Hey guys,
happy 2018!!
I hope you are doing well and are growing consistently.
I read some of your resolutions and they look astonishing, will be quite interesting to see in a few months, where these took you

For me, life is about quality and authenticity.
Living a life of quality sometimes has you do things you don't really enjoy, putting you into spots of discomfort, like those mad 2-5 minute cold showers I take every morning or other exposures to ice cold environments.
Doing meditation is not always fun, but I have not missed a day in many years.
Those things improve my life, I have had very dark times, gaining over 100 lbs. (45Kg), being deeply depressed for about 5-6 years, which was when I gained that weight.

I went from being an ex semi pro basketball player to being really fat. My life made a 180° turn to the worse.
But one thing stayed constant. The enjoyment of learning and the drive to grow.

In 2017, I was able to make another 180° turn and lost about 60-70 lbs. using many of the strategies I am advocating in my videos here. One super cool one is having streaks, they create a momentum, that will take on a life of its own and sometimes when you don#t want to do some of the uncomfortable things, they might be the difference maker, because you don't want to break that streak.

I can't tell you how often it kept my meditation practice going, some days, I would only meditate for 2 minutes, JUST to keep the streak going and have 0 days missed.. I am using an app called "insight timer" and at first while I was still struggling with consistency in my meditation, I somehow discovered that it kept track of my consecutive days, those motivated me as I got to 10 consecutive days, then 20 and I thought, man, maybe I can get to 30 or 40.... now I am at quite a large number with an avg. session being over 20 minutes long over that period with spans for years now. Before the app, I was also meditating, but very inconsistent with the practice.
Since 2016, I am doing the cold showers and I have this streak going, so some days, when I don't feel like doing it, this streak lets me go even when it is hard.

Streaks are not everything and they are only a little helper, but why not employ a little helper here and there, if it helps, nice, if not, adjust to something that might help. Streaks are nothing new, in fact, Jerry Seinfeld, a long time ago, gave some advice to an up and coming comedian trying to make it. He said something along these lines.

"Write jokes every day and when you are done, mark the day in your calender with a red X. After a while you have a streak going and from then on, your job is to never let the streak break".

I did not lose my weight because I read his quote in fact I might have only read it after I was already in the process, but even if I had read it before, there is a chance I might not have been ready to really understand the message. But now that I did it myself I lived the message and it is very obvious to me.

I guess what I am trying to say is, sometimes we have great advice or a great idea right in front of us and are not ready to understand its depth and we will learn it by applying and executing. Sometimes we need to sit with things a lot longer than we do.
In Verse 41 of the Tao Te Ching it says:

"When a great student hears of the Tao, he immediately begins to embody it;
when a middling student hears of the Tao, he thinks about it now and then;
when a bad student hears of the Tao, he immediately laughs out loud.
If he didn't laugh, it would not be the Tao."

If you are interested, I will write more about it and how I overcame these dark times. I also talk about it on a podcast with the lovely Kristy Arnett in case you didn't know. We did two episodes together and I talk about some of that history. Kristy is such a wonderful host, person and interviewer. Let me know what you think

You can find the podcast here
http://kristyarnett.libsyn.com/-the-completely-counterintuitive-secret-to-high-quality-results

http://kristyarnett.libsyn.com/hack-your-memory

Curious about your thoughts,
have a wonderful day and sorry for the lengthy post.