Episode 531 · Feb 15, 2022

Train Your Mind to Create Success: The Gap and the Gain

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High achievers have a paradox at the center of their lives. They set goals, hit them, and immediately feel the pull toward the next target. The satisfaction they expected never arrives. In a recent episode of The Daily Mastermind, host George Wright III unpacks a concept from Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan's book "The Gap and the Gain" that reframes how you measure progress and why that reframing changes everything.

George describes a pattern he has seen in his own career: successes kept coming, but they never felt like enough. The pivot that changed his perspective was learning to focus on who he was becoming rather than what he was chasing. That shift is exactly what this framework is designed to produce.

What Is the Gap, and Why Does It Keep You Stuck?

The gap is the distance between where you are right now and an ideal that keeps moving. Every time you reach a milestone, the ideal shifts further out. Because the target is always ahead of you, you are always measuring yourself against something you have not yet achieved.

"we're constantly improving and achieving, but we're never satisfied"

That dissatisfaction is not a personal failing. It is a feature of measuring forward. When your benchmark is always something outside your control and always in the future, you will never feel like you have arrived, no matter how much you accomplish.

What Is the Gain, and How Does It Build Real Momentum?

The gain is what you see when you turn around and measure backwards. You compare yourself not to an ideal, but to where you were a year ago, five years ago, or even last month. For high achievers, that comparison almost always reveals real, tangible progress.

Being in the gain does not mean you stop pushing forward. It means you stop letting the future drain the present. As George puts it:

"don't let your vision of the future rob you of the joy of the present"

Staying in the gain builds motivation, confidence, and resilience because you are feeding your brain evidence that you are moving forward rather than evidence of how far you still have to go.

Why Internal Milestones Matter More Than External Ones

Many high achievers load their goals with externally focused targets: revenue numbers, follower counts, comparisons to others. George points out that every externally focused goal keeps you in the gap because external conditions are never fully in your control and the goalposts keep shifting.

Internal milestones put the definition of success back in your hands. When you decide what progress looks like for you, you control the parameters. You can live more in the present and spend less time scanning social media for evidence of what you do not yet have.

How Stoic Philosophy Trains Your Brain to Value What You Have

George draws on Stoic philosophy as a practical tool for staying in the gain. Two exercises stand out. First, imagine losing what you have. When you mentally rehearse losing something, you tend to value it more. Second, reflect on your own mortality. When you genuinely sit with the reality that your time is finite, what you already have starts to look a lot richer.

Both practices pull your attention away from what is missing and toward what is present, which is exactly the mental shift the gain requires.

The Power of Measuring and Reporting Your Wins

One of the most concrete strategies George shares is the practice of journaling your wins each night. Journaling is effective on its own, but he references Pearson's Law to explain why reporting those wins amplifies the effect even further:

"When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates."

Writing down three things you accomplished before you go to sleep trains your brain to scan for evidence of success rather than evidence of lack. That nightly habit shifts your mind from scarcity to abundance and compounds over time.

How a Creator Mindset Turns Every Experience Into a Gain

The final layer of this framework is about responsibility. A victim mindset looks at difficult experiences and asks what was taken away. A creator mindset looks at the same experience and asks what can be learned, used, or built from it.

George is clear that this is not about toxic positivity or forcing a smile on hard situations. It is about taking ownership. When you make every experience serve you, you extract gains from circumstances that would otherwise just be losses.

Action Steps

At the end of each day, write down three things you accomplished. Focus on what you did, not what you still have to do.
Identify one externally focused goal you are currently measuring yourself against. Find an internal version of that same goal that is within your control.
Try a Stoic exercise: spend five minutes imagining losing something you value. Notice how your appreciation for it shifts.
Find an accountability partner and share your daily wins with them. Reporting your progress accelerates your improvement.
When a difficult situation arises, ask: "What can I take from this that serves me?" and write the answer down.

