The Gap and The Gain Quotes

“I don’t think we set and achieve goals in an effort to become happy. We do it because we are happy and want to expand our happiness.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“You’re in the GAP every time you measure yourself or your situation against an ideal.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“If you’re in the GAP and think that “happiness” and “success” are something you “pursue” and will have in your future, then you’re in trouble. You’re making yourself miserable. And just as bad, you’re actually making everyone around you miserable with your GAP-thinking. When you’re in the GAP, you see everything through your GAP-lens. Nothing is ever enough. Nothing ever will be enough. You can’t see the GAIN in yourself or others. And until you do, you’ll never be happy. Plain and simple.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The past is nothing more than the meaning you ascribe to it. Traumatic experiences can be changed. They are not fixed.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The more you transform your experiences into learning and growth, the objectively better your experiences will become. 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.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“A fundamental aspect of flexibility is what psychologists call pathways thinking, and it’s the ability to find or create many workable paths to a given outcome.10 The more flexible you are as a person, the more willing you’ll be to try multiple approaches to getting where you want to go. The more rigid you are, the more dogmatically you’ll try forcing the same approach even when it proves unsuccessful. As Einstein is credited with saying: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Your behaviors before bed are coded into your long-term memory.1 While you’re sleeping, your brain processes everything you experienced that day. But not everything equally. This is why top-performing athletes—like Michael Phelps, the most winning Olympian of all time—create visualizations of success just before they go to sleep.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The British philosopher Alain de Botton said, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“When you draw on a memory, you always do so from the perspective of your present self. Psychologists call memory a “reconstruction,” because it is always reconstructed based on your present views, which influence how you see and perceive past events.14,15,16 As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., stated, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The past, and how we view it, is more a reflection of where we currently are than of the past itself. As the psychologist Dr. Brent Slife states in the book Time and Psychological Explanation (emphasis mine): “We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present. . . . Our memories are not stored and objective entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“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.” —Dr. Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist8”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Research shows that applying implementation intentions increases your self-control, even when you’re in bad environments.27 Rather than wearing out your willpower and watching yourself fail, you have a pre-planned response that takes the guesswork out of your decision-making. When you have a pre-plan for how you’ll deal with obstacles, then you won’t get thrown off when you’re in a situation and tempted to sabotage your goals.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Exposure to short-term stress can actually strengthen your cellular response (i.e., “hormetic stress”). Hormetic stress promotes longevity by activating defense mechanisms in your body. However, prolonged and extended exposure to stress overwhelms your system, which then has to compensate and overwork (i.e., “toxic stress”), which shortens your lifespan.2 Put simply: if you’re continually stressed or upset, you’re wearing your physical body down.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“There’s a quiet confidence that comes from running your own race, from no longer measuring or comparing yourself to others. The philosopher Seneca called it euthymia, which means “That you’re on the right path and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost.”18”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Your happiness as a person is dependent on what you measure yourself against.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you’re proud to live.” –Anne Sweeney, American businesswoman and former co-chair of Disney Media”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Psychologists have separated needs and wants into two core types of passion: obsessive and harmonious.13 Obsessive passion is highly impulsive and fueled by suppressed emotions and unresolved internal conflict. You become obsessed with something to the point of an unhealthy desperation. You believe you need it, and can’t be happy without it. Obsessive passion is regularly associated with addiction. Also, when you become obsessively passionate about something, you lose sight of the other areas of your life.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Happiness is a byproduct of realizing that you are the destination. You are enough and you have enough. You are worthy of love. Your viewpoints and judgments of your own experiences are infinitely more important than anyone else’s judgments of you and of your experiences.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“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. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, said, “All progress starts by telling the truth.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Everything in life happens FOR you, not TO you. Nothing can stop you so long as you transform every experience into a GAIN.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Ideals are like a horizon in the desert. No matter how many steps you take forward, the horizon continues to move out of reach. Psychology has a term for this moving horizon, hedonic adaptation. It’s the tendency of humans to quickly adapt to where they are and what they’ve got. It leads to never being satisfied, and to constantly seeking the next thing.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“According to research in economic decision-making, if a person feels they’ve been given an unfair deal, they will often reject the offer entirely, even when doing so leaves them with nothing rather than something.14,15,16 Research shows that people with low emotional intelligence are highly sensitive to “fairness violations.”17 They really want everything to be “totally fair” or “weighted in their favor” or they’ll be upset—essentially throwing a tantrum to get what they want or trying to prove that they’re in control.18 They quickly get emotionally attached to what they believe “should be theirs,” and if they don’t get that, they break down. They go into the GAP because”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“You have an ideal in your mind, and you’re measuring yourself against your ideal, rather than against the actual progress you’ve made. This is why you’re unhappy with what you’ve done, and it’s probably why you’re unhappy with everything in your life.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The GAP is a habit. It’s a habit we can fall into literally hundreds of times per day. We can spend hours each day in the GAP—unhappy, resentful, regretful.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.” —Pearson’s Law”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Practice mental subtraction to remind yourself of the GAINS in your life. Create a GAIN Tiny Habit Recipe for getting out of the GAP, such as the five-minute rule the women’s soccer coach used.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The past is nothing more than the meaning you ascribe to it. Traumatic experiences can be changed. They are not fixed. Motivation is often broken into one of two categories: approach or avoid.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success