Nir Eyal Best Selling Author of the Book Hooked - How to Build Habit Building Products

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Nir, the best-selling author of Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products. And we discuss what it takes to make a habit forming product, how it's not always the best technology that wins in the end, and acts of traction versus acts of distraction. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Dude, I love your book.

(Nir Eyal at 00:00:39) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) I gave a list of people who I like books of to my PR, and I said, hey, get these people. I want to talk with them. And my top picks were you and Marty Kagan for user experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) I got to talk to Marty, and now I get to talk to Nir.

(Nir Eyal at 00:00:56) Well, thank you. I'm in very illustrious company here. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Wait, what are you working on today? What are you excited about right now?

(Nir Eyal at 00:01:03) Right this minute, I'm excited to talk to you, first of all, being fully present in the moment. But earlier today, I was working on my new book, which I'm really excited about as well. It's called Indistractable, and it's about how to manage this world of distraction that we live in. What is distraction? And how do we make sure that we do the things that we know we should do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) I just recorded a video literally four minutes before we got on this call called the MVP Mindset, and it was about that. And while I was recording the video, my producer Jake goes, I just listened to Nir's talk, and he, if he could be any superhero in the world, he would be indistractable. And now you're writing your book on it? I love it.

(Nir Eyal at 00:01:42) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad he heard my talk. Yeah.

(Nir Eyal at 00:01:45) I presented kind of a summary of the book. I already did a first draft, but now I'm working on refining it. And I gave a first talk two weeks ago in San Francisco where I kind of presented the big framework.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) What? I was just out there for RSA.

(Nir Eyal at 00:01:58) Oh, I'm sorry I missed you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:59) Yeah. Are you normally in that side of the world, or where are you located usually?

(Nir Eyal at 00:02:03) No, I live in New York.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) Oh, yeah. I'm in New York at least once a month.

(Nir Eyal at 00:02:09) Oh, nice. Next time you're in town, let me know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) Oh, man. There's so many great people in New York. I'm going to add you to the list. Just so you know.

(Nir Eyal at 00:02:16) Yeah. And I'm looking to meet more, because I just moved here, you know, less than a year ago. So if you know any good folks to connect me to, that would be awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) Yeah. 100%. One of the two people in the past, I don't know, three weeks that are really cool from New York, the CTO of New York City, Miguel. He's very connected in technology being the CTO of New York City as you would imagine.

(Nir Eyal at 00:02:37) Right? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) And then the list is, actually my mind's flooding so much. I don't even know. There's at least eight. We got Bruno. He's a CTO. He was a Forbes 30 Under 30, and he's a CTO of this cool AI startup that's recognizing video rendering. And we've got some food companies. What's the big food registration site? Do you remember what that is, Jake? Sorry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) He wasn't here the other day when I recorded that episode. But we, the food, some really great food booking services that are popular out there, and there's just a lot of great people. So I'll put together a list, and I'll send it to you, like a menu. Anyone you want to know, get Nir all connected in New York.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:15) Yeah. That'd be perfect. I appreciate that. Yeah.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:17) And where are you calling in from?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:19) Florida. We're down in Florida.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:21) What part?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) Sarasota.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:23) Oh, I know Sarasota. I actually grew up in Altamonte Springs just outside of Orlando.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) What? That is awesome.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:29) Yeah. We used to go to Sarasota all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:30) Yeah, man. The beach is nice.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:33) Beautiful beaches.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:34) Yeah. I was actually born here. I'm a native.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:36) No kidding.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:37) Yeah. It's a retirement slash vacation town. So for her to be a native there is rare.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:43) Very. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Good for you.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:45) Well, I come down to Orlando a couple times a year as well. My family is still all down there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:49) Oh, really? Yeah. I've got Apopka. My aunt's in Apopka, which is right outside Orlando too.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:54) That's where my brother lives. Is it Apopka?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:56) Yep. Potato. It's the word for potato. I didn't know that.

(Nir Eyal at 00:03:59) Is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:01) Yeah. My aunt told me one day we're driving up. I'm like, Apopka. What does that mean? She goes, oh, it's a word for potato.

