Agreed. The difference between reward and pleasure is a salient distinction here -- it's difficult to implement a hack solely for its own sake. My suggestion to the OP would be to find reasons to change their preferences, and start by weighing the following factors:
Do you care about maximizing your future likelihood of a stable lifestyle? How about maximizing your earning potential? How about the degree of enjoyment you obtain from your work?
Look for links between them -- for me, "enjoyment obtained from work" has a very strong weighting effect on "maximizing stability". I'm sufficiently bad at keeping a job that's all stress and no rewards for it to be detrimental to seek one (this is not a strength, but it seems to be a limit I've encountered often), and hence to optimize myself for such a search. If your current satisfaction with the prospect of changing your focus is very low, can you leverage something else you value highly against that?
If not, it seems like you're looking at either creating a new niche for yourself (with the associated risks of that) or trying to change your field altogether. Given how much you'll benefit from your cached skill and expertise gained by pursuing what you enjoy, I'd recommend the former. In your case: current research on machine vision is overwhelmingly focused on methods you dislike. Can you imagine any scenarios where your preferred method might have an edge, or work to supplement the existing method? Can you find a way to persuasively convey them such that you might be able to stake out some territory doing research on it?
If the answer is still no: break your habits, be more empirical. You might need to go exploring and see if you can discover any new interests or talents to which your energies might be efficiently put, which might also entail some degree of "starting over from scratch." This option is not for everyone and I don't recommend it cavalierly, but it's something to think about.
I was inspired by the recent post discussing self-hacking for the purpose of changing a relationship perspective to achieve a goal. Despite my feeling inspired, though, I also felt like life hacking was not something I could ever want to do even if I perceived benefits to doing it. It seems to me that the place where I would need to begin is hacking myself in order to cause myself to want to be hacked. But then I started contemplating whether this is a plausible thing to do.
In my own case, there are two concrete examples in mind. I am a graduate student working on applied math and probability theory in the field of machine vision. I was one of those bright-eyes, bushy-tailed dolts as an undergrad who just sort of floated to grad school believing that as long as I worked sufficiently hard, it was a logical conclusion that I would get a tenure-track faculty position at a desirable university. Even though I am a fellowship award winner and I am working with a well-known researcher at an Ivy League school, my experience in grad school (along with some noted articles) has forced me to re-examine a lot of my priorities. Tenure-track positions are just too difficult to achieve and achieving them is based on networking, politics, and whether the popularity of your research happens to have a peak at the same time that your productivity in that area also has a peak.
But the alternatives that I see are: join the consulting/business/startup world, become a programmer/analyst for a large software/IT/computer company, work for a government research lab. I worked for two years at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory as a radar analyst and signal processing algorithm developer prior to grad school. The main reason I left that job was because I (foolishly) thought that graduate school was where someone goes to specifically learn the higher-level knowledge and skills to do theoretical work that transcends the software development / data processing work that is so common. I'm more interested in creating tools that go into the toolbox of an engineer than with actually using those tools to create something that people want to pay for.
I have been deeply thinking about these issues for more than two years now, almost every day. I read everything that I can and I try to be as blunt and to-the-point about it as I can be. Future career prospects seem bleak to me. Everyone is getting crushed by data right now. I was just talking with my adviser recently about how so much of the mathematical framework for studying vision over the last 30 years is just being flushed down the tubes because of the massive amount of data processing and large scale machine learning we can now tractably perform. If you want to build a cup-detector for example, you can do lots of fancy modeling, stochastic texture mapping, active contour models, fancy differential geometry, occlusion modeling, etc. Or.. you can just train an SVM on 50,000,000 weakly labeled images of cups you find on the internet. And that SVM will utterly crush the performance of the expert system based on 30 years of research from amazing mathematicians. And this crushing effect only stands to get much much worse and at an increasing pace.
In light of this, it seems to me that I should be learning as much as I can about large-scale data processing, GPU computing, advanced parallel architectures, and the gross details of implementing bleeding edge machine learning. But, currently, this is exactly the sort of thing I hate and went to graduate school to avoid. I wanted to study Total Variation minimization, or PDE-driven diffusion models in image processing, etc. And these are things that are completely crushed by large data processing.
So anyway, long story short: suppose that I really like "math theory and teaching at a respected research university" but I see the coming data steamroller and believe that this preference will cause me to feel unhappy in the future when many other preferences I have (and some I don't yet know about) are effected negatively by pursuit of a phantom tenure-track position. But suppose also that another preference I have is that I really hate "writing computer code to build widgets for customers" which can include large scale data analyses, and thus I feel an aversion to even trying to *want* to hack myself and orient myself to a more practical career goal.
How does one hack one's self to change one's preferences when the preference in question is "I don't want to hack myself?"