I a very lazy learner. I learn things only if I can relate to them through a hands-on opportunity, which is then a very fast process and I always excel in anything and everything I get my hands on, as long as it is something that I like to do. However, being a lazy/tactile, hands-on learner, I am not good at reading theoretical books as I lack patience with anything non-practical that doesn't yield almost instant results that I can relate to.
I am embarking on yet another job search and all the jobs I like seem to requre X number of years of experience in certain technologies I aspire to but do not have qualification backing. My compensation is already at a Senior Developer level and I cannot afford to earn less in a job that would make up for a learning curve (I have a mortgage to pay for). I had the same problem in the previous job search, where none of the jobs I could get based on being able to answer interview questions appealed to me and I kept failing to get the jobs I did like as I lacked experience. So it was a lose-lose situation, I ended up habing to take a job I could get but I am very unhappy in it.
Essentially, I need to find somebody who will be willing to take a risk in giving me a job for which I am currently not qualified (as I am utterly uninterested in the ones I can successfully interview for, despite the money) and then probe me for some time to see if I am getting the hang of it. I have tried to offer companies to work for free for two weeks with no strings attached so that I can demonstrate them my general intelligence and aptitude for learning to no avail -- they couldn't do it for legal reasons. I am also working on a couple of personal GitHub projects utilizing desired technologies but, due to some other personal projects, have not had time to focus on as of late. However, while I do love programming, I prefer not doing it in my free time as I have other interests/hobbies (such as sports, gym, yoga, extreme sports, building/construction, interior design, in most of which I do excel to various degrees -- I consider myself a Renaissance man). My impression is that I am up against a competition of very focused nerd-types who do nothing but program on and off work but I consider myself downright smarter than them in a universal regard -- but not smart enough to devise a strategy how to sell myself on the basis of that (as I am not a people person or the fratboy used car salesman type, instead an INTP) and not roto learned book knowledge.
So, I want to upgrade my career, earn the same or more money, and overcome the deficiencies in my resume that are due to not being given the right opportunity in the past for the said reasons precisely. Essentially, I am looking for guidelines how to convince somebody to hire me into a position for which I have no or little related book knowledge, emphasizing that I am a brilliant and creative individual (with technology) once I get the basic idea of what I am working with and can produce amazing outcomes. Unfortunally, most interviewers I come across are terribly unimaginative and ask questions from the far depths of 1000 page books on EJB and similar (which I have no patience to read) and ask me to list the methods in java.lang.Object
(what moron came up with that question?) rather than asking more general programming concepts (like how does Quicksort work or how do you implement a search engine of your own etc.) or open-book/Google programming assignments. I find that they are searching for robots that have roto learned amazing amounts of book material (like developers from certain countries that are trained into that mode in school) and can mostly follow instructions but seldom think on their own or devise their own solution based on recently acquired expertise thanks to their adaptability (again applies to the category enclosed in the previous parentheses).
Please note I am not "ranting" but giving you a very honest picture of myself in the position I am in vs. the circumstances in order to come up with a strategy as the current strategy doesn't seem to work. The last bolded block is the question/request, the previous one reflects what I have tried to do already.