If I am trying to live up to an unreasonable standard then I am being unreasonable aka flawed. This is where Taoism is really important. Effortless action, keeping the gears from grinding needlessly, from wasting the chi, the money, the metaness, the subtelty, the self-correcting-ness of the world, building better institutions with low transaction costs...
I've spent several years studying scientific self-help. I'm sharing some of what I've learned in my sequence The Science of Winning at Life, but I probably won't have time to write additional posts in that series for a while. In the meantime, those who are interested in what mainstream scientists have discovered so far about effective self-help methods may want to read some of my favorite popular-level scientific self-help books: