Most of this post is background and context, so I've included a tl;dr horizontal rule near the bottom where you can skip everything else if you so choose. :)

Here's a short anecdote of Feynman's:

... I invented some way of doing problems in physics, quantum electrodynamics, and made some diagrams that help to make the analysis. I was on a floor in a rooming house. I was in in my pyjamas, I'd been working on the floor in my pyjamas for many weeks, fooling around, but I got these funny diagrams after a while and I found they were useful. They helped me to find the equations easier, so I thought of the possibility that it might be useful for other people, and I thought it would really look funny, these funny diagrams I'm making, if they appear someday in the Physical Review, because they looked so odd to me. And I remember sitting there thinking how funny that would be if it ever happened, ha ha.

Well, it turned out in fact that they were useful and they do appear in the Physical Review, and I can now look at them and see other people making them and smile to myself, they do look funny to me as they did then, not as funny because I've seen so many of them. But I get the same kick out of it, that was a little fantasy when I was a kid…not a kid, I was a college professor already at Cornell. But the idea was that I was still playing, just like I have always been playing, and the secret of my happiness in life or the major part of it is to have discovered a way to entertain myself that other people consider important and they pay me to do. I do exactly what I want and I get paid. They might consider it serious, but the secret is I'm having a very good time.

There are things that I have fun doing, and there are things that I feel I have substantially more fun doing. The things in the latter group are things I generally consider a waste of time. I will focus on one specifically, because it's by far the biggest offender, and what spurred this question. Video games.

I have a knack for video games. I've played them since I was very young. I can pick one up and just be good at it right off the bat. Many of my fondest memories take place in various games played with friends or by myself and I can spend hours just reading about them. (Just recently, I started getting into fighting games technically; I plan to build my own joystick in a couple of weeks. I'm having a blast just doing the associated research.)

Usually, I'd rather play a good game than anything else. I find that the most fun I have is time spent mastering a game, learning its ins and outs, and eventually winning. I have great fun solving a good problem, or making a subtle, surprising connection—but it just doesn't do it for me like a game does.

But I want to have as much fun doing something else. I admire mathematics and physics on a very deep level, and feel a profound sense of awe when I come into contact with new knowledge regarding these fields. The other day, I made a connection between pretty basic group theory and something we were learning about in quantum (nothing amazing; it's something well known to... not undergraduates) and that was awesome. But still, I think I would have preferred to play 50 rounds of Skullgirls and test out a new combo.

TL;DR BAR

I want to have as much fun doing the things that I, on a deep level, want to do—as opposed to the things which I actually have more fun doing. I'm (obviously) not Feynman, but I want to play with ideas and structures and numbers like I do with video games. I want the same creativity to apply. The same fervor. The same want. It's not that it isn't there; I am not just arbitrarily applying this want to mathematics. I can feel it's there—it's just overshadowed by what's already there for video games.

How does one go about switching something they find immensely fun, something they're even passionate about, with something else? I don't want to be as passionate about video games as I am. I'd rather feel this way about something... else. I'd rather be able to happily spend hours reading up on [something] instead of what type of button I'm going to use in my fantasy joystick, or the most effective way to cross-up your opponent.

What would you folks do? I consider this somewhat of a mind-hacking question.

Hello, folks. I'm one of those long-time lurkers.

I've decided to conduct, as the title suggests, a quick and dirty survey in hopes of better understanding a problem I have (or rather, whether or not what I have is actually a problem).

Here's some context: I'm a Physics & Mathematics major, currently taking multi-variable. Lately, I've been unsatisfied with my understanding and usage of mathematics—mainly calculus. I've decided to go through what's been recommended as a much more rigorous Calculus textbook, Calculus by Michael Spivak. So far I'm really enjoying it, but it's taking me a long time to get through the exercises. I can be very meticulous about things like this and want to do every exercise through every chapter; I feel that there's benefit to actually doing them regardless of whether or not I look at the problem and think "Yeah, I can do this." Sometimes actually doing the problem is much more difficult than it seems, and I learn a lot from doing them. When flipping through the exercises, I also notice that—regardless of how well I think I know the material—there ends up being a section of exercises focused on something I've never heard of before; something very clever or, I think, mathematically enlightening, that's dependent on the exercises before it.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that the exercises of the first chapter alone had taken me hours upon hours upon hours of combined work. I consider myself slow when it comes to reading mathematics and physics literature—I have to carefully comb through all the concepts and equations and structure them intuitively in a way I see fit. I hate not having a very fundamental understanding of the things I'm working with.

At the same time, I read/hear people who apparently are familiar with multiple textbooks on the same subject. Familiar enough to judge whether or not it is a good textbook. Familiar enough to place how they fit on a hierarchy of textbooks on the same subject. I think "At the rate I'm going, it will take me a very long time to get through this." 

So...

Here's (what I think is) my issue: I don't know whether or not I'm taking too long. Am I doing things inefficiently? Is there a better way to choose which exercises I do and don't work through so that I learn a similar amount of material in less time? Or is it just fine that I'm taking this long? Am I slow and inefficient or am I just new to this process of working through a textbook cover-to-cover, which is supposed to take a very long time anyway?

