A (1:57)

Well, happiness is a burden if you. If you think you have to go get it. So if you think, I have to go and accomplish this thing in order to become happy, I need to be a millionaire. I need to have that book published. I need that New York. If you feel like you need to go out and get happiness, then you make it a burden for yourself. You know, it's. It's not some. Happiness is not something you pursue. Happiness is not something you chase. It's not something that outside of yourself. That's actually one of the fundamental realities is it's not outside of you. If you're actually chasing happiness outside of you, it's because you've got some emptiness inside of you that you're trying to fill with external accomplishment, and you're never going to actually be able to find it. It's an endless chase to nowhere because the whole is inside of you. It's not outside of you.

B (2:36)

So if that's the gap, what's the gain?

A (2:39)

So the gain is multifold. But in the most simple terms, the gain is that you are only measuring yourself against where you were before. So, like, before this conversation, you were telling me about how in the last year and a half, two years, your podcast is 10x, right? So the gain would be measuring yourself against where you were during our last conversation. You know, and you can pick any starting point. Um, so there's a quote from Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway was a famous novelist, and he said, true nobility is not about being superior to other people. True nobility is about being superior to your former self. Right? So the gain is when I, Ben Hardy, only measure myself against former Benjamin Hardy, and I'm only measuring my gains. Where was I a week ago? Where was I a year ago? Where was I five years ago? I'm tracking my gains, I'm seeing my gains, and I'm living in the gain. I'm actually referencing my gains. And I'm. And I'm recognizing and also appreciating my progress. And what that does. There's, you know, endless psychological benefits to doing this. One of them is, you know, the most immediate one people think about is, well, gratitude. Well, that makes sense. But it's also confidence, because confidence is the byproduct of past performance. And so what's that mean?

B (3:40)

Confidence is. Is the product of past performance. What's that mean?

A (3:44)

That's what confidence is. You know, you can't have confidence in future performance. You can only have confidence in what you've done. You know, and so if I look back on my past that I actually have written this book, then I have, then I can actually measure my past. I can say, oh, I've actually done this. That gives me confidence which then can initiate what I want to do next. And so you can only have confidence based on what you've done. And actually, when it comes to measuring progress, I can't measure future performance. I can't measure what I've done in the future. It doesn't exist. The only thing I can actually measure is what I've done. And so the gain is when you start actually measuring your progress and also start valuing your progress. And then from there you can do whatever you want. But now I'm playing a one player game. I'm no longer competing with you. I'm no longer worried about what the ideal is in the future because my ideals are going to keep changing. I'm just now measuring myself accurately against myself, which then enables me to have a lot more intrinsic motivation. It allows me to stop comparing and competing and really just actually playing my own game and saying, okay, this is the progress. I've made what I want to make now. And it really has no one else, no one else's opinion of my progress is relevant. Your opinion of my progress is irrelevant. The only person whose opinion of my progress that matters is me. But if I'm in the gap, I'm devaluing my own progress. I'm now saying it doesn't matter what I've accomplished because I didn't get that achievement.

B (5:04)

The best analogy is being in the desert and looking at the horizon and aiming for the horizon. It strikes such a chord, man, with pretty much all of the high achievers that I know of that they, they chase after a thing for forever and ever and ever. And then they finally get there. And the first thing that people ask them and that they talk about is, what are you gonna do next? What am I gonna do next? You're constantly moving the goalposts. It's kind of like, it's like being your own worst enemy. If that was the way that your friend spoke to you, if your friend said every time that you did something good, yeah, yeah, that's all right. But like this, this is really, that's the real shit. This is this. And then when you got the real shit, they said, yeah, but, but this, now this one that you want to tear the head off, you would not be friends with them anymore.

A (5:50)

No. And it's unrelenting. It's unrelenting. I mean, I'LL give an example, basic example. I launched my first book, Willpower Doesn't Work. And this is like the fulfillment of a dream of 10 years. I wanted to write this book, I end up growing this big audience. I get a book deal for multi six figures. I end up writing this book and it doesn't hit the New York Times bestseller list. And so now I frame it as a failure. Right. And so that's the gap. Right. I'm framing it against what it should have been or what ideally could have been. And so now I've just devalued all of this progress that I just made over the last 10 years, and now I feel like a failure because it wasn't what I thought it ideally should have been. And even with this recent launch, I mean, by all markers, by far the biggest launch ever, but I'm already in the gap thinking, well, I could have doubled it, you know, so, like, it's an unrelenting thing, unless you get into the gain and just measure yourself backwards. Literally, where am I now versus where was I before? That's all I need to do.

B (6:42)

Two elements there, the should and the could. That's. That's quite interesting as well, because those.

A (6:47)

Are all gap, should, would, could, or all gap.

B (6:49)

Yeah. And especially the could, because the could is, is it physically possible, if you're a high achiever, you're probably going to go for, I want to start a podcast, therefore I'm looking at Rogan or Lex Friedman or fucking call her Daddy or something. That's where I'm going to put myself out. But by its very nature, there's only one of those people in the world. There's only one number one, and everybody else is not number one. So if everyone on the planet tried to become number one, you're going to end up failing at that. You're always going to be dissatisfied. But I suppose a lot of people get addicted to the gap as a motivating factor because feelings of insufficiency can propel you forward to do hard things.

A (7:31)

Yeah, I mean, it is a good fuel for people who want to achieve or prove themselves. But at the end of the day, it will never satisfy the internal problem that it's fueling. And the internal problem it's fueling is, is that you're still trying to get to some place you think you need to get to in order to be worthy or, or, or whole or happy. And it's never going to get there. The gap won't go away. Like, let's just say you actually do create the biggest podcast. And now you're bigger than Rogan. Okay, cool. You just beat Rogan. Cool. Congrats. Now you're. Now you're. Now you're somebody. But that gap's now going to be 50 times bigger because now you're. Now you're measuring yourself against something else. And so it's not that achieving things is bad. It's that the gap is never going to actually fulfill the problem that it's trying to satisfy. And so having ideals is great. Having goals is great. I mean, my goals keep getting bigger and bigger. Being in the game doesn't shrink my ambition. It actually just enables me to know that the ambition isn't going to actually make me happy. I'm already happy. You don't actually set goals to be happy. You should set goals because you're already happy. Like, I'm not setting goals and trying to write these books in order to become a happy person. I'm doing it because I'm already stoked. And I just want to keep growing my own happiness. I'm not trying to, you know, fill some need that is an empty space within me.

