I am sort of facing the same problem. On one hand I like math, abstract algebra, calculus etc but on the other hand I know I am not great with it. I am slow, I am not creative. So, when trying to learn something for programming like differential geometry, when I go deeper than I need to, I feel like I am wasting my time. And sometimes it is particularly hard to read a book written for mathematicians because my knowledge of it is not as "continuous" as theirs.