I was listening to a podcast today and the guest being interviewed was talking about a concept he had heard from someone recently. The concept itself wasn’t new to me but I liked the language he used around it.

He was challenged and was in turn challenging us, to think about whether we were living in the gain or the gap.

The gain is when we look at life and assess it by how far we come, we take the time to appreciate what we have achieved. We realise how much we have gained.

The gap happens when we look at life and assess it by how far we need to go, we look at the things we haven’t yet achieved. We realise how much more we need to gain.

The example used in the podcast was the interviewees own podcast which he launched a year ago. He was someone who knew very little about podcasting and in a year his podcast achieved 1 million downloads, which apparently is very good.

If he assessing this in the gain he would reach the conclusion that he has done incredibly well. He knew nothing and now is building an incredible depth of knowledge. He had no one who was listening and he already has 1 million downloads which is remarkable. He would be happy with his achievement.

However if he assesses this in the gap he would look at other people in his field and see that they had reached 40 million downloads or more. He could look at the deficiencies in his podcast and realise that he had some way to go when it came to his skills.

Both of these are true. We could easily apply these two views to anything in our lives; our faith, our marriage, our job, our fitness etc. It’s possible to live in both and that is probably the healthy way to do it but we usually have a default that we will move towards in life. I think it’s helpful for us to try and realise when we are living in one or the other to avoid us either being too complacent or too critical of ourselves and what we have achieved.

Am I living more in the gain or the gap?