One of the most common complaints among math students is: When am I ever going to use this? The typical response from teachers is something like: “I know this seems dull, but you don’t know what career you’ll choose. You might go into a field where knowing how to compute definite integrals quickly and correctly by hand is really important.”

Most of us use only the most rudimentary math in our jobs, so that answer is not very motivating.

In How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenburg provides a better answer: The math problems you do are to your brain like weight training or calisthenics are to a sport like soccer.

Anyone who is really good at a sport does strength training and drills. These drills may be repetitive or “boring,” but anyone who wants to be good does those things over and over. An athlete might not perform that exact movement on the field—like weaving a soccer ball between cones—but everything he does in those drills translates directly into what he will do on the field. The speed, strength, flexibility, responsiveness—an athlete builds those through drills. If you want to be good at something, you have to do the drills! And the best players do them a lot. They master the basics. They put in the work.

“Mathematics is pretty much the same,” Ellenberg writes. “You may not be aiming for a mathematically oriented career. That’s fine—most people aren’t. But you can still do math. You probably already are doing math, even if you don’t call it that. Math is woven into the way we reason. And math makes you better at things. Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, sounder and more meaningful way. All you need is a coach, or even just a book, to teach you the rules and some basic tactics.”

Math is like weight lifting for your brain. Consider what weight lifting and exercise do for your body.

Take pushups as an example. A relatively fit young man can bust out 40 to 50 pushups. So you’d expect the world record to be 500, maybe a thousand pushups.

In 1980, Minoru Yoshida of Japan did 10,507 pushups nonstop.

When you push your body, it breaks down your muscles in a way that forces them to rebuild, and when they rebuild, they become stronger and more pliable—which makes you stronger and more pliable.

The human body is incredibly adaptive. We don’t know the limits of the human body!

The brain is also incredibly adaptable—it is neuroplastic.

In 1973, David Richard Spencer of Canada broke the world record for how many digits of pi he could memorize—511 digits. A lot of people worked to beat him. Within five years, American David Sanker memorized 10,000 digits of pi. By 2015, that record was up to 70,000 digits. It is now up to over 100,000 digits of pi. What we thought were the limits of the human brain were not limits. It’s just a matter of training the brain.

The brain grows when you exercise it. When you’re pushing your brain, it is actually rewiring itself, physically adapting in a way that allows you to think and do new things. That is what mathematics does for your brain.

Scientists are realizing there are a lot of things that we tend to attribute to natural ability that can actually be developed through the right kind of training. In the book Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise, the authors write: “The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones. In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it.”

We understand that God has given each of us our potential, but it is a mistake to think that your potential is fixed. You can expand it! If you commit yourself to it, your capacity will grow.

The most satisfying part of being a teacher is seeing someone break a barrier. It’s exciting to the student, to the teacher—and to God! We are capable of so much more than we think we are. God is always trying to expand our thinking and our ambition.

The adaptability of your brain is greater now, when you are young, than it will be at any further point in your life. There are some things where your window of adaptability has already passed! “Perfect pitch,” for example, was assumed for centuries to be an innate ability, but research now shows that it can be learned—but only before you turn 6. After that age, you lose the ability to learn that skill.

There are a lot of other ways that you are in the prime years of mental development. Your brain’s adaptability is very strong. Herbert W. Armstrong called these the crucial preparatory years: “During these years the mind is capable of acquiring faster than at any other stage of life the advanced knowledge needed before beginning one’s adult career …. After age 25, the mind which has stagnated since age 16 finds it difficult to enter upon more mature study” (The Missing Dimension in Sex).

You have a super-absorbent brain. It adapts very quickly. Take advantage of that while you have it! “The effects of training on the brain can vary with age in several ways. The most important way is that younger brains—those of children and adolescents—are more adaptable than adult brains are, so training can have larger effects in younger people” (Peak). Your brain is still developing, so the training you put in now will have a larger effect in shaping the brain and strengthening connections.

This applies physically, but there is a spiritual dimension to it as well.

Mr. Armstrong wrote an article titled “Is Specialized Talent God-Given?” In it, he wrote that three things determine your talents: “Some, by natural heredity, have certain aptitudes, some have others. Heredity does play a certain part in one’s success or failure in this life”—although science is showing that heredity has a lot less of an impact than we thought. “So does environment—by which I mean whatever external influences are exerted. Yet the biggest factors in determining success or failure in life are motivation, determination, drive, perseverance” (Plain Truth, January 1982). The real determinant is what you do with what God has given you!

How much motivation, determination, drive and perseverance do you have in developing the areas where God is pushing you? God will use every ounce of your ability if you let Him. When He sees you pushing yourself, He will bless that. It’s not just about a physical process taking place in the gray matter of your brain. He is going to help you! He will give you that extra boost that only He can.

Matthew 25 records the parable of the talents, in which a master, representing Jesus Christ, divides his goods among his servants while he goes on a journey. This wonderful story shows that God has delegated something to us, and He wants to see what we do with it. A “talent,” whether the currency or an ability, is something valuable that God has given us, and He wants us to grow and produce.

We use talent to refer to a gift that you have. We tend to think of things like musical or mechanical ability. But in reality, the main gift that God has given us talent-wise is a remarkably adaptable brain and body! You can take advantage of that and learn to become an expert at just about anything.

Read this parable, and you see that God rewards these individuals according to how much they produced with what they had been given (verses 16, 19-21). God wants growth. Whatever talents you have, God wants you to apply determination, motivation, drive and perseverance to push yourself to make use of those.

“We tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules. You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don’t obey them you get a C-. This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study of things that come out to a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be” (How Not to Be Wrong). Mathematics is like common sense magnified. It gives you the tools to think on a much more complex level.

“You can’t do calculus by common sense. But calculus is still derived from our common sense …,” Ellenberg writes. “The specialized language in which mathematicians converse with one another is a magnificent tool for conveying complex ideas precisely and swiftly. … Math is like an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength. Despite the power of mathematics, and despite its sometimes forbidding notation and abstraction, the actual mental work involved is little different from the way we think about more down-to-earth problems. I find it helpful to keep in mind an image of Iron Man punching a hole through a brick wall. On the one hand, the actual wall-breaking force is being supplied, not by Tony Stark’s muscles, but by a series of exquisitely synchronized servomechanisms powered by a compact beta particle generator. On the other hand, from Tony Stark’s point of view, what he is doing is punching a wall, exactly as he would without the armor. Only much, much harder” (ibid).

There are marvelous benefits to really digging into your math studies. Pastor General Gerald Flurry has said that math is nearly the most important subject that we can teach our young people. John Adams wrote in his diary that mathematics “proved the extent of the human mind to be more spacious and capable than any other science.” It is a tool for developing your thinking, expanding the limits of your mind, and helping you grow to be more capable in many areas of your life.