3 Simple Principles for a Life of Health, Happiness, & Hearts on Fire
5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Practice
🎧 In This Episode
We unpack the rebuilt ChaseTracker app and the three simple principles that shape it — the same ideas that quietly separate a life of drifting from a life of chasing.
You’ll learn why the drift toward convenience, comfort, and conformity happens without anyone ever choosing it, how to find the line between difficult and doable so a habit actually sticks, and why James Clear is right that we’re not changing our habits as much as we’re changing our identity.
Plus: the story behind two months of quietly rebuilding the app around one new idea — a daily trajectory score that shows us, in real time, whether we’re drifting or chasing.
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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS
1. Entropy Is the Default State
Writer Rebecca Newberger Goldstein puts it plainly: “The states constituting your wellbeing and happiness are highly ordered and therefore improbable.”
The good life isn’t something we stumble into — it’s something we build against the current. Entropy, the scientific measure of disorder, is always working against us.
Writer Dan Koe frames it just as bluntly: without systems in the domains of health, wealth, relationships, and happiness, “you will only continue to focus on the default path and end up like everyone else.” That’s not a warning meant to scare us. It’s a map.
We can’t resist a force we refuse to name.
2. Drifting vs Chasing
Drifting is the slow, often unseen, and accidental move toward convenience, comfort, and conformity.
Convenience is choosing whatever requires the least friction right now — the easy path, not necessarily the right one.
Comfort is protecting how we feel in the moment by avoiding discomfort, challenge, or risk.
Conformity is subsuming our own desires to match the group, to blend in, to not stand out.
None of this happens dramatically — it happens quietly, gradually, invisibly.
Chasing is the opposite: the daily decision to organize our time, energy, attention, and money — our T.E.A.M. — toward what truly matters, which here at Chasing Excellence we believe are three things: health, happiness, and living with our heart on fire.
3. The Time Horizon Framework
The rebuilt ChaseTracker app is built around six key areas — move, eat, think, connect, rest, and aim — tracked across four time horizons: daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
Each horizon gets progressively deeper and harder, on purpose.
A daily action should be doable most days.
A weekly action takes more time or accumulates across the week.
A monthly action requires real depth and effort.
Every quarter, we pick our heads up and ask: what did we learn? What did we miss? What do we want to focus on for the next 90 days?
Operating across all four horizons — not just the daily one — is what gives us real leverage on our lives.
4. Difficult, but Doable
The goal isn’t perfection — it’s calibration.
We like the metaphor of a surfer waiting for a wave: they let a few pass by, looking for the one that’s difficult to catch but worth the effort — not too hard (we’ll wipe out) and not too easy (we’ll learn nothing).
Finding that line takes real experimentation, the same way we’d add weight to a barbell a little at a time until we find our true working number. And that line moves — what’s doable in one season of life may need to be dialed down 50% in another.
Consistently failing at a key action is usually a calibration problem, not a motivation problem, which means the fix is honesty, not grit.
5. You’re Not Changing Habits — You’re Changing Identity
James Clear’s core thesis from Atomic Habits applies here exactly: “True behavior change is identity change.”
The ChaseTracker isn’t built to log actions — it’s built to accumulate evidence of who we’re becoming. As Clear puts it, “every action is a vote for the type of person you want to be.”
When we can’t consistently complete a key action, it forces an honest question: is this actually important to us? And if so, why aren’t our actions aligned with that?
The rapid feedback loop — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly — turns that question from a feeling into data, which is exactly the kind of evidence a new identity requires.
Nobody drifts on purpose, just like nobody chases excellence by accident.
That’s why we built the ChaseTracker app. A simple system to identify, track, and chase what matters in just a few minutes a day.
🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. Which area of your life has quietly drifted furthest from where you want it to be?
Imagine closing your eyes and walking in a straight line — you’ll probably shift further off course than you realize. Where has that happened in your health, your relationships, your creative work, or your sense of purpose? What made it so easy not to notice?
2. Where are your actions clearly misaligned with what you say is important to you?
Pick one area of your life — move, eat, think, connect, rest, or aim — and be honest: if someone tracked your actions this week, would they conclude this actually matters to you? If not, is that a calibration problem or a priority problem? Those require very different fixes.
3. What’s the most meaningful key action you keep setting and failing to complete?
Consistent failure at a key action is data, not defeat. It usually points to one of three things: you’re trying to do too much, your priorities are out of order, or you say something matters but aren’t yet willing to do what it costs. Which of those three feels most uncomfortable to admit — and what would it mean to answer it honestly?
🎯 1 PRACTICE
Track one action, four horizons.
Pick a single area of your life — move, eat, think, connect, rest, or aim — and build one key action for each time horizon: something doable daily, something achievable weekly, something that requires real depth monthly, and something worth reviewing every 90 days. Write it down somewhere you’ll actually see it — put it in the ChaseTracker, a spreadsheet, even a sticky note on the bathroom mirror.
At the end of each day this week, ask one question: did we do the daily action? At the end of the week, did we hit the weekly one? We don’t need the full six key areas yet, and we don’t need a perfect system — we need one area, four horizons, and enough reps to feel what the feedback loop actually does.
That’s where the identity shift begins — not with a grand plan, but with a single area of life we’ve decided to stop drifting in.