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

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

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“The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.” —Dan Sullivan

By saying happiness is something we’re pursuing, the direct implication is that we don’t have it now. You don’t pursue something you already have.

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.

“Your future growth and progress are now based in your understanding about the difference between the two ways in which you can measure yourself: against an ideal, which puts you in what I call ‘the GAP,’ and against your starting point, which puts you in ‘the GAIN,’ appreciating all that you’ve accomplished.” —Dan Sullivan

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

“The day you stop racing is the day you win the race.” —Bob Marley

“If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack.”

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. Our society has trained us to measure ourselves against our ideals, which by definition are unreachable. Goals, conversely, are reachable.

GOALS EXPAND HAPPINESS “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.”

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.

When you’re in the GAIN, your life is based on your actions and results, not what could have or should have happened. The GAIN is about real “measurables,” not ideals. As performance coach Tim Grover has said, “Winners don’t have a to-do list. They have a ‘done’ list.”

“I’ve discovered that when something very emotional happens to me, it stays with me until I’ve converted it into lessons. Before I knew this was the case, I could become paralyzed by negative experiences for long periods of time.”

An experience only becomes valuable and useful once you’ve transformed it into a GAIN. Many people have lots of experience but very little learning.

Seth Godin said: “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.”

Everything in life happens FOR you, not TO you. Nothing can stop you so long as you transform every experience into a GAIN.

“The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.” —Joseph Campbell

“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

happiness is where you start, not where you finish.2

REALITY MEASURED BACKWARD “The future isn’t a reality—it’s a projection. And because it’s not reality, it can’t be part of any real measurement of your progress. The only way to measure goals is backward, against the past. Use the reality of where you currently are and measure backward from there to the reality of where you started.”

Needing anything outside of yourself is a form of being in the GAP.

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.

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.

As the famed entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant said: “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 Happiness cannot come from something outside of yourself.

NO SCARCITY WITH WANTING “In the world of wanting, there’s no scarcity, because it’s a world of innovation—not of taking. Wanters are creating things that didn’t exist before.”

Your viewpoints and judgments of your own experiences are infinitely more important than anyone else’s judgments of you and of your experiences.

Start by grabbing a piece of paper and answering the following questions: What do you feel you “need” in order to be happy? Who or what do you measure yourself against? When is a time in your life where you made something or someone into a “need,” and thus created an unhealthy GAP in your life?

“The difference between the two words ‘need’ and ‘want’ is gargantuan. When you need someone, you lose your independence and agency as a human being. Wanting, on the other hand, is the first step in learning how to love someone. The difference between need and want is the difference between codependence and love.” —Michaela Rollings, popular blogger

Consider Trevor’s words: “I think you can have both.” What he meant by “both” is: Having an intense commitment to succeed, and Having a healthy detachment from what you’re doing

WANTING IS A CAPABILITY “This transformation, moving from needing to wanting, is a capability. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Yes, it’s a risk at first because your previous tendencies of justification are well developed and habitual.”

As he stated, he loves football. He works hard. He’s committed to winning. But he doesn’t need football. That’s his point—you can have both: you can be 100% committed to something and simultaneously not need it.

When you’re in the GAP, you “need” something outside of yourself. You’re driven externally. You’re reactive to what’s going on outside of you. In the GAIN, you don’t “need” anything outside of yourself. You’re driven internally. You take what happens outside of you to transform and improve yourself.

Being in the GAP is driven by an unhealthy “need.” Being in the GAIN is driven by a healthy and chosen “want.”

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.

WANTING EMPOWERS YOU “When you take the wanting approach to your future, it also means that you’re leaving behind the world of needing. It means that no one else is responsible for your future progress 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. You can freely perform and be in the flow, rather than obsessing over how it will turn out.

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. You’re here, and you love being here. You love what your life is like. You’re blown away by your GAINS. You appreciate everything and everyone around you. You’re genuinely happy. You also love what you’re working on and building. You’re committed and focused, but you’re not trying to rush to the next place to fill some unresolved need. You’re doing what you love. You’re confident in where your life is going.

By freeing yourself from unnecessary “needs,” you’re finally enabled to create the progress and life you want. You know you’re already whole and complete without those goals. You’re fully free to have whatever you want, and because of that, it’s actually much easier to get what you want.

WANTING CREATES ABUNDANCE “In the wanting world, there is an abundance of resources as a result of the creativity and innovation that comes from wanting.”

The GAIN creates freedom. The GAP makes you a slave to your unhealthy need. The GAP makes you a slave to “there” and makes “here” a prison you’re trying to escape from.

