I am an aspiring autodidact in math who's having motivation issues and would like to identify their cause. I've been, embarrassingly, stuck at basically the same high-school, introductory level for a few years now in all of the material I've begun studying so far, and this is because I've been studying with a frequency ranging from one week per month, to once every three months or something. My chosen study methods are slow and thorough.

I often feel frustrated about the material I'm studying, and find it rather tedious. I suspect that one reason for this is the fact that I'm a freshman undergrad in a STEM field, so I've already gone through all of what I'm studying now and more (albeit more superficially), have been acquainted with more difficult math and would really like to get into the meat of things -- however, I'm aware that I don't have a solid grasp on the basics and need to practice even the easy exercises until it becomes second nature to me.

I often wonder whether my struggles with finding the motivation to go through my textbooks are an ordinary part of the life of people who eventually overcome them (through better study plans, or increased conscientiousness or whatever) and go on to become good mathematicians, or whether it just means that I'm simply naturally disinterested in math, and will always be so, and consequently I'll never raise above the level of a mediocre STEM undergrad. I mean, if I were cut out for math, then I'd be naturally curious and enthusiastic about studying it, right? Or at least I'd have the conscientiousness / work ethic to study diligently even when it doesn't feel exciting. So far none of these conditions apply; does it mean that they never will? (I expect this feeling of tediousness to go away once I start to become good at college-level math. But maybe there's a selection effect at play here: only people who are naturally good at math master the undergrad level; people who naturally suck at math give up by the end of high school.)

I've also noticed that my lack of motivation is not domain-specific: I fail to habitually study every other field I've ever meant to study. In fact, I've been comparatively successful in studying math (and, to a lesser extent, physics and programming). This leads me to thinking the issue is a lack of study habits. The funny thing is that I constantly -- habitually, even -- fret about lacking study habits, yet so far (3 years or so) this has never translated into the instillation of said study habits.

Have any LessWrongers had similar issues and managed to overcome them?