Brainz Magazine Exclusive Interview
Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir previously taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
Nir co-founded and sold two tech companies since 2003 and was dubbed by The M.I.T. Technology Review as, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote, “Nir Eyal is the habits guy. Want to understand how to get app users to come back again and again? Then Eyal is your man.”
He is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
Indistractable received critical acclaim, winning the Outstanding Works of Literature Award as well as being named one of the Best Business and Leadership Books of the Year by Amazon and one of the Best Personal Development Books of the Year by Audible. The Globe and Mail called Indistractable, “the best business book of 2019.”
In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, Nir’s writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and Psychology Today.
How did you go about writing your book?
For me, I always write books to answer questions that I myself have. My mantra as I’m writing is, ‘Follow your curiosity’. With ‘Hooked’, I was looking for a book on how to build habit-building-forming products. I didn’t find such a book, so I started blogging about the topic, for several years. Then, a business school professor of mine at Stanford emailed me and said, ‘I really like your framework. I love your thoughts on this. Let’s teach a class together.’ That then became a course that I taught at the Graduate School of Business at Standford, and later at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Standford. The development of that class and that curriculum became my first book, ‘Hooked: How to build habit forming products’.
The second book, I also wrote for myself, and in this case, was a book about distraction. The reason I wrote the book was that the more successful I became as an author, the more difficult it was to keep doing the thing that made me successful. The world kinda conspired against me in a way, because I had more speaking engagements, and consulting engagements, and all these things took me away from the one thing that I really loved to do. I needed to ensure my future career as an author. I was getting more and more distracted from that thing, and so that is why I decided to write, ‘Indistractible.’ When I read other books on the topic, of how to stop getting distracted, none of them worked for me. I kept getting distracted, so I figured, that really what I need is to dive into a topic. When I read everybody else's book on the topic, and it doesn’t really work for me, that is when I know I need to go back to first principles and original research and write the book that I was looking for.
When it comes to writing, do you write intensely or short and steadily?
So a big principle I learned while writing ‘Indistractable’, which by the way took me 5 years to write because I kept getting distracted, was the idea of time boxing. This is one of the most well-studied time management techniques out there that very few people use, but it really is game-changing, because many are stuck to this antiquated to-do list method, which I think is one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. And what does that look like? To-do lists of writing three pages or doing fifteen hundred words, it’s ridiculous. A much better technique is to timebox. Real professionals show up, put their butt in the chair, and do the work from time x to time y. So whether that’s 30 minutes or an hour, or two hours, that’s your prerogative.
What many people do when they use this silly to-do list technique, is only think about the output without considering the input. And your input as an author is two things, it’s your time, and your attention. And so you have to plan for the input if you want to get the output.
Sometimes I sit down at my desk and I have nothing, and I’ll sit there for two hours. That’s ok. Sometimes I work 2 hours straight non-stop because the ideas are flowing. But if I don’t make the time to sit in the chair, and do the work, then the work will never get done. If I only waited till when I felt like it, to do the work, there wouldn’t be any output.
I know many authors out there, who make up excuses like writer’s block. Writer’s block doesn’t exist. That’s ridiculous. Writer’s block is nothing more than the inability to sit down and do the work, and sometimes the work doesn’t come out. That’s ok, it’s not your job to have the output. The job is to put in the input, the rest will flow.
Do you have any other tips for people who want to write a book and how they can articulate their thoughts and stories onto paper?
One thing that really helps me is, to never set out to write a book. I instead, set out to write bite-size insights. I blog my way to my books. Sitting down and saying, ‘I’m going to write a book,’ is a really hard thing to do. It’s a gargantuan goal. If instead, I say, ‘Hey, you know what, I’m gonna sit down and write a blog post,’ that becomes a more manageable goal of a few thousand words. Do that consistently and don’t put pressure on yourself. Try to say, ‘I’m gonna blog this out, I’m gonna talk through an idea, and I’m gonna share it publicly, and hear what people think about that idea.’
If you do that consistently, turns out that after a year or two, you have plenty of content for a book or at least the skeleton of a book. After that, you can flush out where the connective tissues might be missing.
So that to me, has really been a secret to producing these books. Don’t think of them as books, but rather think of them as blogging your way to a book, and with the miracle of the internet, you get reader feedback along the way. My readers can tell me I am wrong or present new research, that gives me insights I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. It’s gold. I love that. I’d much rather be wrong in a blog post than be wrong in a published book.
What is the premise of ‘Hooked’ really about?
Hooked, my first book is about how to build habit-forming products. It’s about how to build healthy habits in users' lives, through the products and services they use. So essentially I stole the secrets from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Slack, and Snapchat, so that the rest of us could use these techniques and democratize these techniques for good.
Instead of just building frivolous video games or silly social networks, we can use the same psychology that gets us hooked to these tech products; to get people hooked to healthy behaviors.
Since the book was published back in 2014, it has been used in every conceivable industry from healthcare to financial services, to fitness apps, and to all kinds of education products. These types of products and services used the hooked model, to get people hooked for good, and build healthy habits in their lives. And of course, healthy habits in consumers' life, makes for a healthy bottom line in business life. And so that’s Hooked.
