Douglas Flora, Executive Medical Director of Yung Family Cancer Center at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, President-Elect of the Association of Cancer Care Centers, and Editor in Chief of AI in Precision Oncology, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Measuring Backward: The GAP vs. the GAIN
Those of you who’ve been with me for a while on here know I love to read over my coffee while my adult kids sleep late. Today it’s Madeira, Portugal, and the book is The Gap and the Gain.
“Always measure your progress backward, against where you started, not forward against your ideal. The ideal is like the horizon — it keeps moving the closer you get to it.”
— Dan Sullivan, The Gap and the Gain
Sullivan’s argument is this: high achievers almost universally measure themselves against their ideals. The ideal is always ahead, always receding. So no matter how far you’ve come, you arrive each morning already behind. He calls this living in the GAP. The GAIN is measuring backward — from where you actually started.
Same distance traveled. Completely different experience of a life. It sounds simple. It isn’t.
Perhaps we need to look more at our astounding progress in cancer medicine in this framing? So much of our work lives in permanent tension with the ideal — the treatment that almost worked, the patient who made it to five years and not six. We are trained to see the distance remaining. It is, in some ways, what makes us good at what we do. It is also, quietly, what wears us down.
But the GAIN in oncology right now is real, and worth naming. Survival curves that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Immunotherapy turning certain death sentences into chronic conditions. AI tools beginning to close the gap between what medicine knows and what patients actually receive. Psychosocial care finally entering the national conversation as a clinical priority, not an afterthought. The nurses holding someone’s hand at 2am. The researchers building tools that protect the patient relationship. The colleagues pushing harder than anyone will ever fully see.
They are all moving something real. Worth counting.
And a personal note to all of of you who have been kindly texting about my recent heart procedure — the atrial ablation appears to have worked. Hiked a few days already, including climbing a very steep trail yesterday, and happy to report that my back and heart are both cooperating beautifully.
Counting the GAIN.”
Other articles featuring Douglas Flora on OncoDaily.
