We praise what matters. In a famous study, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck found that students were far more likely to persevere through challenging problems and bring those problems home to work on more when they received praise for working hard rather than being smart.
Praising effort produced a hard-working identity that fueled people to persist through difficult challenges.
Read How to Form Tough Identities That Propel Behavioral Change at its original source Breaking Muscle:
http://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/how-to-form-tough-identities-that-propel-behavioral-change
