In the evenings, I am too tired or hungry and all I want to do is unwind with music or tv or FaceTime. If I say I just want to run every day, it's far too easy for me to rationalize it away every hour. This exact reason is also why I'm having such a hard time with my running goal - I have yet to find a good place for it. That nice little trick can start to get your brain rewired, turning a new action into something that you start to do without thought. When I am done meditating, I walk my dog. So I can start to train my mind: When I finish coffee, I meditate. I will literally put meditation right between those two events. So what I did was think: Ok, I always drink coffee (a habit I already have), and I always walk my dog (another habit). If I set a precise time, then I'd be setting myself up to fail on the weekends, for example. Some mornings I wake up really early, and others I wake up late. The reason for this is because I tried same time before, but time is so variable. Not necessarily same time, but I meditate always after coffee but before my dog walk. I started meditating every day at the same point in my day. I'm finally starting to get on a streak now though, because I did a couple of key things that helped my brain build a predictable highway out of a dirt road: For my goals, meditating every day for at least 10 minutes - I will admit it's something that I have tried so many years to achieve. I bring all of that up to reinforce just how powerful turning an ambition into a habit is, for achieving a goal. That's why, for example, when you start driving it's a lot to pay attention to, but by the time you're 3 years into it, you can drive while you talk to others, listen to music, or sometimes (which is so crazy), drive and not even realize you just drove somewhere because your mind was entirely somewhere else. It runs smooth, never has traffic, and can handle a lot. That's what evolved into what we call "habits" - things that we have done so many times, that our brain has all the pathways built and ready to go, so it's like turning a dirt road in your brain into a super highway. When the brain is offered the ability to do something automatically, and with very little energy, then it's happy - it gets to keep humming along with very low exertion. Truly - if you've ever studied for a test or tried to learn a new skill, don't you feel really tired afterwards? That's because building neural pathways is very costly from an energy point of view. So our bodies developed really strong ways to make sure it could survive lean times - by turning things into fat and also by making sure we tend to follow the path of least resistance. We didn't always know when our next meal was, or how nourishing it would be. We don't like to expend a lot of energy because evolutionarily speaking, energy was hard to come by. Like I mentioned yesterday, our bodies tend to be kind of lazy by nature. The secret of a habit is that you already have so many - you literally don't think about them (consciously) because your brain has them on a kind of autopilot. Day 3 - I started touching on this on day 2, but one of the real secrets to achieving a goal is to turn it into a habit.