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

by Dan Sullivan

Get very good at saying “No” to anything that misaligns with your success criteria. As you do, you’ll be shocked at the confidence and momentum you quickly build. Your list of success criteria is your rocket fuel.

Are your success criteria focused on the outcomes you currently want? What’s a simple filter you can create to assess every decision you make (e.g., “Will it make the boat go faster?”)? What is one thing you can apply this filter to in the next 3 hours?

Getting out of the GAP and into the GAIN means you’ve made yourself your own reference point.

When your reference point is internal, happiness and success are always right here and right now.

There’s an entire field now based on this premise: epigenetics, which shows that our perception of events and situations shapes how those events affect us.7 Research shows that your interpretation of events, despite their objective characteristics, determines the impact of stress and illness on your body.

Perception shapes biology.

it was the context that shaped the meaning and effect of the content. The context was the view or framing of the experience. Take,

When you’re in the GAIN, you perceive everything in your life—even the challenging experiences—as a GAIN. You could be going through a challenging and even stressful experience, but your body can positively handle that experience because you’re framing it as a GAIN. No

Pull out your journal and answer the following questions: When was a time you went into the GAP because you went from wanting something to believing you needed it? When was a time you went into the GAP by comparing yourself to someone else? When was a time you used gratitude to reframe a situation into a GAIN and move forward?

The experience actually brought us closer together because my son was able to see me admit when I made a mistake, and he watched me resolve it quickly.

Call yourself out when you catch yourself in the GAP. Immediately look for and vocalize the GAIN.

Tell five people you know and love about The GAP and The GAIN.

Give those five people permission to call you out when you’re in the GAP.

When you’re in a difficult situation, help yourself and others find the GAIN.

research shows that imagining the absence of a positive event in your life has a more powerful effect on you than simply looking back on that positive event.

Being in the GAIN is appreciating everything in your life, including the progress you’ve made as a person. It’s about measuring yourself against where you were before. It’s about seeing everything in your life as a GAIN.

Start by mentally subtracting something important to you. Here are the steps: Pull out a piece of paper and a pen. Select one specific thing to mentally subtract: it could be a relationship, an achievement, your health, a possession. Imagine how your life would be if you never had that one thing, or if it was instantly taken away from you forever. Picture the impact that would have on you right now. Think about how losing that one thing would affect your future. How would it affect others? Write down how your life would be different. Now, refocus on the present moment and this one thing in your life that you’ve been focusing on. This one thing is a huge GAIN in your life. How can you appreciate this GAIN more than you have up to this point? How can you turn this GAIN into even more GAINS? How have your thoughts and feelings changed about this one thing by doing this exercise? How do you feel about your life in general right now? Repeat:

How you frame an experience shapes how your body processes that experience.

Here are the five questions: Where am I right now? What are my wins from the past 90 days? What are my desired wins for the next 90 days? Where will I be in 12 months? Where will I be in 3 years? It takes me about 5–10 minutes to answer these questions whenever I start a new journal.

What do you now know that you didn’t know 3 years ago?

Where were you 12 months ago? What were you focused on back then? How has your life changed and improved? What do you know now that you didn’t know back then? How has your “measure of success” improved over the past 12 months? What are you measuring now that you weren’t measuring back then? Make your bulleted list.

Alright, one final time. Let’s zoom in again. What have been your GAINS over the past 90 days?

When you’re in the GAIN, you’re proactive about your experiences—you look at your experiences and utilize them to become more adaptive and successful in your future.

Whenever you frame an experience in the GAP, you lose power and ownership over that experience.

“Everyone who grows achieves their progress and improvement by transforming frustrating and painful failures into rules and measurements for satisfying success.”3 The GAP takes away your agency as a person and makes you psychologically rigid. The GAIN increases your agency and makes you increasingly psychologically flexible.4,5,6,7,8 Psychological flexibility means that you manage your emotions, they don’t manage you.

You’re either winning or learning.

the book Peaks and Valleys, Spencer Johnson, M.D., explains that the good things in people’s lives happen because of what they do during their “valleys,” whereas the bad things in people’s lives happen because of what they do during their “peaks.”

When you go through a valley, you can learn from that valley or be frustrated by it. The choice is yours.