Easy excercise on the 5-second level: ask the question “as opposed to what?” both loud, and when constructing what you’d like to tell. An easy trigger to remember is qualifiers -they’re usually a mark of motivated abstraction-switch.
Medium-level excercise: take one of your life failures at any level, and dismantle it via root cause analysis:
“The business failed.” “Why?”
“We failed to nail down the unit economics tightly before scaling up marketing” “why?”
“No one was dedicated to look over all the 6 pieces on the value chain” “why?”
...etc.
Also known as 5-whys, this practice basically drills down a single causality chain via “why” questions to 4-6 levels, untangling human, skill, intention, and other components that lead to the failure. You can verify, whether you were specific enough, by being able to come up with concrete solutions for each of these levels.
You’re framing the problem wrong -within these conditions, there are no good solution. There are 3 shortcuts out:
First, realize, that you’re inherently time-locked: the current self is the only one on which you have some amount of control (you might put yourself in a situation, where your only way out is to “work hard” -eg. make a bet with a friend to pass that exam, etc- but I found these to be less effective, than the other two).
Second, reframe the problem. Some sample questions you might ask:
In what ways might I get the most gratification out of this work?
In what ways might I get the most XP out of this experience?
In what ways might I learn the most of myself during this excercise?
In what ways might I use this as a way to self-improve? You get the idea -reframing is key.
Third, “working” for most classes of work, is fundamentally muscles: as you do more, and more, try different ways out, your leverage, and ability to “get stuff done” will improve. So: start with baby steps, then use the positive feedback, and gained experience to improve, and apply it to other aspects of the task.
Hope this helps.