B (8:55)

You know, what if people have an empty space? What if they. They don't feel like they're enough? Maybe they. They feel like there are certain things that they want to achieve in life or paths and failures that they haven't got past.

A (9:09)

They can, but being in the gap is never going to actually satisfy that. Like, let me give an example. My younger brother, Trevor, he's two years younger than me. You know, by external measures, people might consider him a failure. You know, he dropped out of high school, got kicked out of the military, and has gone job to job to job for the last 10 years. He does have an amazing daughter. But if he is looking at his own past and if he's feeling like a failure, and by the way, we can be in the gap about our past as well. If you're in the gap about your past, you're measuring against what it would have, should have been, right? Or against other people. And so there's nothing beneficial about going in the gap about your own past and saying, oh, it could have been something else. At some point, you've got to actually start seeing your own gains and creating gains and actually just running your own race. I'm all about people achieving goals, but. And there are things that people may really want to do. There's nothing wrong with wanting to do it, but if you feel like you need it in order to be successful, you're never gonna actually fill that need. You can want it. There's a big difference and a healthy difference between wanting and needing.

B (10:14)

How do you define that?

A (10:16)

Well, if you feel like you need something, first off, you have to justify it. And it's a lot healthier just to want something because you want it.

B (10:24)

You know, that's a huge justify the want as well. No, why do you want the podcast?

A (10:29)

You don't need it because you want it. You don't need to justify why you want to grow a podcast. You can just say, because I want to, because it sounds fun. I don't need to justify why I write books. It's because I want to. You know, you don't need to justify anything, but when you're in the gain, you can go and have what you want. And intrinsic motivation is about wanting, whereas, you know, extrinsic motivation means you feel like you need it to have something else. Right. And also in psychology, there's a difference between what's called harmonious passion and obsessive passion. Obsessive passion means that you feel like you need this thing, and if you can't have it, you're never gonna be happy. Whereas harmonious passion means you just do what you want. It's way more intrinsic. It's way healthier. I use in the book an example of a football player here in America. His name is. And this is American football, where they throw, throw like a weird oval shaped device. But this is Trevor Lawrence, and he talked about how he doesn't need football to be considered a healthy, happy person. He's like, if you took football away from me, I'd be fine. And so he's just saying, I don't need football, but I'm completely committed to it. Like, I love it, I'm completely committed, but I don't need it. And that's kind of a healthy detachment. Like in Buddhism, they would say, like, you know, if you feel like you're attached to something, then it owns you. You don't own it. And that's really what obsessive passion is, is where this thing owns you, and it's actually driving the ship. And that's not what goals are for. You own your goals, you own your future. You should decide, you know, you should be able to control it. But if you feel like it owns you, then you're the slave of your own goals. And that's. That's an unhealthy place to be.

B (11:59)

Why do you think we have a gap mentality? Where does it come from?

A (12:06)

It's definitely like less existent in kids. Kids are a lot more intrinsically motivated. Our arguments are a few aspects of society. One is so like the gap is where you're measuring yourself against some external reference point, right? So the public education system is one kind of aspect of this, right? So like we're in public education, you're given grades on tests, right? And you're measured against other people. And so the measuring stick or the, the reference point for your performance is given by, you know, external authorities and then you're measured against other people. So you're already taught to measure yourself against externals that are given by someone else. And you're also measuring yourself against other people from the get go. And so that's one aspect. And then once you get older and older, it's generally culture or society that gives you the reference points to measure yourself against social media, likes, amount of money you make. And so usually all of our reference points are externally driven generally by culture or by the upbringing we're given. And we never develop an internally referencing system where we just start measuring ourselves against ourselves and deciding what we want. What are the reference points that I care about that I want that have nothing to do with anyone else and where it's just you running your own race. And so that's kind of where I think being in the game starts. You is once I just start measuring myself against myself, don't really care about you, don't care about what your opinion is of my progress. I can be respectful of your progress, I can be pumped for your 10x jump, but my opinion of your jump doesn't really matter. What matters is your opinion of your own jump. And, and so just getting to the point where you're actually measuring your own progress and valuing your own progress and then from there deciding what you want to do from a wanting perspective rather than a needing perspective. What do I want to do because I want it and because I value it regardless of what anyone else thinks and without needing to justify why I want it to anyone else. That's actually what they would call self actualization or what they would call freedom. Freedom. 2 so like there's two levels of freedom psychologically. One is freedom from, which is where you free yourself from poverty. You free yourself from, you know, a bad toxic environment, you free yourself from ignorance. But the goal of freedom from is to give you a place of freedom too, which is where you, you're free to choose whatever you want. You, you're free to pursue what you want because you want it. And it takes a lot of courage to actually chase what you want because you want it. It's a lot easier to just focus on, you know, trying to. Trying to be successful to other people or, you know, doing what you think other people want you to do.

B (14:40)

Have you looked at status and how you think this relates to that? Because I had Will Storr on the show a couple of months ago and his new book, the Status Game, is fucking phenomenal. And he talks a lot about just how ingrained our comparisons between us, the mapping of keeping track of where we are within the dominance hierarchy. Have I. I'm moving up, he's moving down, so on and so forth. So it seems like there's an evolutionary compulsion, some sort of adaptive evolutionary compulsion for us to be in the gap. Because if without that, without that external comparison to the rest of the people, you would just like, let's say that you're an artist in 40,000 BC world on the Ethiopian plains somewhere, and no one gives a shit about art, but that's just what you do. You're stacking rocks up, you're dead, you're bottom of the pile because you don't contribute anything to the tribe. So there has to be an adaptive property of this, just no longer adaptive.

A (15:34)

I like what you're saying. I mean, one of the concepts. I've never read the book. I want to. I'm going to put it right on the reading list. What's it called? The Status Game.

B (15:41)

The Status Game, yeah. Yeah.

