I agree in principle that your personal story is made of the rough things you've overcome, and it's refreshing to hear it stated in a positive way (calculus) as opposed to the usual negative way (abuse, alcoholism, etc). It misses something, though: Many people will slack endlessly on doing the hard thing until it appears to us to be a challenge we've come up with for ourselves. Then and only then does doing it the hardest way possible seem not just worthy of our time, but essential to our personal growth.

I'd argue that as long as someone reaches that attitude toward something that they choose, they have lived a good life. And that something doesn't need to be a high school math class. The hard thing could be trying to become a chef when you're 50, or deciding to write your next app in Assembly knowing none at all, or surviving a month in the woods, or going to a foreign country with the intention of learning the language. It has to be hard to make it worthwhile, but it has to be your own to make it valuable as an accomplishment to you, as opposed to something imposed on you which you merely endured. I think this is why a lot of people come out of incredibly hard ordeals in the military with much less personal sense of self-worth than they were sold they would get going in.

[edit: removed a critique. I had misinterpreted the words "errant period" to allude to something other than punctuation. My mistake.]