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

by Dan Sullivan

“The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.”

Even if we’ve already achieved something great, this pursuing keeps happiness always up ahead and around the corner. Happiness is after the next achievement. Happiness is somewhere in the distant future. Happiness is out there. But happiness is never here.

When your happiness is tied to something in the future, then your present is diminished. You don’t feel happy, confident, or successful. But maybe in the future you will be, or so the logic goes.

You’re in the GAP every time you measure yourself or your situation against an ideal.

“The day you stop racing is the day you win the race.” —Bob Marley

“If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack.”6

Ideals are meant to provide direction, motivation, and meaning to our lives. They are not the measuring stick. Our society has trained us to measure ourselves against our ideals, which by definition are unreachable. Goals, conversely, are reachable.

Being in the GAIN means you measure yourself backward, against where you were before.

You measure your own progress. You don’t compare yourself to something external. You don’t measure yourself against your ideals.

Everything in life happens FOR you, not TO you. Nothing can stop you so long as you transform every experience into a GAIN.

Research in psychology shows that confidence is not what creates success, but rather, prior success is actually what creates confidence.5 While in the GAP and thinking about the races he should have won but didn’t, Jansen was unwittingly killing his own confidence levels, which would have negatively impacted his final performance.

When you’re in the GAP, you have an unhealthy attachment to something external.

You feel you need something outside of yourself in order to be whole and happy. You need to have a million dollars. You need that person’s approval. You need that position or promotion. You need to be a particular size or shape or to look a certain way. When you’re driven by need, rather than want, you have an urgency and desperation to fulfill that need. The problem is that “needs” are unresolved internal pain, not something you can solve externally.