Anyone hoping to achieve something is chasing a goal. Whether you want to become an internet marketer, top of your class, first in a race, or a top executive you have something ahead of you that you are aiming at. It’s difficult to imagine how we could reach our goals if we don’t plan a path to follow and have an image of what sucess would be like.
It seems the most natural approach. After all this is how we’ve met targets from a very early age. From wanting to ride a bicycle to getting a good score in a school test to enjoying a birthday party, we’ve all imagined what it would be like to reach a target and experience success. This is how we’ve been trained to look at ourselves.
Yet this way of aiming at distant targets also holds the potential for discouragement and feelings of failure.
Learning How To Avoid The Gap by Dan Sullivan addresses the common pitfall that so many with aspirations fall into. In aiming for a distant target we set up an ideal picture of success in our imaginations.
However this ideal is often like the horizon – it’s a mental construct that doesn’t exist in reality, and no matter how hard we work to reach it we can never seem to get there. The ideal never quite happens and when you reach your target there’s always something else to aim for, more steps to climb.
The habit of aiming for something in the future also influences how we measure and celebrate success. Have you ever decided to celebrate when a target is reached, or some specific anticipated event happens? Yet when you attained the goal you decided to postpone the celebration because you now had another target and convinced yourself that achieving that was a more valid reason for celebration. Consequently you undervalue your achievements and feel discouraged because you believe you’ll never reach the ideal you’ve been aiming for.
Dan Sullivan calls this difference between where you are now and the ideal you are aiming for ‘the Gap’. The Gap can make success feel like failure, aspirations seem like folly, and effort appear to be an exercise in futility.
The solution is to turn your focus in the opposite direction. Stop measuring how far you are from an unobtainable ideal and celebrate the part of the journey you’ve already covered. Instead of contemplating how short you are of your imagined destination consider how far you have already progressed.
Your website may not be at the top of Google’s results, but it has been climbing the rankings. You may not have as many sales as you hoped for, but you didn’t even have a product a few short years ago. Perhaps you haven’t even launched a product yet, but you’re closer to that milestone than ever before.
Learning How To Avoid The Gap is a short book. It covers the above challenge and its solution in less than 30 pages. However it addresses a common problem and includes 12 strategies to help you appreciate your progress instead of focussing on the Gap.
If you are an internet marketer it’s likely that you’ll fall short of ideals that the hype in this industry may have persuaded you to believe in. To avoid the trap of measuring yourself against these ideals, change your mindset and implement the 12 strategies in this book.