Pull out your journal and answer the following questions: Are there any areas in your life where you have obsessive passion? If so, what unresolved internal need are you trying to fill? What about your life and work do you love? What is your long game? When you’re playing the long game, you’re doing what you love. You’re not doing something just to get somewhere else. Do you have a long enough time table to truly slow down and enjoy being here, or are you trying to quickly get “there”? Look at your life right now—what are all the GAINS you can think of? How would your priorities change if you were playing the long game?

In the classic book Escape from Freedom,26 Erich Fromm defines two types of freedom: Freedom from (which is external) Freedom to (which is internal)

Freedom from is lack of obstacles—you’re not a slave to someone or something. Freedom to is the presence of control—you’re your own master.

These build on top of each other. Freedom from means you’ve removed the external obstacles. Freedom to asks, “Okay, what will you do now?”

IDEALS AREN’T FOR MEASUREMENT “An ideal can’t be measured. It’s there for emotional, psychological, and intellectual motivation, but it’s not there for measurement.”

“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

As Seth Godin explains: “Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence—it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they’re told.”

PROGRESS MUST BE CONCRETE “A sense that we’re making progress toward our goals makes us happy. But to truly get the feeling of progress, we need to base it on concrete facts. When we set goals, we must be specific so we know when they’re accomplished—usually, a number was reached or an event took place.”

Children are trained to measure themselves against external reference points. These reference points are not generally chosen by the child themselves, but by society and the education system. As these children grow up, they’re not taught how to determine their own reference point or “measure of success.” Instead, they adopt the reference points that society deems as “success”—money, fame, social media likes, etc.

Every one of us has reference points we use to measure ourselves. Pull out your journal and answer these questions: What are the reference points you measure yourself against? Why did you choose those particular reference points? How do you define and measure success for yourself?

“To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests.” —Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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.

Social media is largely designed to put people into the GAP.

HOW TO MEASURE GAINS “You can’t make a real measurement of your gains unless it’s based on numbers achieved or events that have made a difference. It has to be quantifiable and verifiable.”

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.”

Any form of social comparison puts you in the GAP. Measuring yourself against someone else puts you in the GAP. Competing with someone else puts you in the GAP.

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

As a quick exercise, pull out your journal and answer the following questions: Are the reference points you measure yourself against external or internal? How often do you compare yourself to others? How much time do you spend on social media? Are you self-determined and free?

Define Your “Success Criteria” “What preoccupies us is the way we define success.” —Arianna Huffington15

APPRECIATE PROGRESS FIRST “Before you start the process with a new goal, make sure to recognize and appreciate the progress and achievements you’ve made so far.”

Dean decided to flip the question to put success in the here and now. He asked himself, “I know I’m being successful when … ” and came up with a list of 10 items:16 I can wake up every day and ask, “What would I like to do today?” My passive revenue exceeds my lifestyle needs. I can live anywhere in the world I choose. I’m working on projects that excite me and allow me to do my best work. I can disappear for several months with no effect on my income. There are no whiny people in my life. I wear my watch for curiosity only. I have no time obligations or deadlines. I wear whatever I want all the time. I can quit anytime.

Spend 20 to 30 minutes with no distractions writing down your answer to this question: “I know I’m being successful when …” Be as honest with yourself as you possibly can. 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. Be flexible with this list.

ELIMINATE JUSTIFICATION “By eliminating justification, you recognize that all the energy you were spending comes back in the form of creativity, innovation, and cooperation.”

Here are Lee’s six filtering questions, which also act as his personal success criteria: Is this opportunity, person, expense, adventure, experience, relationship, commitment, etc., aligned with my values? (If the answer to this first question is “No,” then Lee doesn’t proceed to ask himself the remaining five questions. If, however, the answer to this first question is “Yes,” then he continues his filtering process.) Will this opportunity, etc., take advantage of my unique ability and make me even stronger? Will it lengthen my stride? How will this opportunity, etc., benefit mankind? Is there a bigger cause or purpose that will benefit society? Does this make sense financially? Is this transactional or transformational? In other words, is this a stand-alone opportunity or a gateway opportunity? If I say “Yes” to this opportunity, what then must I say “No” to?

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.

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

IDEALS AS INSPIRATION “The best way to look at your ideals is as an infinite source of inspiration for creating goals. We are all like moviemakers, using our entire memory and imagination as raw material for casting a never—ending series of pictures out in front of us.”

Use Your Filtering System to Go Further, Faster “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 Sivers

CREATE SUCCESS CRITERIA “The simplest and most efficient way to ensure you get the results you want is to create a list of success criteria for your goals.”

