Grind the f*ck out of it
Why?
Better question: Why not? For me, life needs a bigger purpose than happiness. Of course, happiness is a part of life, and one should be grateful for it when happiness arrives. But the constant pursuit of happiness is not the right path of life, at least not for me. One needs a bigger goal, a goal so significant that you need to work for it for years. It's even better when the goal is so generic that you know where you need to go, but still have the freedom to decide where specifically you want to go. Because, when your goal is short-sighted and done in 2 to 3 years, you need a new goal. This means you have to ask yourself again where you really want to go. When you really ask yourself and want to do it right, this is no easy task. The thing is, when you do this, you probably have no real clue where you want to go in life. You just set some goals in order to have some goals and not be that hopeless and to have a little drive.
Opportunities
"Easy to spot a yellow car when you are always thinking of a yellow car."
"Easy to spot opportunity when you are always thinking of opportunity."
I couldn't have said it better.
Opportunities are all around us.
The only thing we need to do is open our eyes and look around us, metaphorically speaking.
Behind every opportunity, there is a really big tree (speaking in computer science language).
When you take an opportunity and use it, you will see, there are so many other opportunities behind it, it's overwhelming.
The only thing you need to do, in order to be successful, is to take and use the stream of opportunities seriously and work hard in order to keep up with the new opportunities.
The hard part is keeping up.
Keeping the momentum up, building discipline with initial motivation.
When a rocket flies up the sky through the atmosphere, it doesn't pause halfway up the sky, does it?
Excuses
All of us have excuses. Excuses are just reasons that we use to justify our laziness. When you use generic and blurry reasons for excuses, you use the weakest version of excuses. "Oh well, I don't feel like working for myself today." Feeling like it? That's the whole point of discipline. Still doing things even when you don't feel like doing them. But you still do them because ultimately, they benefit you, and who doesn't want that? The question you should ask yourself when you find yourself making excuses is, "Who benefits from my excuses?" The answer is nobody. Or, if you have a different mindset: your enemies or competition. Do you really want that? To what life would that lead? I guess, when you don't make excuses for literally everything and just use excuses for the hard things or the things you don't want to do, then yes, your life probably won't be hell. But you know you could do better. So, do better.