You're totally right that "motivation" is probably the key to learning anything. We're taught that kids have aptitude for different stuff from birth, but I thin

You're totally right that "motivation" is probably the key to learning anything. We're taught that kids have aptitude for different stuff from birth, but I think the curiosity and intrinsic motivation parts are the most important. If something is fun enough you spend the time to become good, and then people say "oh how talented you are", but in reality you've just spent a lot more time working at it. One way I've seen I can "hack" it myself is if I stumble on things that are actually fun and it becomes a "wedge" into an area I was too shy to try out. For example "Kerbal Space Program" taught me way more about rocket science than I've thought possible, but more than that, once I understood the core concepts and could play around with them in my mind it actually did become fun. I still remember how I was doing some hochman transfer calculations to figure out when should I do a lunch to get to Duna (KSP's Mars) with the limited tech I had unlocked in the game, and a sudden realisation hit me, I'm actually doing rocket science math for a game ... This got me into reading about rocket engines and I ended up reading through the whole of the "biblical" Ignition book just for fun. Now I'm a web dev and as far away from Aerospace as you can probably get and still be somewhat of an engineer, but it opened a would of interesting news, data, discussions and theories at the bleeding edge of science, for which I'll be eternally grateful. I guess what I mean is it's possible to start caring for something that's outside of your domain expertise, you just need to find somethings that's fun enough to keep you there.