A (15:42)

Oh, my goodness, that sounds great. I'm definitely sticking that right on my list. One of the things that, you know, Dan, and Dan's the co author of this book and by the way, the originator of the concept. He came up with this idea 25 years ago because his coaching program, which is called Strategic Coach, is generally considered one of the highest end coaching programs for entrepreneurs in existence. And the only reason he created this concept in the first place was because he just found that didn't matter how much his clients were succeeding, they were all unhappy. And so this is more. I would argue this concept isn't initially designed to make you more successful. I would argue there's already a billion books on that subject and this book is not immediately optimized for that. This book is to help the high achiever who's already listening to this podcast learn to be happy along the way and to value their progress. But the byproduct is that once they get into the gain, it's kind of like you train your brain. Once you start seeing gains, creating more gains from your experience, which is another aspect of the gain. It's not just about measuring your progress, it's also about creating more gains, even from, for example, traumas and whatnot. Once you start creating more gains and training your brain to see more gains, you'll actually start becoming enormously more successful. But it's without that weird psychological need that we're talking about, where you're needing to get there or you feel like you should get there, where you're comparing or you're measuring against anyone else so it becomes a lot healthier and you completely be free of all of that. But one of the. Just back to the status concept. One of the. And this may or may not be relevant, but one of the things I've always learned from Dan is he said you should seek growth, not status. Because if you're seeking status, you might not actually grow. Or if once you achieve that status, it might plummet your growth. So if my whole ambition is to reach some status. New York Times bestseller, millionaire billionaire. Once you reach the status, if you reach it, the growth, there's no guarantee that seeking status will actually lead to growth. But if you're just genuinely seeking growth, chances are you'll accumulate a lot of status. But it isn't necessarily what you were going for in the first place. I could get all the status in the world, but if it's my goal, there's no guarantee I'm actually growing as a human being. But if my goal is actually growth, it's not that hard to get status.

B (18:09)

When it comes to the high achievers. You have to ask yourself a question of what's the fucking point of being this successful if I'm not happy? Like, what's the point? But presumably I ask myself this all the time. This is another. We're mutual friends with Greg McKeown, and, you know, there's echoes of essentialism, I think, in the gap in the gain. Talking about removing the stuff that doesn't matter why you're doing the things that you're doing, what are your points of highest contribution? Is it intrinsic, is it extrinsic, so on and so forth.

A (18:37)

But.

B (18:40)

What is the point of achieving all of this success that you're chasing after if you're miserable along the way? Presumably the point of getting the success of being successful to you in your mind is that it's going to make you happy. Now, if happiness is there for you in the moment, why go through all of the rigmarole of having to wait until you do this thing if you're Climbing up a mountain, 99% of the journey is you going up, and only 1% is you standing on the top. And then as soon as you do that, you decide, well, yeah, but there's another mountain there that I've got to go after. There has to be a shortcut to this. I'm aware that the hedonic fucking treadmill is a hell of a drug, and we're wired to play status games and compare ourselves against others, and it's a motivating force and all of these things, but, man, if someone who isn't me yet can master the ability to just take pleasure right now in the things that you're doing and genuinely be able to look at, did I give a good enough. Not even my best, did I give a good enough solution for me to feel like I'm happy today? Yes. Right, well, fucking be happy then. Like, you don't need to wait for something to happen. You don't have to wait to record the perfect podcast or to have the perfect sales call or release the perfect online course or get the perfect book, because you're never going to get that. That is the horizon that continues to move away.

A (20:04)

Yeah. And our argument is happiness is really how you measure if you set a goal. I could set the goal that I wanted to write this book, and let's just say I'm halfway through writing it, even though the book's not actually finished. I can measure back and say, because I'm in the middle of writing a book and of course I want to finish the book. I'm committed to finishing the book I'm writing right now, but I'm in the messy of the middle. Right. I'm halfway up the mountain. I guess you could say now I could be mad at myself right now, like the current Benjamin Hardy that you're talking about. I can be miserable because the book's not done, and I can believe in my mind that once I actually finish the book, then Benjamin Hardy will be finally happy. I can give myself permission once the book is done, obviously, knowing that now I've got to go out and do a million other things if that's the game I'm going to play. Or I can actually just measure myself backwards and say, you know what? Where am I right now versus where I was when I started writing the book. Well, I've got 40,000 words and it's pretty cool. And I've changed a lot of my belief systems even going through it. And so if I just start measuring myself backwards and seeing my progress, I Can be happy in that if that's the game I'd rather play. And that's a much healthier, happier game. It doesn't stop me from wanting to finish the book. It's not. But I actually get to love my progress along the way and increase the value. My current position doesn't change. Your current position doesn't change if you measure yourself against your moving ideal or if you measure yourself against your former self. Your. Your position doesn't change. How you feel about. Your position fundamentally changes. And one is a bomb.

B (21:30)

That's such a bomb insight, man.

A (21:31)

That's really it. That's it. Like, your current position doesn't change if you're measuring yourself in the gap or the gain, but how you feel about your current position fundamentally changes. And if you feel better, if you feel the gains, and if you feel the progress, and if you're no longer on the rat race or the treadmill of trying to get to the next thing, if you're like, this is my game. This is where I'm at. I can see my progress. I'm loving my progress. This is where I'm going. I know that five more steps up the mountain, I'm still not going to be there, but I'm going to be further than I am right now. And I can then measure those gains. And this is the gains that I want to have. This is the progress I want to make because this is what I'm motivated towards. This is the, you know, this is a mountain I'm choosing to climb. It has nothing to do with your mountain or anyone else's opinion of what mountain I should climb. This is the mountain I'm choosing to climb. And every step forward, I'm going to measure my gains and be in the gain, and I'm going to let my gains propel me rather than the gap. Kind of, you know, whatever. It's just a. It's just a different experience. And so if people, you know, wherever a person is, they can either devalue that current position by measuring it in a gap, whatever the gap is, against someone else, against, you know, what society's opinion is, or even though. Yeah, ideal. Yeah. Or they can take their current position and up level it by framing themselves in the gain. And you can do this on a daily basis as well. Let's just say my goal today was to hit 5,000 words in my book and I only hit 2,000. Do I want to be in the gap about today and say today was a failure because I only wrote 2,000 words when my goal was five. And so therefore today was a failure. I'm upset about it. I'm going to just, you know, today was a lost day, I'm a loser. Or do I want to actually create gains and say, okay, I got 2,000 words, but what else did I learn today? In other words, you can contextualize anything however you want, but it does zero good for you to contextualize today as a, as a failure. It does nothing for your confidence. You get no benefits from it. You're actually literally just devaluing your own experience. Why devalue your past? Why not inflate the value of your past? Because you're the only person who has access to your past. I'm the only person who has access to Benjamin Hardy's experiences. I can either flush them down the toilet and be mad at them because they're not what I thought they should be, or I can increase the value of my experience and learn from them. I can create gains from them. And that's really like how you create post traumatic growth. Something rough happens. And if you're in the gap, you're saying, why did this happen? I'm worse off now because it happened. Post traumatic growth is when you take an experience, it's rough and you increase the value of it. What are all the things I learned from this? How can I be better because of this? My current self, because this happened, is actually better and further and stronger and more antifragile than my former self. Therefore I'm glad it happened. That's being in the gain that's turning any experience into a gain.