(Nir Eyal at 00:04:06) I'm going to text my brother right now and ask me if he knows what Apopka means because I guarantee you he doesn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) I would be so happy if my aunt was lying to me.

(Nir Eyal at 00:04:17) Yeah. It actually mean screw you, white man, for taking our land.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:23) Yeah. And then for a while, I lived in Baldwin Park, which is probably twenty minutes from Corona Bar from Downtown Orlando. It used to be a military base.

(Nir Eyal at 00:04:32) Oh, very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) Yeah. And they paved over the military base and just designed a whole cool community around it. So yeah.

(Nir Eyal at 00:04:40) All right. Well, text is sent. Do you know what Apopka means? I'm asking. By the way, are we recording right now, or is this—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:46) Oh, yeah. This is the podcast, by the way. It's you and me hanging out.

(Nir Eyal at 00:04:50) Oh, I'm getting all indecent here on what we're talking about. So now I know that we can get down to business. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) Oh, yeah. This is it. Because, I mean, I'd never done a podcast before. It started, the blog I was writing took off because I was giving advice. And I said, well, all right. I'll turn into a blog so I can send people the advice and not have to have twenty minute conversations with every person. Then that did really, really well. And so the blog became a book. And then before I published the book, I didn't want to look like an idiot. So I started calling CTOs of the largest companies on the planet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) And I said, hey, you know, I'm putting out this book. Here's a rough draft. This is what the topics are. They ended up calling me and having these long conversations with me about the book, about that it was awesome, that I was talking about these CTO issues and this experience. I started recording the calls, and then emailing them around as MP3s. Somebody said, hey, this is ridiculous. It's called a podcast. I didn't know what a podcast was. So I Googled, you know, I thought it was an app on iPhone, but I found out that it's a thing. And then I did the podcast and boom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:58) Now we have, you know, 72,000 active listeners.

(Nir Eyal at 00:06:02) Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. That's fantastic. And so that's great. Well, good to know that you're recording. Thanks. Thanks for giving me the heads up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:08) Oh, that's right. Yeah. It gets some of our guests, but it's so genuine though, too. Right?

(Nir Eyal at 00:06:15) It is. That's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:16) Because that's the essence of why people, we get a lot of, we always engage our audience. Right? Very Gary V style. We're always asking people what's going on. You know, what do you want us to cover?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:27) And one of the things they like about it is it's just people talking about technology and life. And I mean, how long ago did Hooked come out, by the way? How long ago was that book published?

(Nir Eyal at 00:06:38) So I self-published it in 2013, late 2013, and then it was professionally published in 2014, late 2014.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) Nice. Yeah. It's—

(Nir Eyal at 00:06:53) So it's been a while now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:54) It's catchy. The color is catchy. The graphics are catchy. I actually saw it on my friend Derek. He's a CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:01) I saw it on his bookshelf. And it was, I was like, what is that? He's like, oh, it's really great. You've got to check it out. So I took it home, flipped through it, checked it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:09) I was like, this is brilliant. And this is, you know, at least 2015-ish, 2014, 2015.

(Nir Eyal at 00:07:16) Nice. Yeah. And I appreciate you saying that. There was a lot of thought, I've got to say, put into the title and the book cover. And it's a lot of psychology that a lot of folks don't realize, but I'll give you some secrets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:27) Yes, please.

(Nir Eyal at 00:07:27) One secret is the color. You know, yellow. If you notice the warning signs when you're driving on the street and the, you know, whenever you see signs that you really need to see, the super important ones are always in yellow. So yellow, we know, is the color that attracts the most attention. But then there's also this other trick to the book that I don't, I haven't done any quantification of whether this actually worked. But if you notice on the cover, there's a mouse cursor. Or not a cursor, but the arrow that you see on a Mac. And that was actually very intentional because I knew that the majority of people who buy my book, you're not going to buy it in the bookstore.