You are not the same person you were a year ago. You have made progress, overcome obstacles, and built something real. Measuring those gains, not just the distance still to cover, is how you train your mind to create the success you are already building. It is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. Glad to have you with me this morning. I wanted to share an idea with you that I came across the other day from Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan, who wrote the book, The Gap and the Gain. This is a great book. You can get it on Amazon Books. In fact, I'll put a link in the show notes. But there's this overall problem that a lot of high achievers face. I know I've faced it in my life. you probably do as well. And that is that, you know, we're constantly improving and achieving, but we're never satisfied, right? And it makes it really difficult to be able to enjoy the moment, stay in the moment. We talk about being part of the journey and having the journey be the real focus. But maybe you've been there. Look, have you ever set a goal? You've worked really hard for it. You've reached that goal and yet it just still didn't satisfy you. In fact, you end up just setting another goal, which is even higher, another benchmark, another peak to be able to perform towards. I found this in my life as well as I was going through my career and my successes and the successes kept going and they never seemed to be enough and that's why I kind of started to focus more on creating the life I wanted and ultimately just focusing on becoming a better person and attracting the success into my life. But this book that I came across and this idea, this concept of the gap and the gain had a really, really great perspective on this whole process. And so I thought I'd share that with you here today. Let me start by just summarizing sort of the key ideas behind this book. And the key idea is that we all have this ideal, quote unquote, this ideal. And it's a moving target, unfortunately, that's sort of always out of our reach. We want to get to this point. Then we want to get to that point. Then we want to get to that point. It's like constantly moving. And when we measure ourselves against that ideal, there's always a gap between where you are and where you want to go. But when we measure ourselves against our previous selves, our background, our history, our past, we're always in a game because we're always further ahead. You know, especially with high achievers, you've always made progress. You've always accomplished a lot of things. and so when we measure backwards we're actually in a gain rather than a gap looking forwards and being in the gain has a really huge impact on your mindset it gives you more motivation confidence success and so we always want to measure backwards even though we're always pushing forwards and that's the concept of this this this book and this idea behind the gap and the gain so let me break it down for you a little bit i wrote several notes of things that i thought would be good to kind of cover with you and the first part is you know the gap is is sort of this attachment we have to something outside of ourselves because it always something in the future We never satisfied until we get what we want but it never really enough And so it always leaves you wanting, right? You're always wanting. The gain is really based on knowing what you want, but it's knowing that you don't have to have it to be happy. So when you're in the gain, it means you're enjoying the journey and you're able to create this freedom from your wants, the things that you've got to have. And creating that freedom is what helps you to enjoy life and have more fulfillment and happiness. And so when you look backwards and you're measuring backwards, it allows you more gratitude and it allows you the ability to be free from those future wants. You know, I always talk about don't let your vision of the future rob you of the joy of the present. Well, measuring backwards your gains, that's one way to be able to help you to do that. So I ask you, what are your goals right now? Are they all externally focused? Are they all things outside of yourself? Because that creates a gap when there's things you want that are all outside of your control, outside of yourself. And what are some internal gains that you can add to your life and to your milestones? This internal progress, this internal growth, this internal happiness. That's the first kind of thought I want to leave you with. Then I want to talk to you about how wanting external things means that you're never really going to be in control of what you're doing because the goalposts are always moving. So if you learn to create internal focus and internal milestones, what you're doing is you're taking back control of your life and your perspective. Because internal focus and finding things that you can recognize for success internally means that you can create the parameters of your success and you can live more in the present. So how often do you compare yourself to others, for example, that's outside of yourself? How often do you spend time on social media? So you're creating this focus of external things and your attention is going towards external things and it makes it constantly pulling you into this gap of what you don't have. And remember, our goal is to get you into the gain of what you've already accomplished and training your brain for success. So how do you get into the gap and how do you get out of this or how do you get out of the gap and get into the gain? One way to do that is through this idea the Stoics have, the Stoic philosophy, and that is you can imagine losing everything that you have because they do a couple of things. The Stoic philosophy talks about how you can imagine yourself losing everything you have and what that does is it allows you to put more value on it. We all know that when you lose something, you tend to value it more. So if you can imagine yourself losing things, that will help you to create more value on those things you already have. Another thing the Stoics do is they reflect on their mortality. See, when