‘Indistractable’ is the other side. If ‘Hooked’ is about how we build good habits with the products and services we use, then ‘Indistractable’ is about how we break bad habits. ‘Hooked’ was targeted toward people who are building products (marketers, product managers, CEO’s). ‘Indistractable’ is for everyone. Everyone who struggles with the fact that: ‘We’ll say we do one thing, and somehow or another, we don’t do that thing, or we do something else despite knowing what to do.’
This is such a fascinating question, right? Even knowing what to do, we don’t just do it. Somehow, we get distracted. So it’s not that we don’t have the answer to what we should do. We know how to do these things, but we don’t know how to get out of our own way. And that’s really the challenge of this century with so many potential distractions. It is really figuring out how we get out of our own way so that we can do the things that we ourselves want to do.
So Hooked is about building good habits with technology, and various products and Indistractable is how to break the bad habits that don’t serve us. And the good news is, just to wrap it up, we can have both! It’s not contradictory. We can have good habits around certain products and services, and we can also break the bad habits if we know the deeper psychology for swaying us.
How do we build our own habit-forming products or services?
This is called the ‘Hooked’ model, and it’s a four-part framework that we see repeated time and time again. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it in the products and services that we use. Every habit-forming product, online or offline (doesn’t matter the industry), you’ll see this pattern repeated time and time again.
Essentially there are four basic steps: a trigger, an action, a reward, and finally, an investment.
So there are two types of triggers: internal and external. External triggers are all the things in our outside environment that pings, rings, and dings. Then comes the action phase, which might be opening an app, scrolling a feed, pushing a play button, or any of these simple behaviors done in anticipation of a reward. Then comes the variable reward phase, where we find that there is some kind of uncertainty, some kind of mystery. Let’s call that an intermittent reinforcement or variable reward. That’s what keeps us pecking and checking. It’s the uncertainty principle of what we might find. Same reason we like to play a slot machine, it’s that game of chance. Playing on the slot machine uses the exact same psychology as scrolling on your feed. And finally, and perhaps the most overlooked is called the ‘investment phase’. This happens when the user puts in some bit of effort for a future benefit, not for immediate reward, but for future benefit. That accrues over time. This is what I call stored value.
A habit-forming product doesn’t depreciate, unlike things in the physical world like a car or clothing. These things lose value. Habit-forming products must appreciate. They get better and better the more they are used because of this principle of stored value. So it’s imperative that your product stores value, and gets better with use. That way, through successive cycles and through these hooks, you eventually no longer need to send customers spammy marketing messages. People start using the product, not because they have to, but because they want to. That’s really where the habit is formed. It is when there is an association with an internal trigger.
And, going back to those external triggers: all those pings, dings, and rings, what we find is that habit-forming products, don’t need those external triggers. Once the habit is formed, people start checking the product on their own. They are internally triggered to use these products, and that is where the habit takes hold.
Does the psychology of human behavior excite you?
Absolutely, so I’ve always been fascinated with human psychology and the book is very much based on peer-review studies. I hate books you read that are telling people to live their life like how the author lives. That’s nice but to me, that’s not good enough. I really want my books to be backed by peer-reviewed studies, so both my books have over 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies in leading journals. This is stuff that very few people take the time to actually read. They are very boring and are written to not be understood. Oftentime, they are generally read by a few dozen people. So that’s really my job, to digest this amazing research that is locked up in the ivory towers of academia and bring them to everyone else so that the rest of us can really benefit from knowing these principles of consumer psychology.
How do you go about getting out of your own way?
I follow the principles of Indistractable. It took me 5 years to write the book because I kept getting distracted and wasn’t until I dug into the academic research and really learned what the scientists tell us about how to focus, and how to do what you say you are going to do, that I could become indistractable myself. Starting with understanding what the word distraction even means is a really important distinction. Most people will tell you the opposite of distraction is to focus. The opposite of distraction is not to focus. If you look at the origin of the word, the root of distraction comes from the Latin root trahere, which means to pull. The opposite of distraction is traction. It is very obvious when you see it: Traction and Distraction, and both words end in the same six letters a-c-t-i-o-n, and that spells action. This reminds us that distraction is not something that happens to us, but rather it is an action that we ourselves take.
So traction, by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. The opposite, distraction, is any action that pulls you away from what you planned to do. So this is more than semantics. This is actually a very important distinction. I would argue, that any action could be traction or distraction based on one word and that one word is intent.
We need to stop moralizing and medicalizing every little potential distraction. Today, people say it’s social media or video games. The last generation said it was TV, and before them, they said it was the radio, and before that, it was the bicycle, and long ago, they said it was the written word. We blame the proximal cause. We blame whatever’s in our hands for causing distraction, but distraction has always been with us.
The root cause goes much much deeper and is much more interesting than I think this narrative we hear these days that our attention is being hijacked. That our focus is being stolen. It is not true. It is in our control. We need to distinguish between what is traction and what is a distraction.
People go through life and say, ‘I wanted to do this or I wanted to do that,’ without asking themselves in advance, ‘Wait a minute, how exactly do I want to spend my time?’ If you have big, open slots of time on your calendar, what are you complaining about? Everything is a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. If you don’t plan your time in advance, you don’t know what traction is. You have to plan in advance how you're going to spend your time, so that you finally know this is traction, everything else is a distraction.
If you are interested in these two topics, visit nirandfar.com. The books are called ‘Hooked: How to build habit-forming products’, and ‘Indistractable: How to control your attention and choose your life.’ You can go to indistractable.com, there is a free a/b page workbook, that is not in the final edition of the books.
