Sensing that we’re making progress toward our goals makes us happy. To feel progress, it must be based on specific facts.
Measuring yourself against the #1 person in your industry won’t make you happy. If you don’t feel good about what you’re doing, you’ll compare yourself to others who do better, which makes you feel worse.
Comparison is the thief of joy — Theodore Roosevelt
The purpose of measurement: have right thinking around results you’ve achieved.
Measure yourself, your own business, not others. Make sure all your comparisons are against yourself.
The horizon is not a specific destination anyone can reach. Ideals are like the horizon: they help you figure out a direction and plan a destination, but you can’t reach it.
The only way to measure your travel distance is from where you started, not from the horizon.
- THE GAIN = The right way to measure progress: specific to specific, present to starting point. Gain Thinking means looking at the progress we have already made.
- THE GAP = Wrong way to measure progress: specific to general, present to ideal. Gap Thinking means looking at the distance between where we are and where we want to be (or comparing ourselves to what other people have achieved). When you measure yourself in the gap, you simply cannot be happy. You can be successful, even highly successful, but you will still feel unhappy, frustrated and even like a failure.
In the gap, you feel as if you've accomplished nothing because the ideal remains distant. Only use your ideals to identify your goals.
Always measure how much you have come and not how much is left to reach where you want to be. Measuring backward is counterintuitive for many people. You can’t grow until you’ve acknowledged how far you’ve come.
Your goals will always be getting bigger, you’ll be growing, your achievements growing.
Focus on Your Progress, Not Your Ideal.
Be your own best friend and fan, not your biggest critic, by applauding each step and enjoying progress.
Being caught in the gap makes you feel old.
The Gain makes you feel energetic and enthusiastic.
Focus on Gain not Gap. Only progress matters.
"The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal." -Dan Sullivan
This post is inspired from The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy.