Primarily it instilled that love of math, where previously there had been anxiety and ennui. This was sufficient to get me actually complete the work -- and do some extra work for fun -- which was more than enough to get through the math in my university coursework. I didn't get into more advanced maths in university, and for the fields that I've ended up in (and here I need to omit some otherwise too-revealing biographical details), I'm undoubtedly sub-par at mathematics. When it comes to calculation, I'm still definitely slower and more mistake-prone than my colleagues. I attribute this to avoiding mathematics for my first two decades; if math is a language, then I learned it at an age when having a thick accent is unavoidable. I make up for these deficiencies by being much more stubborn than my colleagues -- just hammering away at problems until they're done -- and also having an excellent intuitive grasp of certain domains, which I can then implement via coding rather than formulae. (I learned to code when I was very young, so that's something which I'm much more natively fluent at). After I've solved a problem via intuition and code, I usually try to prove (or at least investigate) it with proper math, to reassure myself that the solution is efficient and correct. That's far slower and more painstaking, but I eventually get there (and nine times out of ten, my intuition was correct). That's probably the wrong way to do things, but it works. I wouldn't be able to have a job where the math necessarily came first, however!