Beyond that, I think that some of the beauty of mathematics can be revealed in working on hard problems. Math just seemed kind of boring in high school because it wasn't really about understanding the way that things work. When you hit up against limitations and realize that to get your head around them there are some concepts that happen to be expressed in mathematical notation that will make you more capable, suddenly wading through a bunch of cryptic notation seems like less of a chore.

It's kind of like the difference between learning Spanish because your high school teacher told you too verses stumbling into some of Pablo Neruda's poetry and realizing that it'd be more powerful in its native form.