Gain Traction On Your Life And Goals With Nir Eyal, Author Of Indistractable [AMP 158]

- Deep Dive into Human Psychology: Hooked on building habit-forming products
- If you could have any superpower, which would you want to use for good?
- Proximal vs. Root Cause: Distractions and reasons to procrastinate
- Motivated Reasoning: Place blame and pin responsibility on proximates
- Definition of Distraction: Opposite of distraction is not focus, but traction
- Definition of Traction: Any action that pulls you toward what you want to do
- External and internal triggers motivate us toward traction or distraction
- How to channel discomfort into traction, not distraction:
- Step 1: Master internal triggers (re-imagine trigger, task, temperament)
- Step 2: Make time for traction
- Step 3: Hack back at external triggers
- Step 4: Prevent distraction with pacts
- "The more I research this topic of distraction, I realize that technology is the proximal cause, it's not the root cause."
- "Most distraction doesn't originate outside of us. It's not just the pings, dings, and rings. Most distraction starts from within."
- “We are using our devices as digital pacification devices.”
- “When we believe there's nothing we can do about the problem, we don't even try.”
Gain Traction On Your Life And Goals With @nireyal, Author Of Indistractable
Click To TweetTranscript:
Nathan: It’s easy to blame your phone for distractions. You see those notifications, you hear the pings, you get the rush of someone wanting to talk with you, and then even though you're working or maybe you're spending time with people, you glance at your phone and completely disengage from what you were doing or what you had planned on doing, too. But when you really think about this, your phone isn't the problem, is it? Now, it’s a small and crude example here, but it’s really fascinating to me to dig deeper into the root cause of why we as humans actually like to be distracted. When we are distracted, it has the potential to damage relationships, your work life, your results, your own person. You get the picture. Let’s explore how we can become indistractable with Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal bestselling of Hooked and the author of the new book, Indistractable. Nir has a ton of frameworks to help you understand and take control of your internal urges to be distracted. You’ll learn how to make time for traction, hack back some of those external triggers to focus on traction, and how to make packs with yourself to remain indistractable. Now, let’s get AMPed with Nir. Nir, thank you so much for being on the show today. Nir: My pleasure, it’s so good to be back. Episode number two here that I'm with you. Nathan: Exactly. I don't remember what number it was, but I know we talked to you about Hooked way back in the day. Nir: Yeah, so what does it mean. Tom Seleck? Who's the other? Nathan: Basically, yeah. Nir: Me and Magnum, PI? I don’t know. Nathan: Let's see. Andrea Fryrear I think is the only other one that we— Nir: Excellent. I'm in good company. Nathan: Exactly. Speaking of being in good company, we just talked about Hooked and now you've got another book out and I'm very excited to read it. I know it just recently came out. I am in the shoes where I am very curious to learn a lot more, which I think is probably good for our audience today. In case someone didn't catch your previous episode with us, can you give us a quick fill-in on your background and then tell us about your latest book, Indistractable? Nir: Sure. My first book, Hooked, was about how to build habit-forming products and that book is really about how we can use the same psychology that is used to build video games and social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, and all sorts of different products out there that we find to be very sticky and engaging. The book Hooked is really a deep dive into the deeper psychology around why we find ourselves using these products so much, so that we can learn from them and democratize some of these techniques. I wrote the book, it's coming up on its fifth year anniversary here. The idea was to really democratize these techniques so that people building enterprise software, B2B products, consumer web products, anybody who’s building a product that needs to be used habitually—something that people use every single day and that's becoming a larger share of businesses out there now with the rise of many SaaS companies out there—we need people to use the product regularly or we go out of business. For those types of products, it's essential that the company build the product to become a habit. Some people think that I wrote Hooked because I wanted to get people hooked to Facebook and the gaming companies. No, that wasn’t the point at all. It was for a business audience to help people make the products using some of the same tactics and that's exactly what's happened. I've been really, really proud of seeing how the book has permeated the product design community. Products like Kahoot, a company that went public a few months ago is the world's largest education software. They used the Hooked model to get kids hooked onto learning in the classroom. Companies like Paga have brought millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa online and given them bank accounts for the first time and change their habits around saving money. Companies like Fitbod. The fifth year edition of Hooked will actually have a case study about Fitbod which is a company that I started using their app shortly after I wrote an article a few years ago that was called, Why Your Fitness App Is Making You Fat, because I was so disappointed in how so many fitness apps out there were just awful and weren't helping anybody. I wrote this very