I absolutely HATED maths in school, and I hated and barely passed it in the first few years in my first university. It is only now, when I am 27, did I actually begin to understand its beauty and grace. I still have a lot to catch up, but now I at least have the motivation I lacked before.
I used to blame the Russian system of education, that convinced me that maths is when you blindly learn formulas by heart and then solve hundreds and hundreds of typical problems and equations just applying the formulas, without thinking what you're doing. Any original approach, any creative thinking was discouraged - then again, the teachers in my school were not very bright themselves, and obviously they preferred to receive banal, standardized answers to the tests they can compare with textbooks than some original solution they'll have to think about.
Now I am understanding, that the same, if not worse, things go on in many different countries, and thus many talented and creative young people are discouraged from maths. It takes a long time - or a very good teacher - to recapture the motivation to learn maths.