Pull out your journal and simplify the success criteria you’ve listed above. 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?

BE SPECIFIC, NOT VAGUE “Vagueness generates vagueness, so you must be specific when describing your desired results.”

Train Your Brain to See GAINS “Sometimes the greatest scientific breakthroughs happen because someone ignores the prevailing pessimism.” –Nessa Carey, British biologist

Other research shows that unhappy people get sick easier. For instance, one study showed that unhappy employees take, on average, 15 extra sick days per year.

The way you mentally filter experiences shapes your emotional and physical response to those experiences.

Research shows that your interpretation of events, despite their objective characteristics, determines the impact of stress and illness on your body.8,9 The way you interpret an experience literally affects how your body metabolizes that experience. Perception shapes biology.

COMPARISON MAKES YOU UNHAPPY “Comparison makes you unhappy, and there’s no end to comparison in the world, if that’s the path you choose.”

When you change the context, you change the meaning. The meaning determines the psychological and physical impact of the content.

BE UNIQUE, DON’T COMPARE “Instead of focusing on self—comparison, you focus on valuable thinking and action, created through your unique thoughts and experiences.”

Stop Comparing and Practice Gratitude “Comparison is the thief of joy.” —Theodore Roosevelt

Being in the GAP creates scarcity. It also stops you from being grateful and generous.

The GAP robs you of enjoying your life. It robs you of appreciating what you already have. It completely kills the reward of any positive experience you have or progress you make.

As with all things, an obvious antidote to emotional reactivity and an unhealthy need for “fairness” is gratitude. Research shows that people who are grateful don’t overly obsess over “fairness” or comparisons.

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?

Call Yourself Out and Give Others Permission to Call You Out “Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” —Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican theologian and human rights activist

MEASURE YOUR OWN PROGRESS “Measuring your own personal progress keeps you out of comparison with others.”

Practice Mental Subtraction “Is there a good way to ‘unadapt’ to positive events? Perhaps thinking about the absence of those positive events would work.” —Minkyung Koo, Sara Algoe, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert

Indeed, 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 it.

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.

Let’s take some time to start focusing on the GAINS in your life. 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: choose another specific thing, event, possession, achievement, health, or person.

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. We all go into the GAP way too much.

“One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. There are a lot of things I don’t worry about, because I have a plan in place if they do.” —Randy Pausch

YOU’RE 100 PERCENT DISCIPLINED “You are 100 percent disciplined to your existing set of habits.”

Decision fatigue happens when you’re not sure what you’re going to do. It’s when you’re torn between options and, due to your indecisiveness, you often cave to the tempting worse option.28 Having a pre-plan in place enables you to be intentional, and to avoid the willpower burnout that comes through decision fatigue.

After I compare myself with another person, I will say to myself, “Are you in the GAP or the GAIN?” After I feel discouraged, I will list 3 specific GAINS from the last 30 days. After someone tells me about a setback, I will say, “What did you GAIN from this experience?” After I start my weekly team meeting, I will ask, “What was your biggest GAIN yesterday?” After I open my journal, I will immediately write about one GAIN in my life. After I __________, I will __________. After I __________, I will __________. After I __________, I will __________.

Increase Your Hope and Resilience “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” —Steve Jobs1

If we’re not progressing as people, then we’re givingup on ourselves. If we don’t believe someone else can make progress, then we’ve given up on them.

YOU’RE ALWAYS GROWING “You are always growing, and you continually measure yourself in terms of growth.”

When you stay in the GAIN, your motivation to push through challenges is not only enabled but strengthened. Being in the GAIN helps you discern the progress that others in the GAP would miss.

Seeing GAINS gives you hope, confidence, and motivation to keep going—even when progress is difficult or slower than desired.

“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 psychologist

“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.”

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

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.

MOVE TOWARD WHAT’S GROWING “Your increasing sense of individual uniqueness makes you aware of everything and everyone that’s rigidly opposed to any kind of growth. This enables you to identify and move toward everything that’s growing.”

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?

Comparing snapshots of your former self with your current self quickly gets you into the GAIN.

A.M.B. ALWAYS. MEASURE. BACKWARD.

THE PROBLEM IS HOW YOU MEASURE “Do you find that no matter how much success you have, you’re perpetually dissatisfied with your progress? Does it feel like you’re still far from achieving your biggest goals? The problem is not in the quantity or quality of your success and achievements. The problem is how you measure.”