you reflect on the fact that you may not be here tomorrow it really helps you to value what you have today And so getting in the gain is there a couple ways to do that with the Stoics that allows you to get into the gain. And what that does is it helps you to create this compound effect in your life and really accelerate your gratitude and your growth and your focus on success, not focus on what you don't have, but focus on what you do have. Another thing that I thought this book really brought out is if you'll always measure backwards, it'll allow you to be able to stay inside the gain. And the ways that you do that is through like journaling, for example. Journaling is a really effective way to be able to constantly recognize your growth. And keep in mind that your KPIs, your key performance indicators in your business or in your life, they should always measure where you're going, but they really should measure what you've accomplished. When you measure your progress, this is a key to enjoying the moment when you've measured the progress you've made versus the variance you have towards your goal that you still have to hit, right? We're always sometimes measuring what we have left to do to get to our goal. What I'm saying and I want to really emphasize is measuring your progress you've made already allows you to enjoy the moment and it allows you to really be, it'll help motivate you more. It'll help you to push your confidence, your self-esteem, your resilience, because you see the progress you're making. You're not just seeing what you still have to do. So I'd ask you, what are your accomplishments that you've done so far? What wins have you made? What wins can you acknowledge and celebrate right now? And it's important for you to find and celebrate those short-term wins because it'll get you in a success mindset. And that's the goal, get in a success mindset. So what I recommend is you measure these wins daily. And the best time to do this is right before bed because, for example, if you're scrolling through your phone or social media right before bed, you're training your mind to be reactive and to focus on the things that are external to your life. But if you're recognizing your wins before bed, let's say you're journaling, which is a great way to do this. You journal and write down three things you accomplished today. You're going to be training your mind to focus on success and to focus on what you've achieved. And this is a thing that really helps your brain to start focusing on abundance versus scarcity, what you don't have that's outside you versus inside. And Pearson's law, which is a great way because Pearson's law states, when performance is measured, performance improves. We all know that, right? When performance is measured, performance improves. But when performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates. The rate of improvement accelerates. So by journaling your wins, it's not just about recognizing wins It about journaling and celebrating your wins You going to accelerate your performance And I really believe that journaling at the end of the day or another way to do this is to create an accountability partner so that there's someone that you can report your wins to and they can help you to celebrate those wins. That's another way to do that as well. And then the last thought I wanted to kind of leave with you is learn to make every lesson or experience in your life a gain. And what I mean by that is, it's not about just being positive. It's not about turning every situation in life into a positive. What I'm saying is, when you're in the game, it's about finding ways to take every situation or experience that you have and make it serve you. And make it serve you. What I mean is, rather than a victim mindset, you're in a creator mindset. So are you taking responsibility and empowering yourself by taking your situations and lessons in life and finding the wins? Or are you playing the victim and disempowering yourself by looking at what you don't have because of something or looking at what it's keeping you from where you want to be? I hope that makes sense. So this topic, the reason I brought this whole thing up is I thought it would give you some fresh perspective and also give you a few strategies to work on in your own life. Because I truly believe that learning to measure backwards, and I hadn't really thought about it this way, but measuring backwards while still motivating yourself with the future vision of where you want to be really helps you to become more productive and create more results. Because let's be really frank here. You are not the same person you were a year ago. You are not the same person you were two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. And I don't care where you're at. Because you're a high achiever, because you're listening to just the simple fact you're listening to this podcast, you're growing every single day. And all of us have made progress and all of us have accomplished things in life. Even if that accomplishment is just overcoming obstacles and that is going to put you in the game. That's going to put you into abundant mindset. That's going to put you into training your mind to find the successes. And when you do that, you're going to accelerate and compound your own success. So I appreciate you listening today. That's the thought I wanted to leave you with. If you haven't already, like and subscribe this podcast. And another thing is put this, you know, tag this in your stories and tag the Daily Mastermind. if you'll do that I'll know who you are I can respond comment throw a shout out I really look forward to helping you also if you click into the show notes of this I'll add a link to either the audio book or the hardcover book on Amazon there's got some discounts there to get this book if you want to get a copy of it but have an amazing week I look forward to talking with you more tomorrow I've got a motivational message for you tomorrow from Les Brown so I look forward to talking with you then have an amazing week my name is George Wright III and this has been The Daily Mastermind We'll see you next time.