Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement

What stands in the way of becoming the person you aspire to be?

Maybe it is circumstances. Access to opportunity. For many it is bad habits, exacerbated by the unsuccessful war waged to replace them with good habits - a rinse-and-repeat process that generally leads to failure and discouragement.
A habit is a behaviour that has been repeated enough times to be performed automatically. Habits are also defined as behaviours that follow your prediction of interpretation of how you should act in a given context. Outcomes are just the manifestation of the behaviours that preceded them. For example, your weight is just a lagging measure of your eating habits. You get what you repeat.

True behaviour change is really an identity change. Do not make it your goal to run a marathon, make it your goal to become a runner. Once you identify as a certain type of person, you are not pursuing behaviour change anymore. You are just acting in alignment with the type of person that you believe you are.

You have to be willing to experiment with your life. It does not need to be something radical or huge, start off by finding a way to get 1% better every day. The difference between eating a salad versus eating a burger and fries seems like nothing because the scale is the same at the end of the night. It is only when your habits have compounded over two or five or 10 years that the impact of those small choices becomes fully apparent.

Here is to a Happy and Healthy 2021