Today I want to take the opportunity to talk about something called the gap and the gain.
This is a concept that I just ran across recently. It’s a way of thinking about everything that I find myself really appreciating. Let me tell you about the last few weeks. I came out of this really intensive writing period where I was crushing it. I wrote a lot. Then, for a variety of reasons, I had a bunch of decisions that were weighing on me with regards to my career and what to do next and I realized that my writing was starting to drag.
One of the reasons that I was starting to drag is because I was living in what’s called the gap.
Anytime you look at where you are and you try to understand how you got there and how far you still have to go, you can either measure your progress based on the gap, which is how far you are away from your objective, or the gain, which is how far you’ve come from where you started.
You can imagine that this decision of what to measure is going to have an impact. Some time ago, I realized that almost every single time that I stop and take stock of my life, I always end up getting a little bit depressed. During these down periods, I feel like I have to pull myself up by my bootstraps and throw myself back into my work. Though I never realized it before, this happens because I typically measure the gap rather than the gain. That is, I measure how far away I am from my goals. Granted, I set pretty aggressive goals, which doesn’t help, but when I measure how far away I am from achieving them, it makes the progress that I’ve made feel kind of worthless.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but I wrote like 15 chapters of a book over the last few weeks and when I paused to take stock of it, I was really depressed. I was depressed because I hadn’t written 52 chapters of the book. I was still so far away from my goal of finishing the book, and there was this sort of feeling of, ‘Oh man, what’s even the point of doing this?’
I hope you can see just how insidious and toxic that thought is because making 15 chapters worth of progress is actually fantastic. The fact that I just mentally undercut all of my effort simply because I wasn’t further along toward my goal is a terrible habit. That’s not a good space to be in so when I ran across this concept of measuring the gain instead of the gap, it really caught my attention. I’ve been trying to shift my mentality into this idea where instead of measuring how far we have yet to go, we measure how far we’ve come.
When I look at my situation, instead of saying, ‘I’ve written 15 chapters, I’m so far away from my 52 chapter goal,’ if instead I say ‘I’ve written 15 chapters and I’m making real progress in this story, that’s 15 chapters that didn’t exist before. And they’re good chapters too,’ it encourages me to keep going. It motivates me to continue toward my goal.
I think we can often do this in life in general. We say, ‘Man, I really want to be a full-time author.’ And then when we stop and take stock, we measure ourselves against that goal of being a full-time author. That isn’t actually helpful because the distance between where you are now and your goal might take you a year, two years, five years, but it could also take you a month or two months or three months. You have no idea. You don’t know what the future holds.
To measure the gap as if you know, just doesn’t make sense. Instead, saying, ‘Okay, my goal is to be a full-time author and I am making progress towards that goal. I’m moving forward towards that goal. And look how far I’ve come from where I started.’ That’s something that you can be proud of. That’s something that should motivate you to keep moving forward.
This is just a little bit of a shift in mentality that I’m trying to adopt. So when I saw that I had messed up this week’s videos, because I just never turned the sound on, instead of saying, ‘Oh, my goal this week was to produce three videos and now I’m back at zero,’ I can measure the gain. I have practiced these three videos already. And my next attempt at these videos is going to be even better.
That’s what I would like to encourage you with. And I’m trying to encourage myself with it as well, because even though I’m a full-time author, this is how I make my living. It isn’t always easy to maintain. It’s not easy to be working toward a goal constantly because being an author, your goals never stop. They never go away. You have to write a book. And then after you finish that book, you have to write another book. Then after you finish that book, you have to write another book. And once you finish your series, you have to write a new series. It doesn’t stop.
Measuring yourself in the gap against that ever receding goal, it’s just sort of crazy to do, but I’ve never thought about it as crazy before this. I’ve never conceptualized it in this way. And so I just kept doing it. I kept measuring myself against this goal that’s always getting further away from me because after you write one book, it’s like, ‘Okay, now I’ve got to write a couple of books.’ And then your goal becomes ‘I’ve got to write 10 books.’ And then it’s 15.
The other day I looked up and I was like, ‘My goal is to write 60 books.’ I can only imagine that when I get to 60, it’ll be like, ‘My goal is to write a hundred books.’ That just, there’s something about that ever receding goal that doesn’t help. But on the other hand, if I say, ‘In the last five years I’ve written 30 books,’ that’s really good. That’s great.
And even if you’ve only written five books, even if you’ve only written one book in the last five years, being able to finish a book is a monumental achievement. Measuring ourselves in the gain instead of the gap just makes life better. It makes life easier to live. And I am all for things that make life easier to live. It’s hard enough to live and I think we can add a little bit of positivity into our lives. I think it’s appropriate to live in the gain instead of in the gap, but that’s just my thoughts on it.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/vrIGIqLE9LM
Thanks for reading and watching.
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