Wei, I don't think a "rage to learn" is really taught and definitely not trained. Also hard work is mostly a perception thing. Work being effort over time becomes meaningless if you are in Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and not really experiencing the time aspect. I think when there is a rage to learn, one seeks the level of optimal challenge where learning (and flow) best takes place. To someone perhaps with less learning aptitude that may seem hard. To one person running uphill five miles is pure joy to another it's torture.
Gifted kids often have a rage to learn; some are oriented towards breadth and other towards depth. Perhaps the most damaging thing to do is to push an extrinsic motivational system in the way of their freight train of intrinsically motivated learning.