I spend more time than I should learning about learning, instead of learning the material itself. I find myself using up lots of time trying to figure out how to learn more efficiently, how to think more efficiently, how to work more efficiently, and such things—as opposed to actually learning and actually thinking and actually working, which ends up being an inefficient use of my time. I think part of this problem stems from the fact that I don't have much of a comparison for when I can say "Ok, I'm satisfied and can stop focusing on improve how I do this act—and just do it already." I want to solve that issue now.

Which brings us to...

Here's my attempted solution: A survey! I assume many people here at LessWrong have worked through a science or mathematics textbook on their own. Mainly I'd like to gauge whether or not you thought you were taking a very long time, how long it took you, etc. I'd also like to know what your approach was: Did you perform every exercise, or skim through the book finding things you knew you didn't know? Did you skip around or go from the first chapter to the last? Do you have any advice on how one should approach a given textbook?

Here's the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S4_-7_dxgmgprMbNhL1dNmX_0Zq9QrA9lpTl9ZHHxMI/viewform

I'm not sure how interested anyone but me is in this, but on a later date I could make another post showing the data. I considered checking "Publish and show a link to the results of this form", but I wasn't sure if that kept everyone anonymous or not. Also, feel more than free to post any criticism, shortcomings, improvements, etc. Have I left anything out? Is there anything you'd like to see me add? This is my first attempt at a survey like this and I'd appreciate any feedback (though I know it's not necessarily a rigorous survey, just a quick data-collection, I suppose).

I strongly encourage the posting of any textbook-reading tips or guidelines in the comments. I left that out of the survey so that anyone who's interested has immediate access to tips.

Here's an edit: Thanks for all the responses, everyone. Not only was my original question sufficiently answered (that is, it doesn't seem like I'm taking too long; there were only a few survey takers, but in between the comments and the survey answers, I'm not going at an extraordinarily slow rate). There's some very solid advice for different methods I might try to optimize my learning process.  One that especially hit home was the suggestion that the large amounts of time spent "learning about learning" are such because it feels more comfortable than actually learning the material. In short, it's a safety blanket that makes me feel like I'm doing something productive when I'm really just avoiding what needs to be done. Some other useful pieces of advice are:

- Try being open to learning a broader range of materials without necessarily mastering each one. It might be the case that you need to know one thing in order to master the other, and need to know the other in order to master the one—trying to master either of them in isolation ends up being somewhat futile. Not everything needs to be "brick by brick" structured. (This was a lesson I found useful when I first learned that a number raised to the "one half" power was the square root of that number: Trying to master it in terms of the rules I already knew ended up in a thought like, "... Two to the third power is two times two times two. Two to the one-half power is two... times two one half times?"

- Though it may be uncomfortable at first, it could make learning easier to try the exercises before reading the chapter super-carefully; trying them before you feel ready to try them. You don't necessarily have to fully comprehend all of the proofs in the chapter to get through some exercises. 

- Textbooks might just be the wrong way to go in the first place. Try resources like Wikipedia, math blogs, and math forums.

- "Don't use the answer key unless you've spent a significant amount of time trying to find the answer yourself!" (This may seem obvious, but a few years ago, I'd spend a couple of minutes on the problem, not understand it, look to the answer key, and wonder why I wasn't learning anything.)

- Skip exercises when you feel you could solve them, but randomly check whether this estimate is correct by doing the problem anyway. (I like this one a lot).

- Talk to a professor!

- It may be the case that you learn well via just reading, and not spending so much time on the exercises.

Here are some websites/blogs mentioned:
(Blog) Math for Programmers - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for-programmers.html
(Blog) Annoying Precision - http://qchu.wordpress.com/
(Math Forum) Mathematics - http://math.stackexchange.com/ 

Excellent, excellent stuff, though. Thank you. :) There's a lot of material and advice for me to work with—while simultaneously making sure I don't avoid my work by hiding under the guise of productivity.

If you're expecting anything but a long post by an LW lurking college student asking sincerely for some advice, you should read The Curse of Identity, the article that spurred this very post. It's a good read, regardless of my advice-seeking status. With that said: Hello. I'm an LW lurking college student in need of advice, and this is my long post asking for it. I hope this isn't inappropriate.

Mainly, this comes down to my hardly having a satisfying direction in life. I'm ignorant as to the reasons behind my lack of some fully functional inner compass. Is it that I just haven't found my passion—my niche in life? Or am I just lazy? Are the goals I want to achieve products of genuine interest, or are they methods of preserving a reputation which I (admittedly) very much enjoy having? Is my discouragement something I must use instrumental rationality to overcome, a sign that I'm fooling myself; one I should listen to and change something, or just a natural feeling when a particular situation is difficult? Is my not having direction a reasonable, youth-related status (is 22 that young?), or a sign that I've been doing something horribly wrong?