(Nir Eyal at 00:08:07) Most people who buy my book buy it online. They buy it on Amazon. And so we know that your eye is trained to look for that little arrow. And so when my book appears at the bottom of, you know, customers who bought this item also bought such and such, the fact that there's that little arrow on it draws your eye to my book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:26) I love it.

(Nir Eyal at 00:08:27) Yeah. A lot of psychology behind it. But, oh, maybe that's why the book succeeded. I don't know. It's not what's in it. It's just all about the cover.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:34) That's it. Yeah. The content's, that doesn't matter. Man. It's the cover. Sorry. No. But I like your yellow thing. My book, the cover is yellow.

(Nir Eyal at 00:08:42) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:43) I came to it on a different way. I looked at the shelf that a book that it would be on, and everything was blue and greens. And so I just picked a color that stood out amongst all the books that would be next to it.

(Nir Eyal at 00:08:56) So what do we do now? Because now I feel like everybody's using yellow. We changed it. It's become saturated. So what color would you publish your book in now if you were going to publish a book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:06) I would definitely invent a color.

(Nir Eyal at 00:09:08) Invent the color. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:09) Yeah. I would do like a mirror finish maybe.

(Nir Eyal at 00:09:13) Oh, there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) So you could see yourself in the book. There's the psychology for that.

(Nir Eyal at 00:09:17) There you go. Oh, there we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) That's cool.

(Nir Eyal at 00:09:19) It's making like a bright silver book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:22) Bright. Yeah. Bright. I remember the Guinness Book of World Records in, like, '99 had that reflective cover on it. For some reason that flashed in my head.

(Nir Eyal at 00:09:29) The color of Bitcoin or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:31) There you go. Are you into Bitcoin?

(Nir Eyal at 00:09:33) No. Not really. No. I mean, I bought a little bit, not Bitcoin, Ethereum. But I try and stay out of stuff I don't know anything about, and it just seemed like there was way too much. Either the people who proposed that I should buy more and more either had something to sell me, or I had to turn off half my brain to understand why I should buy it. So I decided to just invest a very little amount for fun. But, yeah, I don't know much about it to speak intelligently. I try and focus on habit forming products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:06) That's good. You're the, you know, an expert in the area through all the research and experience. And you're investing in a bunch of companies as well because you're picking them out? You're saying, nope. This meets the credentials. This meets the litmus test. These are the products that will form habits, so I'm going to invest in them. Is that how that comes about?

(Nir Eyal at 00:10:27) Yeah. Yeah. I think you need to have an investment thesis when you invest in companies. And so that's my little niche. You know? I don't dabble in products that don't have that element because that's where I think I can offer value to companies that I invest in. And so I do these office hours every week that people can call me actually on Thursday, today. Anybody can call me. They just have to book time with me in advance on my calendar through my website. And I talk to four companies over the course of an hour.

(Nir Eyal at 00:10:51) Somebody gets fifteen minutes and they, you know, a lot of times companies will either pitch me or ask me a question or, you know, they read the book and they don't understand a particular topic and they need my help with it. So, about maybe two companies a year out of the hundreds I talk to, I'll invest in when I see something special. So that's typically how I get my deal flow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) Yeah. I know a couple of them too, Eventbrite, Product Hunt, 7 Cups. I know that one. I really like what they're doing. I actually am a president of a charity, so that's how I came across them. But and then Anchor.fm.

(Nir Eyal at 00:11:26) Yeah. Yeah. I just met with the Anchor guys about two hours ago. They came by and we talked about their product, and they're doing great. That's really, really cool. Speaking of podcasting, they're doing really well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) Right? And is Gary V involved in that company?

(Nir Eyal at 00:11:39) I don't know, actually. I mean, I know he uses Anchor quite a bit, but I don't know if he—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:43) He talks about it a lot.

(Nir Eyal at 00:11:44) Yeah. I don't think he actually is, but don't quote me on that. I'm not sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) You'll be quoted. Formally. Yeah. We're going to quote you for sure. That's going to be the title of the episode. Exactly. Nir swears—scary. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:59) No. I was hating on myself a minute ago because this awesome guy I talked with last week from New York, and he does the reservation system that's growing. They're growing rapidly, but Gary Vee's business partner. And so that's who I wanted to introduce you to because you had the connection with Anchor FM, and I was like, oh, that'd be really cool. But I'll figure, I'll look in my show notes after the show and get you his information.

