@suerisue - Agree with what you have written here.. the one of the greatest fault of most of us who claim to work hard but not get results is that we simply don't persist long enough (or are just not patient enough in other words) and always want 'instant results'.... This is why we need to learn 'delayed gratification' ...
In fact, there was a book written by Julian Hosp (now famous as the co-founder of TenX) that I read 2 years ago and he had written at length about this using one of his life stories as an example - I had writtten about this in a blog too.. Do read it sometime, if time permits.
https://steemit.com/life/@roji.abraham/lessons-from-books-learning-delayed-gratification