Seth Godin: Keep exerting "righteous effort," especially after failing

In "After You've Done Your Best (and It Didn't Work)," Seth Godin writes this:

Early in our careers, we're encouraged to avoid failure, and one way we do that is by building up a set of emotions around failure, emotions we try to avoid, and emotions that we associate with the effort of people who fail. It turns out that this is precisely the opposite of the approach of people who end up succeeding.

If you believe that righteous effort leads to the shame of personal failure, you'll seek to avoid righteous effort.

This is precisely what Carol Dweck finds when she studies people with the "fixed mindset" - setbacks cause their effort to decrease, not increase, because they seek to avoid failure (or give themselves excuses for it), rather than learn from it.

It also sounds quite a bit like what Mona Simpson said of her brother Steve Jobs: "He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures."