Freedom by Constraint

I read James Clear’s 3-2-1 Thursday emails every week. This week, he wrote:

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.

James Clear

In essence, achieving freedom is about staying focused. Jocko Willink might say that achieving freedom is about staying disciplined. Focus and discipline are really about the same thing. You take a narrow path with a goal in mind, and you don’t veer off the path.

As a writer, I often encounter another paradox. People often get writer’s block when they don’t know what to write. They can write anything they want, yet they don’t know what to write.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the easiest way to avoid writer’s block is to set constraints for yourself. If I hand you a piece of paper and ask you to write a story, chances are, you will sit there for quite a long while pondering what to write. However, if I hand you a piece of paper and ask you to write a 500-word story with a female protagonist hunting a werewolf who turns out to be the town’s mayor, you can probably jump right into the writing and complete the story fairly quickly.

Achieving freedom is all about focusing on one path to a goal, setting constraints for how far you can veer from that path, and staying disciplined to stay on the path.

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