B (24:02)

How should people measure or define their success criteria then?

A (24:07)

Basically you got to create your own success criteria. What does success mean to you? You're the only person who, the more developed you become as a person, the more you define what success means to you. My value system is going to be different from your value system. And as you grow and mature, at some point you got to create your own value system. You can obviously pull it from different sources.

B (24:26)

What do you mean in a value system?

A (24:29)

Value system is how you're measuring yourself. You know, you, you create goals from a value system. You create success criteria from a value system you know, and so you know and you can turn a value system into specific measurables, which you can do. But at some point you need to define what success means for yourself. And your, your definition of success is going to be different from mine. Your view of your future self is different from mine. And so you got to ask yourself what matters to Me. That's kind of. It does kind of track back to essentialism. Like, you can't go for essential if you can't define what's essential to you. And so you've got to actually define what matters to me and then create a success criteria around that.

B (25:09)

So this is what's important to me. These are my values. These are the things that I value within myself and around me. From that, you try to create goals and projects.

A (25:19)

Well, there's principles and projects. You know, There are principles you can live by, right? One of them could be essentialism. That's a principle. That's an idea. And you can. You can measure yourself on how essential you're living. Right? That's a. That's an. That's a principle if you believe in it, and if you like it, you can measure yourself against that if that's within your value. Or it can be goals, you know, and it's a lot easier to measure yourself either against a principle or a measurable target than just an abstract ideal. So, like, I can create success criteria for a specific project or even for myself in 2020, you know, 2022. Like, I can. I can create success criteria and I can say, you know, in order for this to be a success for me, it's gotta. It's gotta be a certain way. It's gotta, you know, it's gotta sell a certain number of copies, et cetera. I can create my own success criteria. Right. And the more clear you are on what success means, the more you actually can move forward towards a clear path. Most people, they're not very measured in their future because they're measuring themselves against ideals. And they're not very measured in their past, because they're not. Most people just don't track their gains, honestly. Yeah.

B (26:23)

What does the view you have of your future is the thing driving your present mean?

A (26:30)

That's a great. That's a great concept. That's basically prospection in psychology. So prospection is the idea, and this is one of the biggest unearthings of positive psychology in the last probably 20 years is psychology as a discipline believed that we were actually driven by our past. Now, there's a lot of distinctions here, so I'll break it down. What we're really driven by is our view of our future. Now, this is different from being in the gap. The gap is about measuring yourself against the future, thinking, I need to be there, and because I'm not there, I'm a loser. The gain is where you measure yourself against your past. But the truth is we are driven by our future self. So you, whatever your goal, you know, you were driven by a future that landed you to this point, right? You had a future self, even if it was undefined or defined, however defined you got it. And that's what landed you to this moment. And you now have a future that's driving you. And I have a future that's driving me. And this is in big and small ways. In philosophy they call it teleology. Basically, teleology means that all behavior is driven by an end. You know, Aristotle called it final cause. So like the way that this book became a reality was that there was some end. And that drove me to finishing the pages, right? You know, even me, like even us getting onto this podcast. There was a scheduled appointment that led us to having this call, you know, and at some point you're gonna go have dinner and so you're being driven by the next thing. And what's interesting, and Robert Greene actually hits this really hard in the 50th law, but this is really true, is that. And also there's a lot of research on this in positive psychology. Hal Hirschfeld. The sad part for most people is that they're driven by an almost immediate future. There's immediate needs, there's things pushing up against us, paying the bills or just getting to the next thing. And most people never transcend that and start thinking like 10, 15, 20 years into the future and start thinking about a much bigger future to chase and be driven by. So most people are just dealing with immediate battles and so they're being driven by a very short term future, but we're all being driven by the future. That's what prospection is, the idea of prospection.

B (28:38)

What's the problem with being driven by a short term future?

A (28:42)

Well, there's nothing wrong with urgency or immediate goals, but if that's all you have, then you're just actually on the rat race going nowhere. It's a lot of movement but no progress. Right.

B (28:54)

Um, do you have more motivation people? There's some experiments that have been done around people's motivation levels or happiness when they've got a broader longer term life plan.

A (29:06)

Well, yeah, definitely. So bigger goals certainly are more motivating than small goals. But also when it comes to the future self research, the quality of your decisions in the present are directly impacted by your connection and commitment to a longer term future self. So like, let's just say a future self 20 years from now, if you're connected to that, if you're committed to that if you're clear on that, you're going to make different decisions than if you were only committed to whatever is just flashing in your face, the next fire to put out or just getting to work or to paying the bills. If you have a longer out future, then you're going to probably make very different decisions because the goal always determines the process. Whatever future self you're most thinking about or committed to is the thing driving your behavior the most. Yeah, longer term objectives or investments certainly yield a lot longer term happiness and also better outcomes. If your goal is only just to pay the bills, you're not going to be able to do something big enough that's going to lead to something great enough. So having bigger goals and having a longer term future leads to more satisfying results. Endgame.

B (30:10)

Well, I suppose what you're doing with a large goal or a longer term goal, what you're trying to achieve, something that takes a lot of time by virtue of it taking a lot of time to compound, presumably it's going to be quite big and impressive, which means that you're going to take small steps, but very small important steps strategically to get along there. So James Clear says each action that you take is a vote for the future type of person that you want to be. So if you want to be someone in 5 years time who is able to do an iron man, you are going to do things today. You might not be able to do the Ironman for four and a half years, you might only reach that point. But if that's the goal that you're trying to move toward, you're going to do conditioning pieces today and tomorrow and the day after. Whereas what's the best sort of goal that you can reach in terms of your endurance? If your timeline is only two months or one month, you think, oh well, I'll set my sights quite low. And it's not very grand. It doesn't excite us the same way.

