How to Train Your Brain To Focus on Progress, Not Perfection

James Garrett

This past week, a friend of mine felt the need to turn our conversation into a confessional. Their perceived New Year’s resolution failures came tumbling out one by one — I suppose in an effort to get rid of their “habit guilt.” The sentiment was: “I fell short.” “I didn’t measure up.” “I didn’t stick to the plan.”

I listened intently, showed them I cared, and we went on to unpack why the approach they were using might be killing their motivation.

We often get stuck in a trap. A trap of our own making. A motivational tar pit that once you’ve stepped in, won’t let go until you’ve let your dreams go.

Let’s imagine that you’re trying to go for 30 days without sugar. Great. So you’ve set the bar — 30 days sugar-free. You start out and week one is a breeze. This is going to be easier than you thought. Then week two comes and you have one little cheat treat. You were with a friend and they offered you their favorite chocolate truffle. It’d be rude not to eat it, right? So this one lives as a justifiable exception in your mind.

We often get stuck in a trap. A trap of our own making. A motivational tar pit that once you’ve stepped in, won’t let go until you’ve let your dreams go.

But then week three comes. Oh, week three. The cravings start to bubble up and you start obsessing about having your favorite kind of ice cream. That incessant voice keeps getting louder and louder. The more you try to suppress it the stronger the cravings become until late one night when everyone’s asleep, you pull out the Cioccolato Fondente Gelato that you’ve been hiding underneath the oversized bag of frozen peas and before you know it, you’re staring at the bottom of the carton trying to eke out the last melty bite of your midnight indulgence. Then week four comes and, since you’re off the wagon anyway, you decide to grab a Snickers at the gas station Monday through Friday on your way home from work the way you used to — because, well, they taste good.

Wow, you think to yourself — I really blew it.

But have you?

The Gap Trap

Yes, you have — if you’re focusing on the gaps. The “gap trap” in this scenario was baked in from the beginning. We set up a goal — in this case 30 days without sugar — and we measured our success against that goal. According to Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy, “You’re in the GAP every time you measure yourself or your situation against an ideal” (The Gap and The Gain, p. xxiii).

What that naturally means is that we came up short. We wanted to be sugar-free for 30 days, but we only succeeded in 23 out of those 30 days, so (by definition) we failed to reach our goal. What’s weird about brains is that they’re extremely “goal sensitive” — in other words, brains are excellent at keeping track of whether or not we hit our goals. That’s often a good thing. But in this case, we didn’t hit the goal, and since we’ve only trained our brain to think of this particular goal as binary — either we hit it or we didn’t — our brain registers it as a failure. Then it does what’s only natural — it pulls back our energy and kills our motivation because it perceives that goal as not worth pursuing.

What’s fascinating about the brain is just the perception of failure is enough to kill your motivation.

John Doe

Why? Because it believes it has failed. And if you’re going to spend all that energy pursuing a goal, that energy cost better have a payout. If it doesn’t, then the brain shuts off the motivation valve and we end up feeling discouraged and drained. Your brain is simply too smart to waste valuable energy on goals that aren’t working.

What’s fascinating about the brain is just the perception of failure is enough to kill your motivation.

The Gain Brain

But wait, you say — didn’t we also stick to it 23 times?

Also true.

But the difference here is that instead of measuring yourself against an ideal, you’re measuring yourself against yourself. According to Sullivan and Hardy, “Being in the GAIN means you measure yourself backward, against where you were before” (The Gap and The Gain, p. xxvii, italics mine). So if sugar was a daily occurrence before you went on your 30-day challenge, you can confidently (and accurately) say, I had 23 wins this month and last month I had zero.

If you’re trying to motivate someone, how do you think those two different messages land?

Message #1: You failed.

Message #2: You crushed it. You had 23 more sugar-free days this month than you had last month.

If you’re like me, message #1 feels like you’ll never be enough. It’s too hard. But message #2 feels like you’re winning. It’s both factually accurate (there’s no sugar-coating here), but more importantly, it’s motivationally brilliant. Nothing gets the brain excited quite like seeing its own progress. But you have to train your brain to focus on progress; otherwise, it’ll obsess over perfection.

William James, the founder of modern American Psychology said that “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” To modify James’s quote slightly: My motivation is a function of what I attend to.

If you train your brain to focus on the gains by measuring yourself against yourself instead of measuring yourself against some arbitrary standard, you’ll tap into a bottomless source of motivation. But as soon as you start focusing your attention on the gaps, you’ll close off the spigot, your motivation will run dry, and your dreams will start to die.

While we often get stuck in the gap trap, it’s important to remember it’s a trap of our own making. While that may be frustrating, it’s also liberating. Because if you know how the trap works, you can often outsmart it. By following Sullivan and Hardy’s advice of “always measuring backward” — how did I do this week as compared to last week — you’ll train your brain to start seeing your progress instead of chasing the mirage of perfection.

If you ask me, the gain brain is a no-brainer.

This article was also published by Better Humans.