About the big stuff, I realized I wasn't really lazy, I was just afraid of failure and lacked confidence. I think my subconscious logic was that I shouldn't bother to try because I was likely to fail and end up in the same place anyway, so why put in the effort?

As cliché as it sounds, what got me out of that was to start to think of "failures" as just practice runs for whatever I wanted so I could learn to do it again differently until I got it right. I also tried to train myself to feel excited about the potentially positive outcomes, rather than dwelling of the dispiriting nature of the possible negative ones.

Another simple thing that keeps me trying is thinking about what my PhD advisor said about applying for grants, which are so much work and competitive now it sometimes can feel like it's not worth the effort: "There is only one way I know to guarantee that you won't get a grant, and that's not to apply for it at all." It's a pretty good counter to my old argument of "why try if I am going to fail anyway?"