Table of Contents

The Book in Three Sentences

In this summary of The Gap and the Gain, you’ll learn that unsuccessful people focus on “the Gap”, while successful people focus on “the Gain”. Those who focus on an ideal that’s always out of reach are in the GAP. Those who measure themselves against their past selves are in the GAIN. Dan Sullivan uses these concepts to help you achieve happiness, confidence, and success in your personal and professional life.

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The Gap and the Gain Summary

Introduction: Why Most People Aren’t Happy

The idea that happiness is unattainable is ingrained in our culture. By constantly projecting happiness into the future, we can’t experience it in the present. We also assume happiness can only be achieved externally rather than internally. This suggests you’re trying to fill a gap. Dan Sullivan believes the GAP is a toxic mindset that prevents people from being happy and appreciating their lives.

There are two ways to measure yourself: against an ideal (the GAP) or your starting point (the GAIN). While the former is about focusing on everything you lack, the latter is about appreciating everything you’ve accomplished. Being in the GAP will make you unhappy regardless of what you accomplish. Nothing you achieve will ever be enough. The GAP is something internal and, unless you change your mindset, it can ruin you. By reserving happiness and success for an uncertain future, you’ll never experience it in the present.

The antidote to the GAP is the GAIN. Constantly focusing on what you wish you had makes you forget about your achievements. To escape this trap, you must live in the moment which implies thinking about what you have now, not what you wished you’d have. Focusing on the GAIN brings you happiness. All situations in life can be experienced in either the GAP or the GAIN, but you can’t be in both at once.

To move toward the GAIN you must stop measuring yourself against an ideal because that will take you nowhere. In psychology, this is known as hedonic adaptation. It’s how humans adapt to current circumstances and it leads to never being satisfied. The GAIN is measuring yourself against where you were before. It’s about your process, not someone else’s. With a GAIN mindset, every experience you go through can turn into something positive, even if it doesn’t look that way. Even negative experiences can turn into powerful lessons you can learn from.

Although some experiences are outside your control, how you frame them is up to you. Most people spend too much time in the GAP, but you can turn your experiences into learning to move toward the GAIN. Once you do, you become unstoppable. You must remember that everyone’s playing a different game, so comparing yourself to others is unfair.

Part 1: Get Out of the GAP

Chapter 1: Embrace the Freedom of “Wants” – Avoid the Attachment of “Needs”

When you focus on the GAIN, you feel fortunate and grateful. You don’t pursue happiness because the mere act of doing so implies it’s not here. For learning, growth, and high performance to happen, your starting point should be positive emotions. Coming from a place of gratitude broadens your options, but coming from negative emotions narrows them. Focusing on the GAIN increases your confidence.

When you’re in the GAIN, you don’t need to win, you just want to. You commit to doing your best but don’t need external achievements to prove that you did. When you chase external things (money, fame, promotions, and so on), you’re in the GAP. This turns your happiness into a conditional sentence where you say to yourself: “I’ll only be happy if…”

External things are outside of your control which turns them into an elusive and in some cases unreachable target. This attachment to external things is unhealthy because you don’t feel whole unless you get something outside yourself. The best position to be in is when you pursue wants rather than needs. Needs are unresolved emotional problems and even if you get the external thing in question, the pain won’t go away.

Happiness happens the moment you realize you’re good enough, that you have enough, and that you’re worthy of love. When you turn something or someone into a need, you’re essentially creating an unhealthy GAP in your life. Despite what most people think, you don’t have to have an unhealthy obsession with your job to be successful. Your need for passion can become a self-built prison if you’re not careful. You can be committed to success and have a healthy detachment from your job at the same time.

Moving from needing to wanting is a skill. As such, the more you practice it, the better you get at it. You go from being in the GAP (needing something external) to being in the GAIN (wanting something healthy and chosen). Psychologists divide needs and wants into two categories: obsessive and harmonious passions. Obsessive passion is impulsive and driven by unresolved emotional conflicts. You believe you need something and you won’t be happy unless you get it. When you’re obsessive about something, you’re in the GAP. Obsessive passion consumes you and prevents you from being in the flow state. Harmonious passion is intrinsically motivated. You control your passion yet it doesn’t control you. In other words, you’re intuitive, thoughtful, purposeful, and rational.

A passion is harmonious when it enhances the other areas of your life. This usually happens when you do things for their own sake instead of as a means to an end. This leads us to a paradox: the moment you no longer need what you want, you’re more likely to get it. Simply put, you can perform freely because you don’t care about the outcome. Being intrinsically motivated makes you process-focused, not outcome-focused. In harmonious passion, you need grit, or in other words, to play the long game.

Furthermore, you’re playing your own game because you’re not competing with anyone but yourself. High achievers find it difficult to be in the present moment because they’re too focused on the future. Playing the long game roots you to the “right here, right now” and you’re genuinely happy for it. You still have goals and aspirations but you don’t feel “incomplete” without them.

When you’re in the GAP, you want to escape because you have an unaddressed need. When you’re in the GAIN, you feel free and right at home. Erich Fromm distinguishes between two types of freedom: freedom from (which is external) and freedom to (which is internal). In the former, you’re not a slave to something (hunger, the elements, or lack of self-esteem). In the latter, you’re your own master. Freedom to is a higher level of freedom because it encourages you to think of a plan. It invites you to live according to your values regardless of what everyone else thinks. Being in the GAP is trying to free yourself from someone or something. Being in the GAIN gives you ultimate freedom.

Chapter 2: Be Self-Determined – Define Your Own Success Criteria

Never place your measure of worth into someone else’s hands. This is an unhealthy need because if you don’t achieve your goal (which is outside of your control), you will consider yourself a failure. Success is measured against a reference point. An outside reference (money, fame, social media likes, and so on) puts you in the GAP and an internal point puts you in the GAIN. In philosophy, there’s something called the self-determination theory. This is when you make yourself the reference point. Being self-determined makes you intrinsically motivated, you have a clear why, and you’re not competing with anyone else.

