The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

by Dan Sullivan

When an experience is framed in the GAP, you haven’t learned from it. You haven’t taken ownership of it. Until you actively learn from a GAP-experience, you’re stuck. You won’t be able to move forward until you frame the experience as a GAIN. Until you choose to be grateful for the experience and better off because it happened. Once you get yourself in the GAIN, you become better. You’re no longer bitter. You’re grateful for every experience.

By defining your own measure of success, and by actively growing through your experiences, you’ll continually be shocked by how far you’ve come. You’ll regularly look back at where you previously were and see accelerated growth. You’ll see increasingly tangible and measurable progress. Your progress will be startling to most outsiders, because many people spend enormous amounts of time in the GAP, which means they aren’t converting their experiences into learning. It means they aren’t utilizing every experience to refine how they define and measure success. When you’re in the GAIN, you become unstoppable.

When you’re in the GAIN, your progress becomes increasingly measurable to yourself and everyone around you. Yet, the more you’re in the GAIN, the less you compare, compete, or even care what other people think about you. Being in the GAIN leads you to becoming increasingly unique and self-determined as a person. By no longer measuring yourself against externals, and by transforming every experience into a GAIN, you become a highly unique and incomparable person to anyone else.

Josh Waitzkin explains the importance of having a “proactive day architecture vs. a reactive day architecture.”11 What he means by this is: your day can be designed proactively—meaning by you—rather than designed reactively—where you’re bounced around by distractions. Your day can be set up so you can live within that day in a free and proactive manner, rather than constantly being reactively tossed to and fro by random inputs or external agendas.

Retrain your brain to see the GAINS rather than the GAP. What you focus on expands. By measuring three wins every day, you retrain your brain to start seeing more and more GAINS. Psychology has a term, selective attention, that explains that our attention focuses on what matters to us personally.32,33

Your experience is what you choose to focus on. When you’re in the GAP, you’re looking for the GAP. When you’re in the GAIN, you’re looking for the GAIN. You find whatever you’ve trained yourself to look for. Always measure backward. Measure three wins each day. Get yourself committed and excited for three wins tomorrow. WINNING EXPANDS WINNING “Once you get in the habit of looking for wins, you expand your understanding of what can be a win.”