1. What is it we're trying to do here?
How do we understand 'love God'?
How do we understand 'be holy'?

"The Mussar blueprint of the inner life considers the soul as the essence of who you are. In common usage, if we speak of the soul, we are likely to use the possessive: 'my soul' or 'your soul'. But that way of describing the inner life conveys the implicit message that the soul is somehow a possession or secondary to our identity. ... Mussar urges us to see ourselves differently, so that you really live from the deeper reality - not that you have a soul, but that you are a soul interwoven with a body. When we acknowledge the soul as primary, all aspects of our lives become aligned in a way we could hardly imagine previously. You and I are souls. That's who we are." (The Mussar Path, The Mussar Institute)

"All of the inner traits that reside in the nefesh-soul, taken as a group, are called Middot (sing. is middah). While almost always translated into English as "traits of character", the Hebrew word middah literally means "measure". Each of us is endowed at birth with every one of the human traits, and what sets one person apart from another is not whether they do or don't experience anger or humility or generosity or worry or laziness or any other of the many inner traits - because we all do experience all those traits - but rather the degree, or measure, of the traits that live in their souls.
...
The spiritual issue is not whether you have a certain trait - everyone has all of them! - but rather their measure, on a continuum or range. Nor should we aspire to rid ourselves of certain traits because we think of them as "negative", like anger or envy. In fact, each has its role, though every person will experience certain traits in very high or very low measure. A trait becomes part of a person's spiritual curriculum when it tends toward one extreme or the other of the range." (The Mussar Path, The Mussar Institute)