First recognize that your abilities, motivations, likes/dislikes are extremely malleable. It is not productive to view your abilities as primarily innate, somet

First recognize that your abilities, motivations, likes/dislikes are extremely malleable. It is not productive to view your abilities as primarily innate, something you are powerless to influence. * Building up your motivation, resilience, abilities is like building up muscles - it takes practice and work, pushing just beyond your previous limit each time. * Understand better why you dislike working. Clearly you are able to do simple demos and experiments, that's actually a good place to start. * Consider your diet as well. Do you find yourself often in a low-energy state? Look into what helps your energy level. Sleep is a factor as well. It is hard to say what specific strategies will help you out - you need to do your homework to come up with your own plan. There are decent psychology books in this area - I recommend going for the ones actually written by reputable psychologists rather than self-help gurus. Here a few snippets of advice I've cribbed from a psychology blog (sorry I've lost the link): "Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions. "Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day. "Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning. "Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs. "Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to build rituals — specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.