"When you're in the middle of the work, set your expectations high. It's unlikely your performance will exceed the standard you set for yourself. High expectations encourage you to keep reaching and fulfill your potential.

Once the work is done, release yourself from your expectations. The fastest way to ruin a good outcome is to tell yourself it's not good enough. Your expectations dictate your happiness more than your results.

Expectations can be helpful as a motivator and unhelpful as a measuring stick. Now that the work is done you can rest easy knowing you tried your best. You've already won."

"When you're doing something hard, focus on the fun part.

Many people make a subtle mistake, which is they emphasize how difficult it is to do something. They tell themselves writing is hard or running is hard or math is hard. And so on. The dominant thought in their mind is that this is hard to do.

And it is true these things (and many others in life) can be challenging.

Meanwhile, people who thrive in a given area are often emphasizing a completely different aspect of the experience. They are thinking about how it feels good to move their body rather than telling themselves exercise is hard. Or, perhaps, they aren't really thinking much at all. They may slip into a trance during their run, a meditative rhythm.

But what they are almost certainly not doing is repeating a mental story about how hard it is to do the thing. Their dominant thought is about some element of the experience they enjoy. They are working hard, but with the fun part in mind."

James Clear

The concept of a “9 to 5 job”—and even the notion of a job with standardized hours and a weekend break—is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and really only became commonplace in the 1920s. Fixed-hour wage labour is not a core feature of human existence; it was invented to serve a particular manufacturing need. The idea of assigning numerical or letter grades in schools was a late-19th century invention to efficiently select top pupils for the British civil service. Most statistical techniques and ideas about human management have their origins in eugenics and the slave trade, respectively. Reading about their origins, is it any wonder that these things might make us miserable?