(Nir Eyal at 00:12:21) Terrific. That'd be great. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) So all right. Your day, everyday life, what's it like right now?

(Nir Eyal at 00:12:28) So my everyday life is pretty boring by and large. So I wake up every morning at 7:00. My alarm goes off. I cook breakfast for my wife and my daughter. That's my morning task.

(Nir Eyal at 00:12:40) And I don't eat breakfast in the morning, but I get them the food they need. And then I go off to the gym. I do about an hour of exercise. I come home. And, typically, I have a friend of mine, an author friend, who we co-work together.

(Nir Eyal at 00:12:55) So they come over. I have a little home office, and we sit down and we write for a couple hours. And we're done by around 11:30. And then I have lunch. And then the rest of the afternoon is reserved for consulting or sometimes some further writing or these calls I take with readers, or emails, et cetera.

(Nir Eyal at 00:13:16) So I only do about two hours a day of writing, but I try and stay consistent with it. So I do a little bit every day, unless I travel. If I travel, then all bets are off. I do about two speaking engagements per month where I do workshops, whatever.

(Nir Eyal at 00:13:29) So then, you know, all my routines and habits go out the window.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:32) Yeah, our mornings are very similar. Right? So I wake up, my wife makes me breakfast, which is awesome. But I do something very important, and I play with the giggle monster, our seven-month-old little girl.

(Nir Eyal at 00:13:45) Right. That's so sweet. That's awesome. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) How old is yours?

(Nir Eyal at 00:13:50) She's nine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:51) Nine months or years?

(Nir Eyal at 00:13:53) No, nine years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:54) Oh, man. What's going on in a nine-year-old's life right now?

(Nir Eyal at 00:13:58) Oh, it's a lot of fun. So we homeschool, so I get to spend a lot of time with her. Two afternoons a week I have time with her where I either spend an afternoon with her—we live in New York City, so there's lots of stuff to do here. We go to museums, we go to parks, and I'll take her to—she does rock climbing once a week, so I'll take her to that. It's a lot of fun. She's at that age now where she is just a sponge for information and loves to learn new stuff, and we have some great conversations together. So she's awesome. I really enjoy her. How's nine-month-old life?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) Okay, so we just got through the whole finding her feet, putting her feet in her mouth, and being excited about feet. Now we're trying to pull myself and stand on everything. So I can't even hold her. She just wants to stand and crawl on me. She's standing up on her own when she's got an edge to hold on to. And, man, just so many giggles.

(Nir Eyal at 00:14:52) I love it. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, that reminds me, we're now moving into headstands. We're trying to both learn how to do headstands and handstands. So I'm trying to get a—I have this list of physical feats I'd like to do by the end of my life. And so one of them is I want to be able to do a handstand, and my daughter wants to do the same. So we've been practicing that. So this is what you have to look forward to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:18) Yeah, I love it. Like, the sound of it sounds—and it's much smarter to do it now because if you were to do that at age 80, that would be much more difficult.

(Nir Eyal at 00:15:28) Yeah. Yeah. No, it's annoying how much easier it is for her to do it. Right? Like, we've both practiced the same amount. Every day we'll do a little bit more, and I'm way behind her. She has no problem doing these handstands, and I'm still struggling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:42) She's also closer to the earth.

(Nir Eyal at 00:15:44) That's true, and weighs a lot less. So there's force equals mass times acceleration. So when she falls, it doesn't hurt as much as when I fall.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Right. I love the physics there. Oh, dude, you're geeky like me. So for the people who don't know, I want you to touch some bullet points of habit-forming products and/or technologies, whatever you prefer—habit-forming something. And I'm sure that's the thing you've been talking about for years. And then what you're excited about now with the bullet points of your current book that you're releasing?

