Have you heard the saying, "Mind the Gap?" It comes from subway trains. There are signs in the stations to remind people to be careful of the gap between the platform and the train, and it's being applied metaphorically to lots of different things these days.
Recently, I had been feeling a little blech about my progress, not full-on discouraged, but heading that way. Then I read an article by Benjamin P. Hardy on Medium titled, “Unsuccessful People Focus on ‘The Gap.’ Here’s What Successful People Focus On.” Honestly, I wondered if it would help me regain perspective or push me further toward discouragement, but I decided to take the risk and read it. Am I ever glad I did!
I’m only going to share a few key points he made, but you can click through on the link above or below to read the whole thing if what I share speaks to you.
1. Ideals and goals are two separate things.
IDEALS GOALS
- General and immeasurable - Specific and measurable
- Change as you change - Can be accomplished, evaluated, and moved past
- Should not be our benchmark for - Are our benchmarks for measuring our achievement progress
- Should be the source of our goals - Provide specific ways to move toward our ideals
- Intended to produce positive emotion - Can produce the joy of achievement as we
like anticipation, excitement, and reach them, see our progress, and
motivation set new goals to continue our progress
2. If we’re not growing and changing, we’re not happy. Lots of research backs this up, but there’s a delicate balance to maintain between progress and self-acceptance. If we develop an I’m-fine-how-I-am-I-don’t-need-to-change attitude, we’ll stagnate and there’s no joy in that. On the other hand, if we focus so hard on improving that we fail to stop long enough to measure, appreciate, and enjoy our growth regularly, we end up exhausted, discouraged, and dissatisfied.
3. If we measure ourselves against our ideals, we’ll never be happy. This is what Dan Sullivan calls “The Gap” in his book The Gain and the Gap. Because our ideals shift as we progress, they’re a moving target that leads to frustration if we aim only for them. Here’s an example – say our ideal is to be healthier by eating plenty of fruits and vegetables. As we pay close enough attention to our diet to notice our intake of fruits and veggies, we realize how much sugar we eat. Now, eating more fruits and veggies isn’t enough. We know we need to move away from so much sugar, so that becomes our ideal. As we get closer to that, we learn the difference in the nutritive value of processed foods and whole foods. Now, our ideal becomes to eat only whole foods. You see how the positive aspect of having ideals can cause us to become so frustrated we want just to give up if we use those ideals as measuring sticks? There will always be a gap between us/our behavior and our ideals. This is what was happening to me recently that allowed the beginnings of discouragement to sneak in. I slipped into measuring myself against my ideal.
4. Using our starting point as our measuring tool, we’re much more likely to be happy and motivated. This is “The Gain.” Let’s go back to our earlier example. We want to get healthier by eating more fruits and veggies. When we take that ideal and let a goal grow out of it, say, “This week I will eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables at least three days,” we now have something specific to measure. When our week is over, we can look back and see we ate better than we did the prior week. We moved closer to our ideal. That feeling of accomplishment is very motivating. Even if we miss our mark of three days and only hit one day, we can still see some growth. Now, instead of getting discouraged because we’re not living our ideal of perfection in including plenty of fruits and veggies in our diet all the time, we feel encouraged because we see our progress.
There’s so much more good stuff in Benjamin Hardy’s article that I hope you’ll read the whole thing. Even if you don’t, I hope you’ll look ahead to your ideals and let them draw you forward, but also remember to look back to where you started when you want to measure your growth. Looking at how far we’ve come from where we were is much more encouraging than focusing only on how far we have yet to go.
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