A large portion of life is made up of habits. By giving more thought to things you do or don't do habitually and making conscious changes, you can become more of the person you aspire to be.
There are only so many decision points you have to work with per day and it is better to save them on non-routine decisions. Decisions about things you might do daily or weekly can be off-loaded to habits - something you've decided on already, so you don't have to go through the decision process again and again. Should you floss this morning? Should you go to the gym? What should you do on my commute this morning? What should you have for breakfast?
This is especially helpful for things that long-term-you wants to do, but short-term-you doesn't really want to do. One example might be getting up earlier to make it to the gym before work. You might not like getting up earlier (which also means going to bed earlier), and you might not really enjoy the act of working out either, but you always feel better overall the days that you do.
Habits help turn wishful priorities into actual priorities. You could want "health" to be a priority, but until your actual daily choices are healthy, health is not truly a priority for you. Habits are one of the tactical ways to implement your priorities.
(Bad) Habits are also things you've naturally started doing regularly that you don't want to be doing. An example may be as simple as watching too much Netflix when you get home from work. The first step is figuring out why you do this, and the second is finding a better replacement for it.
Traditionally, traditions have been passed on for generations, or maybe just from the last generation, your parents. Sometimes these traditions are intentional and sometimes just start happening naturally, over the years.
Traditions are an excuse to put extra effort into bringing people that care about each other together despite distance or normally conflicting schedules. Traditions get everyone to sync up on the same wavelength for at least a little bit every once in a while.
Some of the most common traditions are around holidays that get families together. As both close friends and family become more scattered across the world, it becomes more important to use existing or create new traditions to bring people you care about together.