When I was in the beginning of grade school, a mixture of numerology and confirmation bias tricked me into being really great at math. Let me explain.

Since as long as I can remember, I have preferred even numbers. I don’t know why, but I’d skip stairs to have climbed an even number (or rather, skip the first/last step to avoid interrupting the sequence of evens). It spread to squares when I understood what multiplication is.

Now, being in love with evens doesn’t make a mathematician. However, my birthday is the sixteenth of April, or numerically, the sixteenth day of the fourth month. My young self noticed that 4^2 = 16. Whoa. It’s like numbers wanted me or something.

After that, my “fate” was sealed; I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. I was good at math naturally, and I had (and still have to this day) a fantastic memory for the minutiae of everyday life. This led to me noticing a lot of coincidences, which further antagonized my predisposition towards numbers. For instance, I’d notice when something happened an even number of times and then something good would happen! I wouldn’t notice when something good didn’t happen, and so on.