Set aside work/career for now. What do you do in your personal life? Have you had any experience with celebrating small (even tiny) milestones or "achievements?
Recent example: I recently moved house. Many of my books and lower-urgency work resources are still in moving boxes. I think I need a new bookshelf, so that I can unbox some stuff. I take pleasure in the act of putting together the bookshelf. It is a 30-60min task, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I feel accomplished about doing this proactive step to improve my working environment. Plus I like the new shelf I picked, I like the way it looks, the design itself gives me some small amount of pleasure.
Rinse and repeat. Maybe not every day, but every week, there will be some small/tiny/insignificant victory like this. Learning to appreciate them, will not necessarily bring you lifelong joy or self-actualization on its own, but it will do wonders for improving your relationship and emotional balance with respect to work. Sometimes a big project goes wrong, everything is on fire, my boss is asking me to do some crazy unreasonable thing (but at least, a good boss doesn't ask this unnecessarily, and only very rarely), whatever... but still there are always some minor victories to celebrate, or at least partial progress:
- hey I stopped the bleeding on that production outage -- at least other teams know where to look for deeper fix
- hey I sketched out an outline for that documentation that everyone keeps asking about -- even if the content isn't there, at least people know this is where new content should go
- hey I wrote down all my tasks for tomorrow -- so even though I didn't finish things today, I can still log off and forget about them, then pick them up again in the morning
EDIT: Or, to put it another way:
- don't think about the problem as, "how do I learn to accept tedium or chores, and not get bored/frustrated/angry about them?"
- instead the problem should be, "how do I find contentment in the small details of life, that I previously overlooked as simply being tedious or boring?"