A (31:06)

Yeah. So here's a great quote from Robert Greene's the 50th law. And the only reason I share this is because this is the book I'm currently reading, which if you haven't read, I think it's pretty cool. So he says this. By our nature as rational, conscious creatures, we cannot help but think of the future. But most people, out of fear, limit their view of the future to a narrow range. Thoughts of tomorrow a few weeks ahead, perhaps a vague plan for the months to come. We are generally dealing with so many immediate battles that it is hard for us to lift our gaze above the moment. It is a law of power, however, that the further and deeper we contemplate the future, the greater our capacity to shape it to our desires. So, yeah, I mean, what's interesting, you know, going back to Hal Hirschfield, Hal Hirschfeld being a UCLA psychologist, is his view is that human beings haven't evolved to think 20, 30, 40 years into the future. Know, like if you were a hunter gatherer, you were mostly just like trying to gather food for the week or for the month. Like, right. You weren't planning for retirement. Right. Like you weren't thinking, where do I want to be in 20 or 30 years? Like you were trying to survive the week. Right. And so most people are not connected or clear on where they want to be in 20, 30 years from now and they're not planting big enough seeds, you know, and then, then. And there's a great quote that basically says time will either promote you or expose you. Right. Like if you're not actually planning towards a bigger future and using that to direct a daily process towards big term goals, the future is going to expose you. Your future self is going to be way less than it could have been. Like, you know what I mean? And so time will promote you like crazy if you're investing daily towards bigger and bigger goals. And every action you take, kind of back to James Clear's concept, he calls it a vote towards the person you want to become. I call it an investment towards the person you're becoming. Because everything you invest in becomes, you know, it compounds over time. Whatever you invest in grows. And so every action you take towards your future self intentionally is an investment that's compounding massively. And you can compound some crap, you know, you can compound weeds in the garden essentially, which is just, you know, every day you jump on social media and just kick it like you're investing. And there's, you know, everything bears fruit, so it's going to be good fruit or bad fruit, I suppose as well.

B (33:32)

When you want to do something that's hard in the moment, the big broader goal is more inspiring because it's so much further away because you want to do the Ironman or you want to hit a million dollars or you want to find and start a family or whatever because you have such a grand goal, it gives you more justification and motivation in the moment. Like you're going to be more motivated to do something that's huge than you are to do something that's small. And then you can break that down.

A (33:57)

Yeah, I mean, how I look at it Is small visions aren't that motivating. Bigger visions are motivating, but when it comes to the actions on the daily basis. So like big vision, but small steps, you know, it's kind of like tiny habits or atomic habits. Like if I have a big goal of one day selling millions and millions of books and having this amazing lifestyle with my family, like that's a great vision that's driving me forward. But if I actually want to accomplish it on a daily basis, I actually need smaller goals. Again, back to the idea of me trying to write 5,000 words. If that actually was my goal, chances are it would be too big of an elephant to try to bite in one day and I might just justify not doing it. So when it comes to actually behavior, you actually want to have smaller goals on a daily basis that give you commitment and momentum, you know. So if my goal is actually just to write 200 words today, I know I can commit to that. And if I do it, chances are I'll get so much momentum I'll write 500 or 1000 or 2000. But at least that day I made an investment in my future self. Whereas most people on a daily basis, they're not actually making progress either. Because most people actually, their vision is fundamentally smaller than it could be. I'm talking their long term future self. We all have caps on our future self. But there's a great quote from Dan Sullivan. He said that the only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger. And that really tracks directly to prospection that we're all driven by whatever view we have of our future. And the level of engagement you have towards your present is based on the commitment and excitement you have towards the future. But then on a daily, you want to make it very doable on the daily.

B (35:35)

So most people have probably got that inverted that the long term vision that they're looking for is too small and the daily vision that they're trying to achieve is too large.

A (35:44)

Fundamentally. Yeah. And so it crushes motivation on both manners because their big picture vision isn't compelling and their daily vision is too big. And so on a daily basis they set themselves for failure and then they frame it in the gap anyways. And so now they've framed today as a loss or they just procrastinated it because it was too big. And where it's taking them in the long run isn't that compelling anyways. That is the inversion. It is the inversion.

B (36:09)

It's a recipe for disaster. Jesus.

A (36:10)

It is. It is. But think about it. If you have doable daily goals and you just did it and you measure in the gain and you're like, you're, you're stoked on it and you also are tracking towards a massive mountain that you're loving and that the mountain will keep getting bigger, there's nothing wrong with your ideals growing, by the way. There's nothing wrong with that. We just invite you to actually measure yourselves against the gain rather than the gap. There's nothing wrong with having a massive future self and also then to quantify it and give yourself specific success criteria along the way. But yeah, I mean, if you can just. If you knocked out some aspects of your big goals today and framed it in the gain, and then you did the same thing tomorrow and the next day and the next day, and you do it for the next 2, 3, 5, 10 years, it's compounding. The challenge for most people is that the long term is too small and now they're trying to make up for it and justify. So they try to do too much and it ends up leading to a lot of bad days, but also a lot of framed days in the gap, so then just makes them unhappy.

B (37:10)

I quite like the gap in the gain concept. I first heard you tease it on Greg's show like a year ago or six months ago or something. And I've had it in my head since then. But people have got heavily habituated framing of situations. Have you got any habits or triggers to notice when people fall into the gap?