“The only way to measure the distance you’ve traveled is by measuring from where you are back to the point where you started.” —Dan Sullivan

For now, let’s start by going back roughly 10 years. Where were you 10 years ago? What were you focused on? How did you measure success back then? How has your situation changed? What do you now know that you didn’t know back then? What have been some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned over the past 10 years? What have been some of your biggest accomplishments and achievements since then?

“I’ve noticed that people who measure their accomplishments in terms of specifics tend to be happier and a lot more energized than people who speak and think in generalities. Someone who responds to a question like ‘How are things going?’ with an answer like ‘Things are pretty good’ isn’t actually connecting with their real experience. “But if you think about specific facts when you assess your situation, this grounds your feeling in reality. “For example, saying, ‘This recently completed project earned ten times as much money as it did last year’ is very different from saying, ‘This project did pretty well.’ If you work in the world of generalities, it’s easy to get confused about what’s really going on, and your sense of your achievements will be vague and unclear.”

THE ONLY WAY TO MEASURE “The only way to measure the distance you’ve traveled is by measuring from where you are back to the point where you started.”

Alain de Botton said, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.”

“What did I believe 3 months ago that I no longer believe today?”

HOW TO MOVE FORWARD “Your level of capability in the future depends upon your measurement of achievements in the past. You can’t move forward and grow until you’ve acknowledged how far you’ve come and have properly measured your GAINS.”

“Our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for.” —Dan Sullivan

THERE’S NO BLAME “There’s no blame to be had for your being in the GAP up to this point. Even if you were raised in a GAIN-minded household, you could easily have picked up GAP-like thinking from the culture that was otherwise around you. After all, measuring backward is counterintuitive to most people.”

What you do during the hour before bed sets the tone for the rest of your life. This is where your deepest habits are formed. How you end your day doesn’t only determine how well you sleep. It dictates when you’ll wake up. It orders how clear and directed you are when you awake. It decides how committed and sold you are on what you’ll do and who you’ll be the next day. It defines how effective and alert you’ll be the next day.

HOW TO MAKE JUMPS “As you move forward, new goals will require you to jump to higher levels of confidence and capability, but you’ve done that before, time and time again. To remind yourself of this, all you have to do is look back to your various starting points and then to your corresponding achievements.”

As Thomas Edison said, “Never go to bed without a request to your subconscious.

DON’T COMPARE TODAY “Don’t compare today’s value to that of any other day.”

“Never begin the day until it is finished on paper.” —Jim Rohn

Research shows that writing down three things you’re grateful for each day increases your happiness.17 Other research shows that gratitude before bed not only makes you feel better but literally makes you sleep better.18,19 Writing what you’re grateful for is very powerful. But perhaps even more powerful is writing down specific “wins” you had that day. Writing three wins from the day not only boosts your gratitude but simultaneously boosts your confidence.

EACH WIN IS IMPORTANT “Each win, big or small, is important, and the more you do the activity of identifying your daily wins, the more you’ll see greater and greater opportunity for wins.”

WINNING EVERY DAY “You’ll notice with each winning day—which is every day—that your sense of pride, confidence, and excitement expands and accelerates.”

Michael Jordan summed it up well: “Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again.”

William James, the Harvard psychologist and father of American psychology, explained selective attention this way: “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

WINNING EXPANDS WINNING “Once you get in the habit of looking for wins, you expand your understanding of what can be a win.”

Naval Ravikant: “I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second.”

“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.” —Pearson’s Law

After writing down your three wins each night, an effective way to tap into Pearson’s Law—where you measure and report your progress—is sharing your three wins with an accountability or “success” partner. It doesn’t need to take more than 2 minutes per day. After your journal session where you’ve written down your three wins for the day, as well as your three wins for the next day, all you have to do is text what you wrote down to your success partner. By sharing your wins, you’re not actually “reporting” to someone. Rather, you’re sharing your success. There are several benefits to sharing your wins with someone you love and respect: It’s energizing to share your GAINS with someone you respect. By sharing your “three wins for tomorrow,” you’ll feel a sense of accountability to achieve. Humans have a desire to be consistent—thus, by saying you’ll accomplish those three, you’ll be far more likely to do it.37 It gamifies your daily progress, making progress into play.

THE WINNING MUSCLE “When you take the time daily to recognize your achievements, you’re building a muscle.”

Take Ownership of Your Past “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” —attributed to Stephen Hawking

WE CREATE MEANING AND VALUE “Meaning and value aren’t given to us. We create our own meaning and value for every experience.”

Taking Ownership of Your Experiences “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 Katie

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.

FREE YOURSELF FROM JUSTIFICATION “When people stop spending their energies on justifying what they want, they free themselves up to focus on creativity and innovation.”

