You’re in the GAP every time you measure yourself or your situation against an ideal.
For instance, you may be on your way to a concert with your spouse that you’ve been anticipating, but you’re running five minutes late. If you’re focused on and frustrated about those five minutes, then you’re in the GAP.
You’re measuring yourself against your ideal. You’re not actually living in the moment. All you have to do is shift to the GAIN and focus on the fact that you’re having an exciting night. The whole night is a GAIN
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.
When an experience is framed in the GAP, you haven’t learned from it. You haven’t taken ownership of it. Until you actively learn from a GAP-experience, you’re stuck. You won’t be able to move forward until you frame the experience as a GAIN. Until you choose to be grateful for the experience and better off because it happened
The GAP makes every experience a negative, which means you’re worse off than you were before that experience.
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.”