Although I'm not a believer in formal "New Year's resolutions," it's understandably easier to make personal changes when we can start at the beginning of something. The biggest drawback is that appeal fades as the New Year loses its freshness. Instead, the strategy is to try to improve good habits and put an end to bad habits without having a deadline in mind - start making changes to your entire life, not just the next 365 days.

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Stop Getting Too Comfortable

As creatures of habit, we often fall into cycles of cemented ideas and routines. There are times and places where we need stability, but far too often we become “comfortable” with things we shouldn’t be comfortable with - namely, things that impede personal growth. “Getting too comfortable” is real and it is unhealthy. In its worst form, it’s what makes us falsely accept ourselves as powerless and victims of circumstance because getting out of our comfort zones is daunting. But in order to become the kind of person we want to see ourselves as, it is necessary.

Start Drinking More Water

Only three creations on this planet are worth the hype they deserve: Nutella, Beyoncé, and water. This hasn’t been the first time you’ve heard “drink lots of water” nor will it be the last, and there’s a reason for that. Like other reiterated health tips we hear about, we tend to brush this off: drinking a gallon of water a day takes discipline and a lot of unwanted bathroom trips. But if there’s one healthy change you can make to your life, make it upping your water intake. It reaps incredible health benefits in exchange for very little. It is unreal that “detox teas” are so when water is doing exactly what they (purportedly) do - for free.

Stop Doing Nice Things for “Likes”

People have always bragged about their good deeds. Social media and camera phones just doing so more appealing thanks to the viral effect. What is potentially the worst part of this phenomenon is how quickly we make inferences from others’ acts of kindness: just as we’re quick to judge someone for doing something we don’t like, we’re quick to give praise to someone for doing one nice thing. Selflessness and altruism are wonderful human traits indeed, and I don’t believe every video of a student asking their disabled classmate to Prom was done so it could get hundreds of shares and likes, but the merit of a good deed certainly loses its meaning when it is. And the wrong kind of people are the ones who completely reject the idea of being an unsung hero.

Start Being A Little More Patient

My mother bought her second house at 30. It was a country home with great acreage and she even had a few ponies to boot. I’m a little over six years away from 30 and I don’t know if I’ll even see my first house in that time. My cohort was raised to believe college was a one-way ticket to future success, but the reality is the road to success - or rather, satisfaction - forks in innumerable ways, and depending on how much you’ve hustled, some roads are more winding than others. The majority of us didn’t have the motivation in high school to have the academic achievement that one-way college ticket now requires, but not all of the roads have closed. But to get anything we want, we must endure its technicalities: don’t expect a 60k job right out of college if you didn’t exactly work for it, but you still have a chance to.

Stop “Stopping”

In other words, think less about terminal goals and more about lifelong improvement. We live in a competitive culture driven by “if you’re not first, you’re last” mindsets. Listen: you will probably never be the “best” at anything you do, and you won’t succeed in what you can do really well in by only giving yourself credit if you’ve surpassed everyone else. Our best passions our found when we want to try those things again after failing. More importantly, they’re found when we don’t care how we place in them. Being open to criticism and improvement, and not taking them personally, are crucial to how you grow as a person.