scathing article and then a few months later, I found this app Fitbod. I said, “Oh my goodness, this is perfect. This is what we need.” I sent them an email and I said, “Did you by any chance read Hooked?” and they said, “Yes. We designed the product with the Hooked model in mind.” That's a product that's gotten all kinds of people hooked to going to the gym. It's kind of a provocative title, but it's not about addiction. It's about habits and we have good habits that we can use to help people improve their lives. That's kind of a short, short summary of why I wrote Hooked. Nathan: Nice. I love that and it makes sense. As working at a software company right now, I definitely can relate to that, building daily habits that use software is very, very important. Nir: And very hard, it's not easy. Some folks, they look at these techniques and they say, “Oh my gosh, this is mind control. This is addiction.” No it's not. It's totally not. It's really hard to get people to change their behavior. Nobody's getting addicted to enterprise SaaS software. That’s nobody's problem. That really is what that book is meant for. Nathan: Definitely. You mentioned the idea of going to the gym and from what I've read with interviews with you at the Indistractable, some of that stuff has played a role in you writing this book, I believe, right? Nir: Yeah. That is a big part of it. Shortly after Hooked was published, I found that I was constantly distracted. I feel weird saying this because it feels like I'm complaining, but I'm not complaining. I'm just telling it as it happened. When I wrote Hooked, nobody ever heard about me. It was my first book. I wasn't getting any phone calls or emails about speaking at conferences or doing much consulting work. I was just teaching at Stanford at the time and I wasn't very busy. I had plenty of time on my hands to write this book, but then once Hooked came out and the methodology started to spread and people started hearing about it, then I got busier. I got more emails and more demands on my time. I had little time to do the thing that made me successful in the first place, which was to research and write about what I was discovering. Not only did it affect my work life, it affected my personal life. I remember I was sitting with my daughter one afternoon. This was maybe a year after Hooked was published and we had this beautiful afternoon together. We had plenty of time to just bond, to just spend time together, father and daughter. We had this activity book of different questions and activities that daddies and daughters could ask each other to bond and get closer. One of the questions in the book, I remember it verbatim. I'll tell you what happened in a second here, but I remember the question verbatim. The question was, “If you could have any super power, what superpower would you want?” I remember the question, but I don't remember what my daughter said, because when she answered, I was busy looking at my phone, and I told her, “Just one second, honey. I just got to do this one thing here on my phone,” because an email or Slack channel or whatever was going on on my phone. I don’t even remember, but I do remember when I looked up from my phone, she got the hint, and she left the room. She went to go play outside. She got the message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. If you think that's bad, by the way, I heard you groan there. Let me tell you, I told a friend of mine the same story and he was curious. He asked his daughter, what super power she would want and she said immediately, “I would want the power to talk to animals.” He said, “Talk to animals? Wow, that's interesting. Why do you want to talk to animals?” and she said, “So that when you and mommy are on your computers and your phones, I’ll have someone to talk to.” Brutal, so that's when I decided I need to figure this out for myself. I used those types of products—the social media companies and the gaming companies—as examples of how we can democratize these techniques for SaaS companies and for companies that use this stuff for good, but I didn't really address the issue of what about these companies that are using these techniques. In some cases we over do it. I wanted to really research what's going on because the chorus in the media these days and the popular perception is that technology is doing this to us. I took the advice of many books—as you know, there's been dozens of books over the past few years—that say, “Technology is melting your brain. Technology is at fault.” So, I decided to do what they said. I said, “Oh my gosh. Maybe it really is the technology's fault.” I got rid of my smartphone, I got rid of my iPhone, I got a flip phone that did nothing but send text messages and receive phone calls. No apps, no email, none of that stuff. Then I got myself a word processor from the 1990’s. They don’t even make these anymore. Some library was selling it on eBay. I found one of those and that didn't have any internet connection. I sat down, I said, “Okay, now I'm going to focus, now I'm going to do what I say I'm going to do. I'm going to actually get to work.” I would see that there's this book on the bookshelf that I've been meaning to look at, or let me just reorganize my desk, or take out the trash, or do the laundry for God’s sake. I would find all these reasons to procrastinate. That led me to the conclusion that it's not really the technology that's doing this to us. The more I research this topic of distraction, I realize that technology is the proximal cause, it's not the root cause. The root cause goes much deeper and I think it's actually much more interesting. It's a problem that humans have faced forever at least since 2500 years ago when Plato talked about this very same problem.



