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.
I think the "focusing" thing is a bit more than just a transderivational search - or rather a specific application of the same thing. "focusing" contains a lot of instructions on where to point your curiosity and what you can get out of it.
Well, removing blocks is definitely a big part of it. With no blocks there it's just a conversation with system 1 about what's important - and that part can often just happen on its own.
I think your "organize your desk" video is a good example on the small scale. People aren't motivated to do it not just because they are blocking themselves with aversive associations but also because they're not associating the good of the clean desk with the act of organizing it. Applied to interest in a subject is just a larger scale application of the same stuff. Instead of one picture of a clean desk, it's a whole series of possible futures and possible payoffs and the like.
My strongest example - perhaps because I was most conscious of it having not yet integrated the skills - actually predates my departure on this mind hacking journey and in fact applies to the motivation I had to do it.
When I first realized that there's big low hanging fruit it wasn't a complete automatic takeover. I was still sorta interested in other hobbies which (according to system2) didn't really pay off the same. And like, do you realize how important it is if half the stuff it seems like hypnosis might be able to do is actually possible?
So I had to deliberately spend some time thinking about the alternate ways I wanted to spend my time and actually visualizing where they'd go and what I'd get out of it. And doing the same for the much more uncertain future where I dive into this with more than mild curiosity. And then having deflated alternatives and connected it more strongly with the potential rewards, it had earned my fascination big time (since then it has been a fairly automatically self reinforcing thing). And the motivating images have changed, of course, as I get a more realistic/detailed idea of whats doable/desirable.
Nah, that part is hard. I'm in a similar place myself, though not 10 years worth. I've been trying to organize them into blog posts as an easy to get down form of thoughts, but then I kinda got stuck tying the last pieces together and I'm backlogged 30 or so posts. But I'm "close" :). It tends to help when I have an interested person to bounce ideas off of and serve as a foil for organizing my thoughts (which I do have, and need to make more use of!).
Anyway, even if not as done as it "should" be for a vaguely meaningful sense of "should", I wouldn't call it silly the way it's silly to not have said "yo, you wanna chat sometime and compare notes?"
Yo, you wanna chat sometime and compare - er, I mean organize notes?