Hello and welcome to Chasing Excellence, a show about living a life of better health and increased fulfillment.

On Tuesdays, Ben and I drop full episodes where we answer your questions and dive deep on what it means to chase what truly matters.

And on Fridays, we do a quick set where we either dig through the show's archive for little bits of wisdom worth resurfacing,

or we grab a snippet from another podcast we've been on that we wanted to share.

This week we are going back to 2020, October of 2020, specifically to an interview we did with Mr. James Clear.

We have talked about James Clear and specifically his book, Atomic Habits, before one that we often recommend here on the show.

What we did in that episode was really fun. We had a nice cool chat with him in the first half of the conversation.

And then the second half of the conversation, I presented him with some things that he had put out in a newsletter that he releases every week. He calls it the 321 newsletter.

I also recommend that where he gives a little bit of wisdom, three little bits of wisdom and then some quotes and a question.

So it's a great little newsletter, but what I had done was I went through the archives of that newsletter and I picked out some of those little bits of wisdom from his archives.

And I just presented it to him and we talked about each one. I think we did probably five or six. So they were all pretty fun for us to unpack with with James.

This one in particular, this is the one we finished the episode with and I read the little bit of wisdom first. So I'm not going to repeat it here. So without further ado, here is James Clear with us from the episode that we called working backwards from magic from 2020.

The paradox of freedom, the way to expand your freedom is to narrow your focus. Stay focused on saving to achieve financial freedom. Stay focused on training to achieve physical freedom. Stay focused on learning to achieve intellectual freedom.

Well, there's this weird little paradox. Yeah, that whatever everybody wants is more options, more freedom, more flexibility.

But actually the way to get that is by being more disciplined, by being more focused, by being by narrowing your options in the short term so that you can expand them in the long term.

And it's almost always the person who remains focused early on that has more options available to them later. You know, it's the person who stays focused on learning that feels like they're ahead of the curve and they've got, you know, they're like mentally adept.

The person who has terrible learning habits or reading habits always feels like they're behind the curve. It's the person who stays focused on saving and kind of has their financial habits in order that feels like they have the capacity to pay for things or to pursue new experiences.

The people with the worst financial habits often have the least amount of money available. And so there's this weird paradox. A lot of times people resist habits because they're like, well, I don't want to pigeonhole myself.

I don't want to, you know, I don't want to live like a robot. But the truth is habits don't restrict freedom. They create it, you know, like they it's by being disciplined that you create the capacity to have more flexibility and freedom and so on in other areas of your life.

So I think in many ways the path of freedom is through focus.

Yeah, I've spoken about before. It's the people that that proactively seek out experiencing short term pain are the ones that avoid long term pain.

So to your point, if you go and you save a little bit today, that saving isn't fun. Like everyone rather spend it today, spend today.

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