The gap is the distance between where you stand today and where your ideal stands way ahead. And as you continue to focus on that gap, you’ll continue to see how far away you still are, and thus you’ll continue to feel dissatisfied with your effort.

The proper way of measuring progress? Look backward, not forward. Gaze right from where you are today, back to where you were when you first started. Do you see how far you’ve come?

What you choose to pursue will constantly elude you because your ideal is a natural moving target. So if you fall for the trap of measuring your current self against your future self (the person who will have attained her ideal), you’ll never be satisfied with where you are today because there will always be a gap to fill. 

Be in the gain, not in the gap, and you’ll experience a sense of having achieved something beautiful. And that’s the feeling that’ll crush your inner critic’s voice and motivate you to keep going. 

Memory consolidation is simply the process by which a temporary memory is transformed into a more stable, long-term form. But since our minds are constantly consumed with stimuli and content, so much of what you think about just washes over like a breaking wave at the shore. 

This means that what you don’t track and make note of, you simply forget.