1: In his fourth Olympic games, in his final race, Dan Jansen won his first-ever Olympic medal, finishing first with a world-record time.
Yesterday, we explored Dan’s emotional gold medal-winning race.
“Before the race, [Dan] decided to compete with a completely new mindset,” Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy write in The Gap and The Gain: The High Achiever’s Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success.
Rather than think about the medal he needed to feel successful or remember all the races he should have won but didn’t, Dan chose to focus on all the wonderful people and experiences in his life.
Dan Jansen focused on the GAIN. Not the GAP.
2: There are two ways we can measure ourselves,” Dan Sullivan believes: “Against an ideal, which puts us in what I call the GAP, and against our starting point, which puts us in the GAIN, appreciating all that we’ve accomplished.”
Before his final Olympic race, Dan Jansen intentionally focused on the GAINs in his life.
“He didn’t need that medal to make him happy,” they write.
“He was already happy and successful before winning the gold.”
If he hadn’t won, he still would have been happy and successful. Losing that race could not have made him a failure.
“He decided that his life was filled with GAINS.”
The noted entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant says: “Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.”
3: The impact of Dan Jansen choosing to live in the GAIN is that he no longer “needed” to win.
“Sure, he wanted to win,” the authors write. “He was committed to performing his best. But he no longer ‘needed’ that gold medal in order to feel worthy or successful.
“Winning the gold medal could not have made Dan Jansen happy if he felt he needed it to be happy or to feel successful.
“Needing anything outside of ourselves is a form of being in the GAP.”
When we’re living in the GAP, we “have an unhealthy attachment to something external,” Dan and Ben note. We feel we “need something outside of ourselves in order to be whole and happy.
“We need to have a million dollars.”
“We need that person’s approval.”
“We need that position or promotion.”
“We need to be a particular size or shape or to look a certain way.”
Dan and Ben believe that our “needs” are “unresolved internal pain, not something we can solve externally.”
We seek to fill that need. But once we achieve our goal, we simply create another one. Another need.
It’s never-ending. The horizon keeps moving.
Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, once said, “All progress starts by telling the truth.”
But when we are living in the GAP, we avoid looking inside.
Instead, we “continually search and seek outwardly to fill the GAP inside.”
And happiness does not come from something outside of ourselves.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: What do I “need” to be happy? Who or what do I measure myself against? When was a time in my life when I made something or someone into a “need,” and thus created an unhealthy GAP?
Action: Journal my answers to the questions above.
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