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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Sullivan
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October 31 - November 6, 2021
When you’re in the GAIN, you take full ownership over your own experiences. By taking full ownership of your experiences and past, you can do whatever you want with them. You can change what your former experiences mean, and what they don’t mean. When you’re in the GAIN, you transform your experiences.
“We’re not usually given encouragement to deal with the negative aspects of our experiences, but when you can take a negative experience and learn a lesson from it that you can apply positively to the future, you’re transforming the negative experience. “In my own life, I’ve found that the more I transform my experiences, the more confident I feel that I’ll be able to deal with anything new, negative, or jarring in the future.”
By continuously learning, you’ll be enabled to do what your former self couldn’t do. You’ll be able to create what your former self couldn’t create. You’ll be able to have what your former self couldn’t have.
word for this is trauma. Trauma happens when your expectations are violated such that you lose your sense of meaning for life and worth as a person.22 It is a dysfunctional belief about an experience that creates ongoing dysfunction in the present and future. Trauma occurs when a person is avoiding and resenting their past, rather than approaching and transforming their past.23 Your past is not fixed, but flexible.
APPRECIATE EVERYTHING IN YOUR WORLD “Proactive gratitude is about appreciating everything in the world around you. It’s not initiated by something special the world first does for you, but rather by something special that you first do for the world.”
“The stories of our lives, far from being fixed narratives, are under constant revision. . . . We are all able to color our past either happy or sad.”
You “grow” from the experience by getting “value” and “usefulness” out of the experience.
The GAP is passive. The GAIN is active.
Taking time to sit down and think about your experiences is what psychologists call deliberate rumination.31 It’s where you: Actively think about an experience. Proactively create the meaning you want that experience to have for you. Revise your life narrative in a positive way as a result. You frame the experience as a GAIN so you can move forward powerfully.
PROACTIVE GRATITUDE CREATES GROWTH “Proactive gratitude allows you to enter into a special relationship with the world—one that continually grows in value, meaning, and happiness.”
As Dr. Nassim Taleb explains, “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” –Ernest Hemingway
When you’re pursuing happiness, then you’re measuring yourself against whatever you’re pursuing.
Ideals are not for measuring yourself against. Why measure yourself against something you can never reach? Rather than measuring yourself against an ideal, as Jefferson subscribed, there is a much better formula for happiness, confidence, and success: always measure backward.
You have the ability to take any experience you’re currently having and appreciate that moment AS A GAIN, rather than measuring that situation against an ideal. Every day you measure the GAIN, you’re happier than you were yesterday. You’re further than you were yesterday. You’re freer than you were yesterday. You’re more yourself than you were yesterday.
“Trust me when I say that one day it’s going to hit you—that you woke up happy, that you’re smiling for no reason, that your hands aren’t shaking anymore. One day, you’re going to remember what it was like to be you a year ago, or three years ago, or even a week ago, and you’re going to be so glad that you fought. You’re going to be so glad that you kept going.” —Bianca Sparacino, Popular blogger
“You’ll notice as you go forward that everything you want in your future has the qualities of being both more achievable and more measurable than things you did in the past.”
The question you must now ask yourself is: How far will I go? You’re the only person who can answer that question. You’re the only person who sets the standards for yourself. You’re the only person who determines your direction. You’re the only person whose judgments matter about your experiences—and your GAINS.