A (37:28)

If you are in the. If you feel bad in any way, seriously, literally, if you feel negative in any way towards yourself, towards someone, toward a situation, it's because you're framing it against an ideal. I'm serious. It's very physical. It's very biological. If I am unhappy about today in any way, or if I'm unhappy about my wife, or if I'm unhappy about my kids or I'm unhappy about my team, any form of unhappiness means I'm measuring it against some ideal. Seriously, like, and so, I mean, a lot of times the. So, like, one of my favorite quotes is, you never see the outside world. You only see your own reaction to it, right? You never see the outside world, you only see your own reaction to it, right? So, for example, my kid is throwing a tantrum and now I'm upset. The only thing I see is my reaction. I could see that tantrum from a totally different perspective. I could try to understand what's really going on here, why, you know, like, I don't have to be upset, but whatever reaction I have is what I see. I could choose instead to have empathy. Right? And so if you're, if, if you're not liking something, it's because you're measuring it incorrectly. You've contextualized it against some ideal or something like that. And so the way out is honestly just practicing being in the game. You know, like from a motivation standpoint, you're either approaching or you're avoiding. It's a lot easier to approach what you want than to avoid what you don't like. As an example, addiction. Like, I could spend all my time trying to avoid addiction, or I could just clarify my goals and start making small wins towards what I want. Right? It's a lot better to approach what you want. So when it comes to the gain, it's a lot better. I mean, you want to be very aware of the gap because it'll get you. It gets, it catches us all, you know? You know, and if you're just unhappy about something, it's because you're probably in the gap about it. You know, I can go in the gap about my kid and be upset that he's not doing better in his school, or I can just look at that same person and say, yeah, but how's he doing against where he was last year or against where he was last week? You know, and so you can just jump into the gain. I mean, we actually break down some tiny habit recipes from BJ Fogg in the book about practicing. It's like, you know, as an example, every time, you know, you go in the gap and feel like you're failing miserably as a person, actually just pull out your journal and write down 3 gains from the last day or 3 gains from the last week or 3 gains from the last month. Like, actually practice measuring yourself backwards on a regular basis. One of the things. So you want to just actually practice being in the gain. And you can do it in different styles. Like one is if you want to just literally sit down and actually have a journaling session where you literally just sit down and you write down different timeframes. Where am I versus where I was 10 years ago. And you can take time to actually think about it. Gains don't just have to be external accomplishments. They could actually be changes in how you see the world. You know, my former self wasn't an entrepreneur. I didn't apply mental models like who, not how. You know, I was making 10x or less, you know, 10x less money than I am now. So, like I can. I had different beliefs about money, I had different beliefs about people. Like, I can go back and look at my gains in my belief system and my experiences, but also in my situation and, you know, and in fundamental external accomplishments. I can do that for five years. I could do that for one year. I could do that for five months. You can do that for a week, you know, and you get to do it. You actually get to frame not only the meaning of your past experiences, but what you got out of that experience. And so if I just look back on where I was a week ago, most people, you know, probably haven't thought about it. Where were you a week ago versus where you are now? But the truth is you're actually in a different place. You actually have gone through experiences and now you get to go through and organize what those experiences actually mean. So I can actually just think, where actually was I a week ago? What the heck happened over the last week? What did I learn over the last week? How am I different than I was a week ago? What are some of the important experiences that I had that are evidences that I'm actually moving towards my future self, you know, and I can do that on a daily basis too, you know, and so you can just practice being in the game. And so one just last thought on this is I would invite you. You know, we actually have a full chapter on this. Chapter five in the book is all about the last day, the last hour of your day. Put your phone on airplane mode because obviously you don't want to train reactivity. Pull out your journal and just write down three wins for the day. It doesn't matter if they were the three wins you were going for. Seriously, you might have had three goals for the day and you missed them all. But what are three wins you did get? What are three forms of progress you did make? What are three things that did that did happen that can be considered gains? And then choose the three for tomorrow. And you just get in this habit of always winning. I'm always in a habit of today was a gain. Even if it didn't go exactly how I planned, I. It was a gain. I'm further along than I was before. I'm better than I was before, and what do I want to get tomorrow? And just trains you to just create gain. So I think that that's just a healthy habit to be into.

B (42:18)

Yeah, one of the things that I think is going to be a challenge to people or that is a big difference to how most people live their lives if they don't embed themselves in organizational psychology is that they need to take time away from the urgent with this. If you're constantly putting out fires and doing things and remaining busy and answering emails quickly and replying on social media, there's two main strategies that we're talking about. One of them is to do with your vision, moving forward, your vision of a future and how you're framing that. And the second one is a reflection of you in the past. The vast, vast, vast majority of people don't do either of those things. They haven't formalized their values. They don't know what their goals are growing out of. Their goals that are written down, are very sorry that they have, are written, not written down in a very loose and kind of ephemeral and nebulous. And they're over there and it's cloudy. And then reflection doesn't really occur in a formal way. It's the reflection is resentment or chips on their shoulder about things that coulda, woulda should have happened in the past.

A (43:16)

Gap.

B (43:17)

Yeah. So neither of these things, neither of the two most important things are all that common. We're being fire hosed with fucking information and jobs and jobs to do every single day. And that's stopping us from doing what sounds like two of the most important tasks that we have to do. Planning where we want to be in the future and reflecting on what we've achieved in the past.

A (43:41)

You know, it's that simple. I mean, you know, in you hear about how you should ignore the past and the future and only be in the present. But from a psychological standpoint, it's fundamentally impossible. Your experience in the present is based on how you feel about your past and how you feel about your future. You know, like, and also as we've talked about, your present is literally being driven by where you want to go in the future. But it's also about how you feel about your past. And a positive psychology in the present is based on having a positive past and a compelling future. But the past being positive was based on how you framed it, how you measured it, how you defined it. I could have objectively the same experience. My father, as an example, was a drug addict. I could have gotten in a car accident last week. My business could have failed last week. But how I frame my past is up to me. Am I in the gap or the game? Right? Like, it does not matter what happened, it matters how I frame and measure it. Am I further along than I was before? Am I better than I was before? Have I learned More than I knew before and am I advancing? You know, and also do I get to change? You know, define the meaning of it? So yeah, what you're describing is essential. I mean we do need a clear future that's driving us, that's exciting and that we want to, we want to have. And being in the gain means you're, you're quantifying and measuring your past in a way that makes it valuable and measurable and useful. And what's great about it is you can, you can keep expanding your experience, you know, like I'm talking about like your own experiences. Like you have experiences, right? You can keep going back to the same experience over and over and over again and getting more and more gold out of that and also continuing to expand what it means just back to me, me growing up in a sing, my dad being a drug addict. I get to go back as the 33 year old version of this and think about that experience and learn from that experience and redefine what it means and redefine all the good that came from that and also the challenges that allowed me to grow. And then in 10 years from now, the 43 year old version of me can go back to that same experience and continue to learn from it, keep evolving that experience, keep. And so your experiences can either happen to you or you can happen to your experiences if you're happy. If your experiences happen to you, that means that you're the passenger of whatever happens to you got in a car accident, you're unhappy, or you can happen to your experiences and you can actually shape what the experience means, the value of the experiences, all that you learn from it, what you can do because of it, what you're going to avoid now because of it, you know, you get to, you know, and that's how you learn. So what's interesting is the gap and the gain, aside from being a measuring model, is actually a learning model. Like how much can I learn from this experience? How much do you juice can I squeeze out of it? If I'm in the gap about an experience, I've just devalued it and I'm avoiding it and I don't want to deal with it. And it was just an experience that shouldn't have happened and therefore I got nothing out of it. I'm just worse off because it happened. But it's your choice what you do with your experiences. You can either be in the gap where you measure them against something else, or you can transform them where you keep getting more and more out of them and keep getting better as a result. It's totally just your choice what you do with your own past. Your past is a fiction, by the way. Just as your future is a fiction. Your past is a fiction. What do you mean you make it up? Literally. You're the one making up what your past means. You're the one making up the story of it. I can. You know I can. You're the one who's making it up along the way.

