To signal a desire for learning, do cool things that require you to learn and do more than the job requires. Employers are, in general, sort of like archeologists: They study artifacts to understand the people who made them. So make artifacts that demonstrate you like to learn things.
"Boredom has at its core the desiring of satisfying engagement but not being able to achieve that," Eastwood said. "And attention is the cognitive process whereby we interface with both the external world and our internal thoughts and feelings. So it falls logically that attention must be at the core of the definition."
To the extent that we can give a brief answer to the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That's what people are usually feeling before having them.
The problem is, of course, that you cannot simply decide to care about something. If you do not care about something, your will cannot simply establish a caring relationship to that thing. It is rather a question of being open to possibilities of caring