Finding gratitude and appreciation is key to resilience. People who take the time to list things they are grateful for are happier and healthier. It turns out that counting your blessings can actually increase your blessings. My New Year's resolution this year is to write down three moments of joy before I go to bed each night. This simple practice has changed my life. Because no matter what happens each day, I go to sleep thinking of something cheerful.

Every year I get more of an understanding of what I need to be happy. If I haven’t slept enough, or if I haven’t exercised, I’m more likely to be in a bad mood. My silly brain will think it’s because I haven’t written a good joke that day, but actually I’m just tired or I need a poo.

Sleeping by 9 pm & getting a workout at 5 am has been helpful. Sleeping early reduces the chances of bingeing when we are drained and have low self-control at the end of the day. A workout in the morning also increases the odds of making healthier choices throughout the day.

You see, soccer didn't make me who I was. I brought who I was to soccer, and I get to bring who I am wherever I go. And guess what? So do you.

So take the time to find the thing that excites you more than anything else in the world. Not the thing your parents want you to do. Or the thing that all your friends are doing. Or that society expects of you.

The second filter is to gravitate towards working on hard things. I’d love to tell you I was an immediate success after leaving Stanford… I wasn’t. Even a decade later, I felt like I wasn’t on the right path, and it took me a while to find my footing. Until I applied to Google. I had my final interview there in 2004, it was April Fool’s Day and the day Gmail launched. So when my interviewers asked me about it, I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or a real product. That’s because at the time, one gigabyte of free storage for everyone felt super ambitious, and almost impossible. A couple years into the job, I got my chance to work on a seemingly impossible problem, too. It was around this time that the internet was moving into a new phase. The web was evolving from simple web pages to rich applications. There was a group of us that felt we could reimagine the browser to be much better and faster, and we had an early prototype that we thought was pretty good. Internally there was a consensus that building a browser would be incredibly difficult, requiring hundreds of engineers; we had a group of about ten. The consensus was right. It was going to be really hard. In some ways we were naive, and it's good to be a bit irrational when you approach new things. And in 2008, we launched what we thought was a great browser. We had eight million users in the first twenty-four hours, and the reviews were really positive. And then user growth stagnated. After a year, we had around two percent share. I remember Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, made fun of Chrome in an interview and called it a rounding error. It could have been demoralizing. But with that California optimism, I told the team that the fact he went out of his way to dismiss us meant we were doing something right. We kept going, setting highly aggressive stretch goals to keep the team pushing. We rapidly iterated, shipping the browser every six weeks while others shipped one maybe every six months to a year. Success began to follow. Working on hard things has taught me a lot: It typically attracts other great and optimistic people. And even if you miss meeting the high goals you set, you’ll still achieve something great. So when you have the choice to work on something hard — say yes. Do what excites you