B (46:59)

If someone's recalling what happened accurately in.

A (47:02)

Their own mind, yeah, they can recall the experience, but all of the emotions, the energy and the meanings are going to be their own doing those things that goes back to. It's not what happens, it's your reaction to it.

B (47:17)

Why? That's the Marcus Aurelius quote, isn't it? The universe itself is change and life is but what we deem it. Life itself is but what we deem it.

A (47:27)

And that that is your past.

B (47:31)

What about if someone's had a situation that's caused them a fair bit of trauma in the past, or they've got something that they're hung up on, the way that they were treated in school, or, you know, it could be a longer term the way that they were treated by their parents and stuff like that. What are some of the triggers for people to transform those sort of difficult experiences into gains?

A (47:50)

100. I will say that the only way you can move forward and for it to cease being a trauma is once you actually have framed it as a gain. You, it will be a trauma until you see it genuinely as a gain, that you're glad it happened and that it actually is something that made you better as a result. So as far as kind of, you know, getting practical, this slightly goes back to approach versus avoid, right? If you're avoiding it, then you're not going to be able to transform it. The only way to transform something is to approach it first place. And probably the safest place is definitely a journal, right? Doing it by yourself. Unless you feel like you want someone to just guide you through it. You can go to a therapist or a friend, but at some point you have to approach the experience and unleash it, right? But you can do it. There's, there's, there's literally prompts we take people through in the book. But one is, is just what is the experience itself? What happened? What about the experience actually is something you can use, right? What is something you can gain from this experience? What is something you can learn from it that you didn't know before? What's something now that you. How does it clarify for you what you want in the future? What is. How does it clarify what you don't want in the future? What else can you have learned from this experience? A lot of it. Going back and reframing experiences is a lot like drafting a book. You know, I could. I could spend five minutes. You don't have to spend five hours on this. You could spend five minutes, just address an experience and say, what happened? What did I. You know, what. What. What did this teach me about life? Or what did this teach me about what I don't want? What are two or three lessons that I could get from this that can help me in the future so that I can avoid that from happening again or so that I can be better as a result? Draft one, boom, I can do it again in a week. And you can just keep updating the meaning of the experience, Keep updating the lessons, keep getting more out of it. But in psychology, we call this deliberate rumination. So there's obtrusive rumination, which is when you're avoiding an experience, and all of a sudden, at some point, just some random thought triggers you, and now you're just filling in the dumps because I just got reminded why life sucks. Deliberate rumination is when you sit down and you look at an experience, you frame it. And what a lot of the research shows is that it's very helpful to apply gratitude to it. Proactive gratitude. Like, I can proactively be grateful for this conversation, but I still need to be proactive about it. I could be grateful and stuff. And so you can proact. You can apply proactive gratitude even to that experience. I'm grateful for what I went through as a teen when my dad went through all of his trauma and his addiction. I'm grateful that I went through that. Like, I can directly apply gratitude to the experience and gratitude for what it led to and for gratitude. And so you. You got. You have to be conscious about gratitude. A lot of people think that gratitude only can occur because something you wanted to happen occurred or because something good happened. You can apply gratitude to anything, and you want to do that with. With experiences and transforming experiences.

B (50:44)

How can people protect themselves from complacency when putting themselves in the gap? I know that you're saying that you.

A (50:51)

Mean putting yourself in the game.

B (50:52)

Putting yourself in the game. Yes. Sorry.

A (50:56)

It's such a good question, and it's really the most immediate question that most people who don't apply this ask. No, I'm serious. And it's nothing against you. It's literally when a high achiever and this book is literally driven towards high achievers, which I know that anyone listening to your channel is someone who's ambitious. The first question is, my edge comes because I've got a chip on my shoulder or my edge comes because I'm trying to get to this next level. Being in the game doesn't blunt your edge. Me measuring myself against my former self and actually just saying. In the last year and a half, I've published three books. We've sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I've had three, had my last kid. Here's all the ways in which I've gained and all the progress I've made. Here's all my growth again. Confidence is the byproduct of past performance. Confidence is actually the thing that helps your imagination think bigger thoughts. The more you actually live this, the bigger your ambitions are going to get because you're actually going to see your progress and you're going to value it and that's going to actually give you a much firmer belief of what you can do. Chances are the high achiever listening to this is actually back to the few of future self. Their future self is actually probably smaller than it could be if they were in the gain. If you're in the gain, you're actually like, holy crap, look how far I've come. What could I do next? Literally, I mean, even just thinking about you, you've 10x your podcast. If you actually valued that and really took it seriously, you're in a fundamentally different place than your former self. You're far more capable than your former self. You're far more connected than your former self. You have a fundamentally different mental model and way of operating. You can way beyond what your former self did if you take seriously what got you here. So it doesn't really blunt your edge. It's weird. The only thing it blunts is the. Is the kind of the number one. It blunts you having any really opinions or worries about what anyone outside of you thinks about your progress. It frees you from that where it's like, you know me in this conversation. If I hop off this podcast and then go into the gap, I'm like, dang, I really didn't explain myself really good. You know, like, you know, I start thinking about all the things I could have done better with this conversation. That's me worrying about other people, right? That's me worrying about if I'm in the gain. I'm just thinking about what did I learn from that? Or what did I get out of that? You know, so it frees you from that. It also just frees you from thinking you need that thing in order to be somewhere. You don't need it, no one needs it. You can have it if you want it. If Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, he can go to Mars. But if he thinks he needs it because he's trying to fill some internal need, he's never going to get there. He might accomplish Mars, but he never actually got what he wanted. Mars is just a means to some internal end for him.

