Benjamin Hardy

How I learned it from Dan is ideals are like the horizon in the desert.

Like you can see them out there, but every time you take a few steps forward, the horizon keeps going.

and in america we're actually trained to always be pursuing happiness that's even in the declaration of independence life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and so we're very big on ideals in america which is good like it's good to have ideals it's good to be idealistic there's nothing wrong with ideals the problem is is that they're immaterial like i think a definition of ideal is whatever you believe is perfection so when you're in the gap you're literally measuring yourself against your view of perfection

But back to the idea of the horizon, that view is never endingly changing.

Like my former self would have felt like it was perfection just to get a book deal.

But then once I got there, the ideal changed, the horizon moved.

And so if you're always measuring yourself against a moving target and also a moving target that by definition is unreachable,

You can't actually reach an ideal.

It's an ideal.

But if you're always measuring yourself against it, then you never feel like you've moved anywhere.

And that's actually why we wrote the book is because high achievers by nature have huge ideals, but they also usually measure themselves against them.

And our culture is trained that way.

Social media trains us to have ideals and to always be comparing ourselves externally.

And sometimes ideals are other people.

Yeah.

But if you're always measuring yourself against something that's way up ahead and also something that you can never actually reach, then what that does for you internally is it feels like you've never made any progress at all.

It also devalues everything you've done to that point.

And so whenever you're in the gap,

It does not matter how much you've achieved.

It doesn't matter if you're living way, way, way beyond the dreams of anything you ever thought you would do.