The Attribution Gap Is Where Recovery Begins or Stalls
The single biggest predictor of how fast someone recovers from failure is not how bad the failure was. It is what they decide the failure means. Martin Seligman's research on explanatory style, developed over decades at the University of Pennsylvania, found that people who recover quickly tend to attribute failure to specific, temporary, external causes. Those who stall attribute it to permanent, pervasive, personal ones. "I prepared poorly for this pitch" versus "I am someone who always fails at this." The first attribution leaves a door open. The second locks the room.
