Bradatan argues that when we find ourselves procrastinating on something important to us, we’re usually in some version of this same mindset. We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off – because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards.

Something – our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events and over the actions of other people – will always render our creation less than perfect.

Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax – because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job.

So you might as well make a start.

But behavior change through self-control, as University of Pennsylvania students experienced, isn’t as successful as behavior change through altering contexts.

Even if it were equally effective (which it’s not), controlling our actions simply isn’t fun. It means we have to continually fight our desires. It means we have to be eternally vigilant, wretchedly stopping ourselves from doing what keeps coming to mind. It means we have to be wet blankets on our own enjoyment.

In the study, Penn students who changed the spaces where they studied were not in this unhappy state of war with themselves. After adjusting their physical and social surroundings to remove temptations to play instead of study, students said they didn’t experience many unwanted desires. They were not, for example, torn between watching a movie with friends or studying for a test. They had put themselves in the library, where no such tempting possibility existed. They didn’t have to consciously force themselves to do the right thing. Instead, they did what was easiest in that environment—study. They didn’t have to conquer themselves and deny their urges. They didn’t have to be wet blankets, because they had no fire to put out…

The alternative, I guess, is to throw out all of the science and reality of habit formation and continue thinking that each of our destinies is ruled by our willpower alone.

You could ignore the psychological forces in our environment and continue to believe that each of us is acting in a vacuum, with the only pressure coming from our own decision and will.

So when you trip up and fall behind, you can feel terrible about yourself. And when you succeed, you can feel intrinsically superior to other people who are struggling.

Does that sound good? More important: Does it sound familiar?

In their article 'Optimal Experience in Work & Leisure', Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre show that people prefer leisure to work, a conclusion that no one would find startling.

However, they also discovered something else: that people actually have more flow experiences at work than they do at home. This paradox, that we say we prefer leisure when we're having our peak experiences at work, is strange and revealing.

It suggests our prejudice against work, our association of effort with pain and leisure with pleasure, is so deep-rooted that it distorts our perception of the actual experience.

When we automatically and regularly evaluate positive experiences at work negatively, simply as a learned response, we're severely limiting our potential for happiness, because in order to be happy we must not only experience positive emotions but to evaluate them as such.