What does it mean that successful people lower their cost of resuming after failure?

Concretely, “cost of resuming” is everything standing between you and getting back on track: the shame you have to push through, the sense that you’ve “ruined” the streak, the rebuilt willpower, the logistics of starting again. Successful people engineer that cost down. They treat a missed workout as one data point, not a verdict, so there’s no identity crisis to process before returning. They have a pre-decided rule like “never miss twice,” so resuming requires no fresh decision. They keep the restart small — ten minutes at the gym, one paragraph written — so the barrier to re-entry is trivially low.
Unsuccessful people do the opposite, often without realizing it: a lapse triggers self-judgment (“I’m just not disciplined”), the goal gets mentally reframed as failed, and now resuming requires overcoming guilt and rebuilding motivation and recommitting from scratch. That’s expensive, so they don’t pay it.