I understood the basic concepts I realized I actually quite like Excel, and now I'm using it whenever I have to keep track of too many numbers.

It's a good idea to learn to embrace the fact that some of the things we dislike are just a result of us not understanding how they work well enough. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, but sometimes you can surprise yourself if you make an extra effort to learn more about what you dislike and see if your opinion changes.