I got addicted to working hard at things as soon as I saw what I could do when I did. It wasn't that I'd never worked hard at things before, but there was a *moment* when I *saw* it. Not that I know how to orchestrate a moment like that.
We've very accidentally hit on something with DS3.5, who has tended to have painfully low frustration tolerance: it's this game called Civiballs. It requires accurate timing and fine motor skills (for a 3 yr old, pretty trivial for an adult), as well as problem solving. For some reason, he's absolutely willing to push past frustration with this game. He'll be sitting there in tears, demanding help, and we'll be telling him that if he's frustrated, he should stop. And he just. won't. stop. It's actually kinda funny in a... painful... way.
We just made him stop a few times, but then we started realizing it seemed to be affecting his frustration tolerance in a more general way. At which point, we decided it would be Very Wise to let him wail and cry over Civiballs.
I *think* what really drew him in was that everyone he's seen play the game takes the same approach: everyone tries a few things to see what will happen _before_ taking a run at an actual solution. Also, we sometimes trade tries, and when we do that, sometimes I'll find a key detail that leads to the solution, but isn't the solution. Then he gets his turn to try and wins. Basically, he sees how my failure contributes to his win.
I've been trying to come up with more situations like this to accidentally-on-purpose introduce him to!
