When interpreting their own failures (…) individuals tend to make external attributions, pointing to factors that are outside of their direct control (such as luck). As a result, their motivation to exert effort on the same task in the future is reduced.

Failure can offer valuable feedback that will help you achieve your goal. Unfortunately, many people lose the learning opportunity by attributing the failure to an external factor, such as luck.

Consequently, instead of identifying the root cause in something they did, they wrongly assume that they had no control over the situation. This not only makes them less likely to exert equal effort during subsequent attempts (which in itself reduces their chances of success), but also increases the risk they’ll repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

As a result, they enter a downward spiral: each failure makes them less motivated to try again, and soon they give up, frustrated at how unfair the world is. It wasn’t really the world that was responsible; it was their own failure to take responsibility for their failure and learn from it.

Make sure that whenever you fail, you always look for the cause of the failure in something that you did, and not in something that you couldn’t control .

Even when it looks as if something was indeed outside of your control, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t make any mistakes that might have increased the chances of such an outcome. Identifying those mistakes — even if they were only partially responsible for the failure — will help you in future attempts and prevent you from developing the unhelpful mindset that you don’t have direct influence over your life.

For example, if you weren’t hired by your dream company, perhaps it wasn’t your fault. Maybe there was a better candidate, the hiring manager didn’t like you, or the company later decided against hiring a new employee.

However, even in such a case, it’s valuable to ponder whether there was anything you could have done better. Perhaps you could have improved your resume, asked better questions during the interview, or been better prepared for the questions you had assumed were unlikely to be asked.

Maybe it still wouldn’t have resulted in success, but at least that way you will have learned something new that will increase your chances of getting hired the next time, and consequently, you get to lift your spirits and boost your determination.

You have to deliver results when making excuses is an option.

Self-discipline comes down to choosing between instant and delayed gratification. Instant gratification feels good today but compromises your long-term goals, while delayed gratification usually doesn’t deliver much in the way of instant pleasure, but it can lead to bigger rewards in the future.

Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation in which you’ll be able to make excuses; they may even sound so sensible that (upon hearing your rationalizations) nobody would question your backing out of that situation. However, don’t let them fool you — even if there’s some legitimacy to them, in most cases it’s still nothing other than choosing instant gratification.

For example, if you want to establish a habit of jogging three times a week and one day it rains and you’re afraid you’ll get sick, you have a valid excuse to skip exercise. After all, there is a higher risk of getting sick when running in bad weather, right?

However, it sets a dangerous precedent: you’re making a decision that your habits depend on the weather. Your self-control (or your lack of it) is now at the mercy of external factors, largely dependent on whether jogging in the given circumstances is easy or not. Is this the right way to build mental toughness and self-discipline ?

If you decide to keep going instead of defaulting to the easy choice of using (partly valid) excuses, you’ll immensely strengthen your resolve. It takes even more discipline — and consequently offers a greater opportunity to exercise your self-control muscle — to stick to something when you have a good justification to not do it.