The Gap and the Gain
By Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy
This book made my reading list at the end of 2025 and is one of the first books I read in the new year. It provides some practical tips for reframing how we measure personal success. I found it be a quick and worthy read.
A FEW OF MY FAVORITE EXCERPTS…
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.
Measuring yourself against an ideal is an endless race to nowhere. That “ideal” could be in the form of a hope or expectation. It could be a comparison with something or someone else: “Her raise was bigger than my raise.”
Being in the GAP stops you from living within your own experience. It stops you from appreciating where you are. It stops you from being happy.
Happiness is not something you pursue. Happiness is not somewhere in the future. Decades of scientific research is clear on this point: happiness is where you start, not where you finish.
Take, for example, the broaden-and-build theory of psychology first introduced by Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson, which shows that positive emotions are the starting point of learning, growth, and high performance.
Positive emotions broaden your options of thinking and acting. As an example, research shows that people in high-stakes situations make the best choices when in a state of gratitude. They can see more clearly the best option before them. On the flip side, negative emotions narrow your options, leaving you with only a few rigid ways of handling a given situation.
Practice mental subtraction – practice thinking of the good things in your life (is one of the most effective science-based techniques for boosting gratitude and happiness) and if it had never happened.
What if you lost your good health?
If you could no longer walk?
Or went blind?
What if you lost the most important person in your life?
How different would your life be if any of these happened? Practice mental subtraction to remind yourself of the GAINS in your life.
End your day feeling awesome by writing down your three wins. Then write down the three most important wins you can get the next day.
Meaning and value aren’t given to us. We create our own meaning and value from every experience.