Designing Your Life

A helpful spring board to get you designing your future instead of leaving it to chance.

The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan

Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

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Transcript

0:21

Hey my friends. I am just coming out of a COVID funk. It is not fun. COVID always really saps my energy when I get it. I've just been really wiped out. So I'm really glad I'm turning the corner on that. I wanted to talk today about taking stock of how far you've come. I read a book once called The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan. Highly recommend that book by the way. And in that book, it talks about how when we are living our life or pursuing a dream or a goal, we have our sights set on the horizon. We have our sights set on where we want to be life. Oftentimes we can feel discouraged or unhappy because we look at where we are versus where we wish we were. And it seems so far away. Dan Sullivan calls that the gap, the distance between where we currently are and where we want to be. And focusing on that gap produces its own kind of misery. Less often we look behind us and look at how far we've already come. In the book, Dan Sullivan calls that the gain, the distance from where we started to where we are now. And it's a much different experience when you take stock of that gain. It's really encouraging and produces hope. It can be really amazing to see just how far you've actually come. Dan Sullivan posits in his book that how happy you are in life will be directly related to how much you live in the gain versus the gap. It isn't so much that the gap isn't there or you never mind the gap right? But your focus is more on the gain. You celebrate the gain more than you despair the gap. I've definitely found value in this in my own life. I've always been a fairly driven person. I'm always pursuing something. I do find that I can get really discouraged and frustrated by how impossible it seems some days, days where I am focused on that gap. My attitude always changes when I look at the gain though. When I can look at where I was just a few years ago, I'm like damn. It's huge. I think it is especially huge when you have gotten out of a toxic or abusive relationship. Like the things that are possible outside of that relationship, are just so much greater. The world of possibilities just really explodes once you step out of the confines of that relationship. Who you become changes so much. I'm a completely different person from who I once was. Completely. I think it is easy sometimes to get stuck in thinking about the past. And wishing that it could have been different or wondering what it could have been like if things have been different. That misses the fact that right now is shaping the future. The past is already done and gone. But what you do right now is actively shaping your future. Right now everything I have, everything I can do, the day to day experience of my life right now, was shaped by the things a prior version of me did. Right now I am shaping the experience of a future me. I think about this a lot. I think a lot about how the things I do with my body right now will determine the quality of life when I get old. When I get old, it will be too late to affect certain things. The time to think about it is now. Now is the time to shape the future. What are you doing now that will produce the results you want in the future? Are you shaping the future deliberately? If you don't like the current results that you have in your life, what are you doing differently so that those results don't repeat into the future? These are the questions we should be asking ourselves. And it doesn't have to be huge things that we're doing. Most things aren't accomplished by some huge flashy breakthrough. Most of the time it's small, consistent actions repeated over time, that are the ones yielding huge results in the future. Whole books have been written by people just deciding that they are going to write for 15 minutes a day. Weight loss goals have been achieved by the act of moving for 20 minutes a day. Financial goals have been reached through the setting aside a small amount each paycheck. A book that I think is really helpful to illustrate this is called Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. I'll put links to both the books I mentioned in the show notes because I think they're really good for like designing your life on purpose. It's a powerful thing to decide that you are going to design your own future instead of leaving it to default or chance. It's a powerful thing to take actions that add up to something big. So this is what I'll leave you with to think about this week. What kind of future do you want? What actions can you take now to shape it? Alright my friends until next time, be well.