Hall of Fame
Dan Sullivan
Founder, Strategic Coach
The Gap and the Gain (with Benjamin Hardy) · 10x Is Easier Than 2x (with Benjamin Hardy)
Dan Sullivan is the founder of Strategic Coach, an entrepreneurial coaching program that has run continuously since 1988. Over more than three decades of working directly with entrepreneurs, Sullivan developed a set of frameworks around the relationship between past experience, present identity, and future capability.
The Gap and the Gain
Sullivan's most recognized contribution is the distinction between measuring in the Gap and measuring in the Gain — a framework developed through decades of direct work with entrepreneurs and brought to a wide audience in a 2021 book he co-authored with Dr. Benjamin Hardy. The Gap is the distance between where you are and where you want to be — the distance to your ideal. The Gain is the distance you have actually traveled from where you started.
High achievers often suffer not because they lack progress but because they measure against an ideal that retreats as they approach it. Progress disappears as soon as it is benchmarked against a higher target. The result is a person who has done a great deal but cannot feel it.
Measuring in the Gain means turning around and measuring backward — counting what actually happened, what actually changed, what was actually built. The past becomes usable material rather than something to escape from.
Collecting wins as an identity practice
A closely related idea in Sullivan's work is that deliberately noting and preserving what went well — wins, progress, moments of capability — does something more than improve mood. It shapes the operating picture of what you are capable of.
Sullivan's framing is structural rather than motivational: what you consciously collect and preserve about your past performance becomes the evidence base from which you take future action. A person with no visible record of their own capability has only uncertainty to navigate from. A person with a collected, preserved record has something else available.
Sullivan has worked within this territory for more than three decades. His contribution is less theoretical than practical — frameworks built from repeated direct observation of what changes when people change how they relate to their past.
Intellectual lineage
How this connects to the MyHGY™ Method
The MyHGY Method grew from René Estripeaut's own practice — a years-long habit of gratitude work, structured reflection, Three Good Things exercises, and real-time capture of what actually happened in a day. That practice was already the foundation of MyDopa when René encountered Sullivan's work and the story behind the name "Have a Great Yesterday." Sullivan and Hardy address an important related problem: that people can make real progress and still fail to experience it, because they lose sight of how far they have come. That insight strongly reinforces the territory MyHGY™ occupies. The method was developed independently and follows its own methodology.
Sullivan's work provides a practical language for a common human problem, and The Gap and the Gain makes that dynamic legible for a wide audience. The relationship between Sullivan and Hardy's framework and MyHGY™ is one of important intellectual adjacency and reinforcement — not shared mechanism or derivation.
Where the phrase "Have a Great Yesterday" comes from →Dan Sullivan is cited here solely for their published intellectual contributions. HaveAGreatYesterday.com and the MyHGY™ Method are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Dan Sullivan. This recognition does not imply any relationship, collaboration, or endorsement.