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.” —Dan Sullivan

By embracing the pursuit of happiness, we rob ourselves of happiness in the here and now. We fail to appreciate who we are and what we’ve done to this point.

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.

The GAP is found in both mundane and monumental experiences. You could be in the GAP about getting the smaller half of a cookie (more on this later). Or you could be in the GAP about your entire past—wishing your life had been something different or better.

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

“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 like a horizon in the desert. No matter how many steps you take forward, the horizon continues to move out of reach.

Ideals are meant to provide direction, motivation, and meaning to our lives. They are not the measuring stick.

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.

“Winners don’t have a to-do list. They have a ‘done’ list.”

“The rule is simple: the person who fails the most will win. If I fail more than you do, I will win. Because in order to keep failing, you’ve got to be good enough to keep playing.”

“You, and you alone, are the person who should take the measure of your own success. I do not try to be better than anyone else. I only try to be better than myself.” —Dan Jansen

“Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.”6

According to self-determination theory, a crucial aspect of motivation and thriving is autonomy.5 The more independence and ownership you take for yourself, your circumstances, and your life, the more self-determined you will be.

Being self-determined means that you’ve made yourself the reference point, rather than measuring yourself against something external.

Being self-determined means that you’ve decided what success means to you, and you don’t need anyone else’s permission for what you want for yourself. You don’t need to apologize for what you want.

The American motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said it well: “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.”9

Your happiness as a person is dependent on what you measure yourself against.

The antidote to being in the GAP is to measure yourself by the GAIN. More specifically, you measure your own GAINS, rather than worrying about other people.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” —Theodore Roosevelt

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been.”

“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.”

“Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it. . . . It’s just easier if you do.” —Byron Katie2

When you’re in the GAIN, you control the meaning of your past. You cherish your past and use it as precious feedback for clarifying what you truly want and value.

Ideals are like a horizon in the desert. They illuminate the path up ahead, and give you direction for setting achievable and measurable targets. But like the horizon, the ideal itself is immeasurable, unreachable, and constantly moving. Ideals

always measure backward.

“Measuring backward” means you measure your progress based on where you were before.