Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The etymology of invention is “to find out, discovery”. There is your answer. When your life must necessa

Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The etymology of invention is “to find out, discovery”. There is your answer. When your life must necessarily depend on learning the thing, you will learn it. Convince yourself that your life depends upon it. Don’t treat it as a trivial thing. Fully integrate the goal of learning with survival, with maintaining your well being. Whenever I feel that my life depends on knowing and understanding a thing, I am fully absorbed, engaged, consumed with focused attention. This takes some psychological work. It requires imagining your death, physical or ego death, imagining the shame, imagining the failure of embarrassment of not knowing this thing. It takes practice, but once you learn to integrate the goal of learning with this feeling of existential annihilation, you can tap into endless sustained energy for motivated focus. See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on learning, specifically flow states. With the right resistance, with the right existential threat, the right challenge, your entire faculties will rise to the occasion and learn the thing.