Having an internal compass is difficult nowadays because there’s a lot of noise and distractions, such as technology, social media, and FOMO. There’s a one-question filtering system to make decisions: “Is the thing in question a resounding yes?” If it isn’t, then your default answer should be a no. When something is misaligned with your success criteria, say no.

Chapter 3: The Compound Effect of GAP and GAIN – Train Your Brain to See GAINS

The GAP leads to emotional and physical stress. It’s also a habit and, as such, it’s affected by the compound effect. Spend too much time in the GAP, and your life will shorten. Luckily, the opposite is also true. The GAIN heals, empowers, and lengthens your life.

How you perceive experiences determines how you feel. If you frame your experiences as positive, you’re in the GAIN. When this happens, you’ll be able to surmount challenges that seem impossible. Another disadvantage of being in the GAP is that it creates scarcity. You won’t be able to enjoy what you have because you think something is missing. This kills joy and prevents you from being grateful. Nevertheless, it’s inevitable to fall into the GAP. When this happens, just recognize it and try to get back to the GAIN.

Another concept that can help you change how you perceive experiences around you is mental subtraction. The idea is to think about how your life would be different if you didn’t have certain things. Inevitably, you’ll appreciate those things more. Examples include relationships, achievements, health, or possessions.

To deal with the GAP, you can try to be in it for five minutes. If something sad or infuriating happens and you need to deal with it, allow yourself to experience those strong emotions for five minutes. When the time is over, think about everything you’re grateful for. In psychology, there’s a concept called implementation intentions. This is how you plan for the worst. So you perform well because you know you’re prepared for an emergency. For example, if you’re on a diet, you think about how you’ll react when there’s junk food. Or if you’re an athlete, you think about how you’ll deal with an injury. These pre-planned responses increase your self-control and prevent decision fatigue from happening. To apply implementation intentions, you can use Tiny Habits. This involves placing new habits after established routines. This sounds something like “After I…, I will…”

Part 2: Get into the GAIN

Chapter 4: Always Measure Backward – Increase Your Hope and Resilience

You must remember your GAINS often or else you’ll go into the GAP and feel hopeless. Never measure yourself against others because you won’t be able to see any progress whatsoever. In psychology, the name given to being so fixated on one thing that you can’t see anything else is known as attentional blindness.

Humans can learn fast and quickly adapt to the new normal. This is called automaticity. You do something consciously at first and as you practice it, it becomes unconscious. According to the Conscious Competence Learning Model, automaticity is a four-step process.

Unconscious Incompetence: you don’t know how to do something and you are unaware of your lack of skills.
Conscious Incompetence: you don’t know how to do something, but you’re aware of your lack of skills. In this stage, you see the value in growth.
Conscious Competence: you can perform the tasks involved, but they demand concentration.
Unconscious Competence: you’ve practiced the task so much that you do it effortlessly.

As you reach stage four, the task becomes second nature, but you also forget about your former GAINS. What was once a struggle, you now take for granted. Looking back is extremely powerful because you see that you’re constantly growing. Journaling helps a lot because it helps you compare your present self to your past self. To feel successful, you must always measure backward.

Chapter 5: Measure 3 Wins Daily – Maximize the Highest-Leverage Hour of the Day

There’s an hour that has the most impact on your success and what you do in it is more meaningful than anything you do in any other hour. This is the last hour of the day and it can be a GAP hour (watching Netflix, using your phone, or consuming mindless content) or a GAIN hour (defining your plan for the future or reading books). Psychologists believe that you judge yourself according to what you do. They call this phenomenon self-signaling. Your behavior becomes your identity, so if you want to change for the better, you want to embrace healthy habits.

This involves designing your life rather than letting distractions dictate what you’ll do throughout the day. If you go to bed using your phone and start the next day without a plan, your life is reactive and directionless. So start using the last hour of the day to learn, journal, or solve important problems. Something as simple as writing down three “wins” at the end of the day can change your life. This boosts your gratitude and confidence, directs your subconscious when you sleep, gives you a purpose for the next day, and you retrain yourself to see the GAIN rather than the GAP. Measuring what you do is important because it helps you improve and proves that certain habits have happened.

Chapter 6: Transform Every Experience into a GAIN – Take Ownership of Your Past

When you’re in the GAIN, you use your experiences to adapt and succeed. When you’re in the GAP, you focus so much on your losses that you can’t do anything else. The GAIN gives you a sense of control because you decide what past experiences mean. The GAP gives you rigidity, so you don’t have any agency. The GAIN is all about psychological flexibility, a state where you control your emotions and experience less anxiety and depression. An aspect of flexibility is pathways thinking, your ability to find paths that lead to a desirable outcome.

Humans can learn from their experiences. This puts you in the GAIN. When this happens you turn a negative into a positive. It’s important to note that in the same way you influence your future, you can also transform your past. By changing how you view the past, you can see traumatic experiences as something more pleasant. Failing to do this leads to intrusive rumination. This is when unpleasant thoughts trigger painful emotions from the past. Slowly, you should move toward the GAIN and reframe that past into something more pleasant. Getting better from challenges makes you what Nassim Taleb calls antifragile, a resilience that makes you better with obstacles.

Conclusion: Life, Liberty, and the Expansion of Happiness

You shouldn’t pursue happiness because the mere fact of doing so means it’s unachievable. The best formula for happiness is to measure your progress based on where you were. Happiness isn’t some elusive thing you can find in an uncertain future. Happiness is something you can have right now. You just have to choose it.

Book Summary: The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan