The Gap and The Gain Quotes

“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.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Transforming” your experiences means you go back to your former experiences again and again and, through your evolving thinking and reasoning, change what those experiences mean to you. You also continually extract new lessons from those experiences”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“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. Likewise, imagining the absence of an important person in your life can be more powerful than simply appreciating the fact that they are in your life. One study found that mentally subtracting a material possession you’ve previously enjoyed increases your happiness with that item more than simply thinking back on when you purchased”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“The goal of creating an environment of freedom is that as an individual, you actually live your life according to your own choosing rather than compulsion.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Something Dan Sullivan has noticed in coaching tens of thousands of entrepreneurs since 1974—over 47 years!—is that most of them are mentally “here” but wanting to be “there.” It really doesn’t matter where they are now and how great their lives are, they continually wish they were “there.” Many high achievers have a hard time being “here.” And although it’s great to have goals and vision and be driven, you’re in the GAP if you’re “here” but wishing you were “there.” Playing a longer game allows you to embrace being “here.” Yes, you have goals and vision, but you’re completely happy where you’re at.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“This brings up a highly nuanced and crucial distinction: you can want something and be 100% committed to that thing without needing it. This is the counterintuitive reality: by no longer needing what you want, you are actually far more enabled to get it.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“When you’re in the GAIN, you transform your experiences. In the GAP, you compare your experiences to other people’s, and feel worse off as a result. You don’t take ownership of your experiences, but instead, you distance yourself emotionally from them, which ends up creating debilitating trauma of varying degrees.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Everyone who grows achieves their progress and improvement by transforming frustrating and painful failures into rules and measurements for satisfying success.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, 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.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Being psychologically flexible means you can move forward through uncertainty. It means you control the meaning of your experiences. When you’re in the GAIN, you become more psychologically flexible. You take every experience life gives you—difficult or easy, scary or exciting, challenging or accelerating—and you become better as a result.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Don’t let your past be forgotten. Always measure backward.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“In psychology, inattentional blindness occurs when you are so fixated on one thing that you fail to see everything else going on around you.7 It’s easy to miss the GAINS happening throughout our lives or businesses because we may have tunnel vision on the problem in front of us.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“We go into the GAP about ourselves, undervaluing and underappreciating ourselves. We go into the GAP about other people, turning them into a problem or an enemy. We go into the GAP about far too many things, and perhaps it’s a good time to stop complaining.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Thankfully, in the real world we don’t literally lose the thing we go into the GAP about. But we do damage it. We damage our own experience. And when it comes to other people, we damage them as well.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“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. Likewise, imagining the absence of an important person in your life can be more powerful than simply appreciating the fact that they are in your life.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“sometimes your hardest experiences can be your most potent peak experiences—which teach you lessons and provide perspectives that truly clarify what you want for yourself.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Use this rule if you’re often over-committed or too scattered. If you’re not saying ‘HELL YEAH!’ about something, say ‘no.’ When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than ‘Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!’—then say ‘no.’” —Derek Sivers19”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“A fundamental aspect of being in the GAIN is to live your life in a self-determined way. You stop living in the GAP and measuring yourself based on ideals, but rather live based on clear measurables that you yourself have chosen.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“No one else can define success for you. Defining your own success criteria is how you become self-determined. This is how you develop an internal reference system. You decide how you will measure yourself.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, 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. 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. This is how you become self-determined: You have an internal reference point. You stop measuring yourself against others. You only measure yourself against yourself. You measure the GAIN, not the GAP.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, 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.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Billions of dollars are spent every day to manipulate and change your thoughts, desires, and behaviors. The reference points for your own success are being created for you, not by you. If you’re not paying for the product, then your behavior change is the product.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“She’s made getting accepted into a great college an obsessive and unhealthy “need” rather than a “want.” If she doesn’t get accepted into what she deems as a “great” school, she’ll consign herself as a failure. In other words: she’s in the GAP.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Research in psychology shows that confidence is not what creates success, but rather, prior success is actually what creates confidence.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“An experience only becomes valuable and useful once you’ve transformed it into a GAIN.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“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.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“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

“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

“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.”
― Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

“Why does all of this matter, though? It matters because without being conscious and intentional, you can easily “forget” or lose sight of your former GAINS. You can forget what you previously struggled with and overcame. You can take for granted how far you’ve come, ignore your progress, and miss out on the confidence of remembering where you were. This is why it is incredibly powerful and important to keep journals, records, or “annual reviews.” Like Jill, you can look back and be reminded of the easily forgotten past. You can be reminded that the “normal life” you’re now living may be the dreams—or even beyond the dreams—of your former self.”
― Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success