Conversely, when you’re in the GAP, you’re reactive to your experiences—looking at them and being frustrated over what happened. Rather than utilizing your experiences for learning and improvement, you frame them as “a negative.”

“Everyone who grows achieves their progress and improvement by transforming frustrating and painful failures into rules and measurements for satisfying success.”

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.

EXPAND OWNERSHIP OVER LIFE “You use your winning brain to identify, achieve, and measure daily progress, which continually expands your ownership over every area of your life.”

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.

CONTROL YOUR RESPONSE “Successful people don’t control events; they control their response to events.”

“We will be better because of this, not bitter because of this.”

VALUE CREATES MEANING “With increased value comes greater meaning. The things that we value or appreciate the most also have the greatest meaning. Value and meaning in the world, then, are totally created by appreciation.”

They’ve taken ownership of the meaning and framing they give their stories. They aren’t reactive about their past, but proactive. They decide what their past means. They decide what they’ll do as a result. They’re better because of their challenges, not worse.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” —George Orwell,

“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this, it has no power over you.” —Chuck Palahniuk

To apply The Experience Transformer, pull out your journal and follow these instructions: Think about any specific experience—positive or negative. Ask yourself: What about this experience worked? What “usefulness” can you get from this experience to improve your future? What can you learn from this experience about what you don’t want? Knowing what you know now, because you’ve had this experience, how will you approach your future differently? What about this experience are you grateful for?

When you’re in the GAIN, you take full ownership over your own experiences. By taking full ownership of your experiences and past, you can do whatever you want with them. You can change what your former experiences mean, and what they don’t mean. When you’re in the GAIN, you transform your experiences.

“We’re not usually given encouragement to deal with the negative aspects of our experiences, but when you can take a negative experience and learn a lesson from it that you can apply positively to the future, you’re transforming the negative experience. “In my own life, I’ve found that the more I transform my experiences, the more confident I feel that I’ll be able to deal with anything new, negative, or jarring in the future.”

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.

word for this is trauma. Trauma happens when your expectations are violated such that you lose your sense of meaning for life and worth as a person.22 It is a dysfunctional belief about an experience that creates ongoing dysfunction in the present and future. Trauma occurs when a person is avoiding and resenting their past, rather than approaching and transforming their past.23 Your past is not fixed, but flexible.

APPRECIATE EVERYTHING IN YOUR WORLD “Proactive gratitude is about appreciating everything in the world around you. It’s not initiated by something special the world first does for you, but rather by something special that you first do for the world.”

“The stories of our lives, far from being fixed narratives, are under constant revision… . We are all able to color our past either happy or sad.”

You “grow” from the experience by getting “value” and “usefulness” out of the experience.

The GAP is passive. The GAIN is active.

Taking time to sit down and think about your experiences is what psychologists call deliberate rumination.31 It’s where you: Actively think about an experience. Proactively create the meaning you want that experience to have for you. Revise your life narrative in a positive way as a result. You frame the experience as a GAIN so you can move forward powerfully.

PROACTIVE GRATITUDE CREATES GROWTH “Proactive gratitude allows you to enter into a special relationship with the world—one that continually grows in value, meaning, and happiness.”

As Dr. Nassim Taleb explains, “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” –Ernest Hemingway

When you’re pursuing happiness, then you’re measuring yourself against whatever you’re pursuing.

Ideals are not for measuring yourself against. Why measure yourself against something you can never reach? Rather than measuring yourself against an ideal, as Jefferson subscribed, there is a much better formula for happiness, confidence, and success: always measure backward.

You have the ability to take any experience you’re currently having and appreciate that moment AS A GAIN, rather than measuring that situation against an ideal. Every day you measure the GAIN, you’re happier than you were yesterday. You’re further than you were yesterday. You’re freer than you were yesterday. You’re more yourself than you were yesterday.

“Trust me when I say that one day it’s going to hit you—that you woke up happy, that you’re smiling for no reason, that your hands aren’t shaking anymore. One day, you’re going to remember what it was like to be you a year ago, or three years ago, or even a week ago, and you’re going to be so glad that you fought. You’re going to be so glad that you kept going.” —Bianca Sparacino, Popular blogger

“You’ll notice as you go forward that everything you want in your future has the qualities of being both more achievable and more measurable than things you did in the past.”

The question you must now ask yourself is: How far will I go? You’re the only person who can answer that question. You’re the only person who sets the standards for yourself. You’re the only person who determines your direction. You’re the only person whose judgments matter about your experiences—and your GAINS.

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