(Nir Eyal at 00:16:17) Sure. So the bullet points for Hooked is that there is a pattern to designing products that engage people, that form these habits. And not that every business needs to be habit-forming, but building a product that is habit-forming has some huge competitive advantages. I mean, if you think about, if I ask your average listener right now, "Who searched with Google in the past 24 hours?" almost everybody would say they have. But if I say, "Who searched with Bing in the past 24 hours?" you know, maybe a couple people. And that's not because Bing is so much worse than Google or Google is so much better than Bing. In fact, third-party studies show that people can't tell the two apart if they don't know which brand is which. And so the point here is that we use a lot of products and services not because one product is better than the other, but because we use them simply out of habit, simply because of this mind monopoly. So there's this cold hard truth that the best technology wins, and that, unfortunately, is not true at all. That's a lie. It's not the best technology that wins. It's the product that captures the monopoly of the mind, the product that we turn to with little or no conscious thought out of habit. That's the product that oftentimes captures the market. So given how important it is to form a consumer habit, how do you do that? And so that was my central question. I didn't see a book that taught me how to build habit-forming products, so I went out and wrote one. And I talked to a lot of academics. I talked to a lot of folks who built some of the most iconic habit-forming products out there like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack. And I wanted to dive into the deeper psychology behind how you build these products. And it turns out there's a pattern that every hook—or, I should say, every habit-forming product has a hook embedded into it. And that hook has four steps: a trigger, an action, a reward, and an investment. And so my book is really about those four steps. If you're building the kind of product that you need people to come back to, if you need to form this unprompted user engagement with your product, how do you do that? Well, you go about following these four basic steps. And so I wrote the book not as a typical business book. You know, a lot of business books are full of very fluffy stories and research and anecdotes. I really kind of wanted to cut to the chase because I've been a CEO twice. I know how hard it is to build a product that people actually use. And so I wanted to make a very—a book that you could read quickly, get to the point, and answer these series of questions for people who are building these products to try and understand where their product might be deficient from a habit-forming perspective and therefore how they can make it better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) Oh, God, it's so, like, oh, I'm so excited. Like, I geek out over products so much and it's just so useful. And then you're like, "All right, now that you know how, people, now that I've told you, I've unlocked here's the keys of the kingdom. This is how you hook people. Right? This is how you create habit-forming products. Now I'm going to tell you how to not be distracted so you can make habit-forming products."

(Nir Eyal at 00:19:15) Well, so this is the thing. Right? The reason I got into this whole business in the first place is because I saw how these products affected me. Right? When I started my last company, we were in the advertising and gaming space, and I saw a lot of companies come and go. The Facebook platform was just starting to take off. This was 2007, 2008, and it was really starting to hit its stride. And I didn't really understand how these products did it. Right? Like, why was Facebook so habit-forming? Why was it so difficult sometimes to stop using the products? And so, you know, one of my writing mentors says that research is me-search, and that's so true for me. Right? I wanted to know how to build these habit-forming products so that I can help people live better lives through the products that I was making. But I also wanted to understand for my own sanity, why was it that sometimes I would overuse these products? And so they're two separate questions. They're connected, they're tangential, but they are two separate questions. So I'm not writing Indistractable because I don't want to negate anything I said in Hooked. I really truly believe in the power of technology to improve the world and to improve people's lives. The problem is that most technology companies out there, they don't suck us in the way Facebook and Twitter and Instagram might suck us in. No, most technology products out there suck. They're horrible. Right? And so what I wanted to do in writing this book was to help those folks out there who, like me when I was at my last company, struggle with building products that people actually use. And how wonderful would the world be if people actually use the products that we're building for them, right, that help them do the things they want to do in their life, but for lack of good product design, don't do? So I didn't write this book for the companies I just mentioned. They already know—you know, gaming companies, Facebook, they already know these techniques. I wanted to write the book for everybody else out there who's building a product and needs people to use it in order to get the benefit of the product. Now in the course of time, I also found that I was struggling with my own behavior. You know, sometimes I would overuse these products and not really understand how to get them under control. So once I understood the basic model behind how these products work, I could start breaking the model where it didn't serve me. And so that led me down this path of what I'm working on now, this book called Indistractable, which is all about not just tech distraction, because what I learned—you know, I thought at first, "Well, why are we so-called addicted to technology? Well, technology must cause technology addiction." Right? Well, not really. It turns out that distraction is much deeper than just the technology we use. That the icky, sticky truth that we don't want to face is that when we overuse something, any product that's potentially addictive, you know, we're using it for other reasons. It's not just the drug or the technology that gets us addicted. There's something else going on in us that blocks this natural circuit breaker that gets us to stop doing something once it hurts us. And so that's more of what I'm exploring in this book is that, okay, the easy answer is these tech companies are all hooking me, and therefore I can't stop. But you know what? That's not really the answer. That's not really true. There's other stuff going on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) Nir, I am literally goosebumps, smile ear to ear right now, man. Like, the way what you're talking about right now—like, they're addicted to the value of what it brings. It's like they're not addicted to Facebook. They're addicted to the byproduct of the value of them being reinforced socially or whatever need that they want. Like, I listen to a lot of the Tony Robbins stuff. Right? So whatever human need that it's solving, that's what they're addicted to. They're addicted to that feeling that they're getting from it.