B (53:48)

I think the interesting thing here is how society and culture put success on such a pedestal that success can come at any cost, and success still gets applauded. So Eddie hall is a good example of this World's Strongest Man a few years ago, British guy, and he says that he would have been divorced without access to his children and maybe dead if he hadn't won the World's Strongest man the year that he did. Because he was 6 foot 3 and 200 and something kilos, probably on all manner of performance enhancing drugs, spending no time with his wife, being short with his kids, his life would have been wrecked. And yet, because he won World's Strongest man and then decided to take a step back and now he's a great father and blah, blah, blah, people still want to put his success on a pedestal. They're prepared for someone to essentially completely annihilate their entire life in pursuit of one particular goal. And because we look at his life within this very narrow domain of competence, within. Was he good at being World's Strongest Man? Well, yeah, he became it briefly. But if we take a broader view, a more holistic view, which we can only do internally, we can't take a broader holistic view of someone else's life because we don't know phenomenologically just how much misery he would have been in to have known that his wife didn't really like him and known that his kids were sad because dad was being short with them. If you take that full holistic view of your own life, the shortcut should be, what is the thing that I can do that will give me the most satisfaction and happiness today in the moment? And again, I'm watching that Michael Jordan documentary, the Last Dance. My housemate put it on again last night and I'd seen it before and I started watching it again.

A (55:28)

I love it. I love that documentary.

B (55:30)

It's so fun, so sick. But even with that, there's there's elements and echoes of some of the ways that Michael was. Was motivated that are. They are romantic. You know, we do put those things up on a pedestal. Someone tells him that he can't do a thing or whatever, and he uses that motivation to fuel him. But you don't know how. Well, you don't know the price that Michael Jordan had to pay to be Michael Jordan. You don't know the psychological turmoil that he went through in some of those situations. How much gap versus how much gain he was actually playing with.

A (56:07)

Yeah, and I think that. I think, you know, obviously Michael Jordan is an incredible athlete. Example. And again, back to. Again, the value of this conversation, it's not necessarily to help people become more successful. I think if Michael's in the game about his own past, he's happy. If he's in the gap about his own past, it doesn't matter if he got eight rings right. It's literally between Michael and himself. It's between you and yourself. It's not about. It's not between you and Michael. Literally. It hasn't you. And you have nothing to do with Michael Jordan's progress. And so, like, yeah, you can be motivated by Michael Jordan and there's nothing wrong with being motivated by outside forces. Um, but the real value of this conversation is how do you feel about yourself? You know, if you're. If your happiness is tied to the future, you're never gonna get there. That's just. Kind of.

B (57:06)

Well, the other point man, that we keep coming back to is what's the fucking point of success if it doesn't make you happy? What is the actual point of doing all of this stuff if the end goal of that is immiseration between. Now, here's a genuine question that I've got in my head. Would I rather be unsuccessful by the standards of myself now or society and happy or successful and miserable? Would I rather be unsuccessful and happy or successful and miserable? And I'm aware that it's not a binary choice. I'm aware that you can actually be successful and happy.

A (57:40)

Well, here's what's interesting. Derek Sivers actually gave a really good example of this. So Derek Sivers was on a, you know, on a Tim Ferriss podcast a long time ago, and he was talking about, you know, one of the prototypical questions that Tim would ask people is who are three people you consider to be the most? Who are the people you consider to be successful? Right. I don't know if you heard this conversation or even just who's the number one person you consider to be successful. And what Derek did was, this was really interesting, but it tracks exactly what we're saying he said. You know, the initial gut response would be someone like a Richard Branson, right? Someone who's externally successful. But what if Richard Branson's goal was not actually to be a successful entrepreneur? What if his true dream would have been to be a painter? And in reality, he started all these businesses as kind of a form of escape from his real goal? Kind of like back to Pressfield, talking about resistance, you know what I mean? If we knew that Richard Branson's true dream was to be a painter, what Saver said was we could never consider him a success because he wasn't being true to the person he really wanted to be. It doesn't matter all that he accomplished if he wasn't actually being what mattered most to him, right? And so that kind of goes back to, like, it really doesn't matter all of the things I do if what I really want is something else. If I would, I, deep in my soul, want to be something else. It doesn't matter what that is in anyone else's estimations of success or in society's measures of success. But if I measure, if I achieve all of those measures of external success according to society, and I'm still not being who I truly want to be, I don't know if you could consider yourself a success, right? Like, it doesn't matter what you accomplished, if it wasn't what you genuinely wanted to do or believed in for yourself. It doesn't matter all of the externals. You know, I could write 50 more books, but if it's not what I actually really want or believe in, it doesn't matter. Like, none of it really matters. You know what I mean? Like, at least for me, I couldn't consider myself a success unless I'm being true to what I value, what I believe in. But also, if I'm measuring myself correctly, which is just against my former self and against my own self, there's really no one else. There's no one else that Ben Hardy is competing against. Like, literally, we're all playing our own game, like it has nothing to do with anyone else.

B (60:02)

Ben Hardy, ladies and gentlemen. People want to check out your stuff and keep up to date with what you're doing. Where should they go?

A (60:09)

Just benjaminhari.com it's kind of just an update on books I'm writing, stuff like that.

B (60:14)

Gap in the game will be linked in the show notes below. And you Got another one out next year as well.

A (60:20)

Two next year. We got be serious.

B (60:22)

Yeah, Serious workload.

A (60:24)

Yeah. But all my ambitions blunted because I'm in the game, man. I'm just kidding. Yeah. So next year we have be your future self now, which comes out in May. And then the next Dan Sullivan book in the is called 10x is easier than 2x, which is true, but we, but by the way, we decided not to write that book first because there's no reason to help people go 10x if they're going to stay in the gap the whole way. You know, why, why help someone 10x their income or their podcast or whatever if they're going to just measure in the gap like there's no point. And so we were very deliberate to write the gap in the gain before 10x just because if someone's in the gap, there's really no, there's no value in encouraging someone to go 10x if they're going to stay in the gap. About it.

B (61:06)

I love it, man. Until next time, brother. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

A (61:29)

So I.

B (61:29)

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