What it argues
The Gap and the Gain is Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy's argument for a specific and counterintuitive reorientation of how high achievers measure their progress. The gap is the distance between where you are and your ideal — the horizon you're perpetually moving toward. The gain is the distance between where you are and where you started. Sullivan's central claim, developed from his coaching practice with entrepreneurs over several decades, is that most driven people measure themselves against the gap and suffer for it, when they could measure themselves against the gain and find motivation without misery.
The argument is not that people should lower their standards or stop pursuing ambitious ideals. The ideal — a constantly receding horizon — is described as a useful tool for direction. But if you evaluate your daily progress against it, you will always feel behind. By definition, you never close the gap. Measuring backward, against your own past starting points, reveals how much has actually changed — and that recognition produces confidence and motivation rather than the chronic dissatisfaction of gap-measuring.
What it gets right
- 1.
The gap is the distance between where you are and your ideal. The gain is the distance between where you are and where you started. Measuring against the gap produces chronic dissatisfaction; measuring against the gain produces confidence.
- 2.
The ideal is a useful directional tool, not a measuring stick. It tells you which way to walk, but evaluating your current position against it is a category error.
- 3.
High achievers are disproportionately susceptible to gap measurement because the drive to pursue ideals is the same trait that makes them measure themselves against those ideals.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Dan Sullivan is a Canadian-American entrepreneur and executive coach who founded Strategic Coach, a coaching program for entrepreneurs, in 1974. He has coached thousands of high-performing entrepreneurs over his career and is the author of more than fifty books drawn from that practice. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and author whose books include Willpower Doesn't Work and Personality Isn't Permanent. The Gap and the Gain, published in 2021, synthesizes Sullivan's coaching framework with Hardy's psychological research and is one of their most widely read collaborations.
