An extreme form of sport that is relatively safe, bungee jumping has a brief, surprising history.

It has its roots in Pentecost Island in the Southern Pacific region. The old legend had a female victim of marital abuse jumping off a large tree with her feet tied to the vines, escaping the fall. The abusive husband who jumped after her died after hitting the ground.

• Mindfulness: the awareness of context and of changes within that context.
• Discernment: the ability to recognize and anticipate the consequences of the patterns around you.
• Action: Having a bias for action and immediate implementation is how rapid learning occurs.
• Expectancy: The belief in your ability to seize or create a future outcome.
• Feedback: You shouldn’t and can’t avoid feedback if you want to learn. 
• Adaptability: If you want to adjust to new norms, you’ll have to adapt to them.

Very few art forms offer something as big as an orchestra—one hundred people playing music that can last over half an hour.

To start with, try to identify some of the different things you hear.

• Pick one of the nine Beethoven symphonies, then add to the Western canon: Brahms Second, Tchaikovsky's Sixth, Mahler's Fifth, Bruckner's Seventh, and Shostakovich's Fifth.
• Or start from the 21st century and work backwards.

Music is linked to our memory and emotion and certain life experiences and autobiographical memories are better recalled than others.

We are nostalgic and extremely emotional about the music we heard in our formative years when we were young. We believe that music from the past was better, but each generation is deeply connected to the music heard in the specific decade where they were teens coming of age.

• This charming carol is based on a 17th century English folk tune, but the symbolism is much older.
• The festivals of Saturnalia and Yule put great emphasis on evergreens. The Romans would exchange boughs of holly and ivy during the festival, and the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxon pagans would use evergreens to decorate their homes as symbols of eternal life.
• Christian carol writers changed the meaning of red holly berry to Jesus's blood and the white holly flower as his shroud.

Building these habits means focusing on the type of person you wish to become rather than the outcome you wish to achieve.

Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself. 

• Vulnerability is so much easier when you love yourself. You'll be less afraid of rejection, you step right into that place of openness.
• Vulnerability takes practice. Life continues to give opportunities to consciously choose openness.
• The rewards of vulnerability are immeasurable. With vulnerability, you experience true connection and you begin to attract people to you who are inspired by your openness.

People tend to let themselves off the hook and take the easy way out much more often than they realize. Often, we hold on to an image or identity that we have of ourselves and let that image distort our reality.

When you track yourself you have factual evidence of your slip-ups, making you less likely to mindlessly justify them or pretend they didn’t happen.