You'll probably work hard for longer if you also do something you enjoy. Pickleball or gardening or dinner with friends can feel like slacking. But almost nobody can work at full intensity for months, so you need the time off to keep from quitting.
When you think "I'm just not good at this," it usually means "I'm still average at this" or "I've only done it a few times." You can wait until you feel talented, or quit so you never have to be mediocre, but either way you skip the step that shows you what's wrong which is finishing something average.
Everyone who's good at something was average at it first. So once being average stops bothering you, you can get on with fixing what's wrong.
Every option has downsides and difficulties and taking it means giving things up. You'll find them in yours. The right choice has as many downsides as the wrong one so finding them doesn't tell you whether you chose right. Downsides describe options, not decisions.
Your first attempt almost always comes out worse than you expected. That's because the standard in your head comes from finished work by people with years of practice, but you're just starting. Where your attempt falls short tells you what to fix next time.
Hesitation usually comes from outcomes you haven't accepted yet, so accept them before you start and you'll act more freely. It helps to work out what a loss would cost you and what a win would change, and to be fine with both (and mean it). Then you can start and think about the work instead of the outcome.
If you're researching something you could test in an afternoon, test it. When you can't tell how it will work, try it. Thinking can only answer the questions you already know to ask. Nobody reading about bread thinks to ask how sticky the dough should feel until they've made some. Sometimes you'll waste time on things that don't work but the ones that fail usually teach you the most.
When you decide you only get one chance at something, the pressure goes up but your odds don't. You probably decide that because you care how it turns out. But the pressure will make you do worse than you would if you'd treated the attempt as one of many. So plan on other tries. If this one goes badly, you'll try again.
Learning a skill used to mean practicing, then it became reading about it, and now it's mostly saving posts to read later. Each change made it cheaper and each still felt like you were learning though you got less out of it every time. But if you want the skill, even a good post can only describe the work. Of the three, practicing is the only one I'd call learning.
Rewards you didn't earn make you want to work less. Each one seems like pure gain since you were handed something for nothing, but being glad to have it doesn't give you much reason to work, and getting it can leave you with less reason than you had.
If a reward comes without work, you tend to be less willing to work for the next one, and probably for anything at all because once you've seen things show up on their own, effort starts to look optional. A reward that makes you work less isn't much of a reward.
If you try enough things, some will go badly. And some of those will embarrass you when you remember them. The embarrassment mostly wears off because other people forget and you eventually do. Anyone who's tried much has a few of their own.
But what you never tried tends to bother you longer and harder. A failure is over once you know what happened. Something you never tried is never over and you can usually imagine it going better than it would have gone. So if you're unsure, lean toward trying even if you might fail or look foolish. Failing usually costs less.
Every hard thing gets done with help and yours will be no different. The ones that look like solo work tend to have people behind them because most help happens out of view. Help usually comes as advice or someone's time or an introduction to whoever knows the answer. If you let people see the work while it's still rough, you'll get unstuck sooner and probably finish more of the hard things you start. Most people are glad to point out what you've missed.
The better you handle things, the less anyone checks on you. That's because checking takes time so people mostly spend it on whatever looks wrong, and when you handle things well, nothing looks wrong. So if you need something, don't wait for anyone to notice.
People who get results rarely lack effort. But effort is only as useful as what it's applied to and that usually gets decided without much thought. Being a hard worker makes that worse because doing something has always worked for you. The most useful thing you can do is pause on purpose even briefly, so your effort goes where you meant it to.
You know some of your habits are bad and suspect some new ones would be good. What differs is how sure you are, since we tend to be more certain of what's hurting us than of what would help. If you know what's going wrong, stopping it is usually an easier place to begin than starting something you're unsure about.
Falling short seems to hurt mostly because of the rule you hold yourself to. A B+ is a bad grade to one student and a good one to another. Whether a nine minute mile is slow depends on who's running. Two hundred dollars saved is a bad month if you wanted five hundred. Some results are bad under any rule though.
You don't have to decide whether something that happened to you was good luck or bad luck. If the outcome was mostly random, deciding which it was tells you nothing and it doesn't change what happened.
All it does is give you a second thing to deal with on top of the first. If it was partly your doing, that's different because then there may be something to learn. So when something happens that you couldn't have controlled, you can leave it at that. Things tend to go easier.
Every choice you've ever made was a prediction. You just made it before you could see the result. Taking a job is a prediction that you'll learn something there or that the money will be enough. Buying a house is another, and so is picking a college or deciding whom to marry.
In each case you were guessing. You had a handful of facts and a general sense of how things go. If you want to choose well, it helps to ask which mistake you can afford. You can't see how things will turn out, but you can usually see what it costs if you're wrong. Some predictions are cheap to get wrong and those are the ones to make quickly.