(Nir Eyal at 00:22:53) So the thing is that it is—you will find cases of people getting addicted to anything that solves pain. So anything that stops pain, people will get addicted to. Not everyone, of course. Just like, you know, let's go to the extreme case. Let's take heroin. Right? Or even cigarettes. You know, people say, "Oh my gosh, heroin and cigarettes are very, very addictive." Right? Everybody would agree that they're so addictive. Well, it's not actually true. If you think about it, you know, these substances do addict some people, but a very, very small percentage. You know, lots of people, millions of people go to the hospital and get diamorphine, which is better than street heroin, when they go get surgery in the hospital. But they don't all come out as addicts. In fact, believe it or not, the majority of people who have smoked don't smoke in an addictive way. You know, they're social smokers. They smoke once or twice or they smoke from time to time, but they're not necessarily addicted. Of course, some people do get addicted, and the same goes for technology as well. And if we go on the other end of the spectrum, like, let's go all the way from heroin to Tylenol, it turns out that some people get addicted to Tylenol as well. Very small proportion, but some people do get addicted. So, you know, the metaphor that technology is like cigarettes—I used to say this. I used to say in my talks that technology is the cigarette of this century, and I don't really believe that anymore. And the reason I don't believe it anymore is because it's not like cigarettes, like tobacco where there is nicotine inside the cigarettes that can cause addiction. Technology is like smoking, but not like smoking tobacco. It's like smoking cannabis. That we know that cannabis doesn't have anything in it that's chemically addictive. And yet we know that nine percent of people who smoke cannabis are addicted, but it's a behavioral addiction. It's not—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) You're addicted to the habit.

(Nir Eyal at 00:24:43) Exactly. It's not a chemical dependency. It's a behavioral dependency. And so this very small number of people, what they're doing is they have become reliant upon the fact that it solves some kind of pain in their life. And that's exactly what we see with technology products, that those who are really addicted, there's something else going on. There's no addict with a happy story. Right? Every addict has something else going on. Now I say that not because most of us are addicted, because it turns out very, very few of us are addicted. But that the rest of us, sometimes we overdo these things, and we need to understand the basic psychology of why we overdo these things so that we can get them under control. But it's very important that we distinguish between people who are actually addicted who go overboard and the rest of us who sometimes, you know, just use them too much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:29) Yeah. So if you understand the psychology of what's happening, that allows you to then have a set of tools to recognize and have awareness of when it's happening before that pain builds up momentum. Right?

(Nir Eyal at 00:25:41) Right, right. And that we need to recognize that this is not a new problem. Right? We human beings have always struggled with distraction. Aristotle and Socrates talked about the nature of akrasia. This term, akrasia, means that we have this tendency to do things against our better interest. And that was 2,500 years ago. So the fact is if it's not Facebook, if it's not, you know, alcohol, if it's not drugs, it's TV. If it's not TV, it's the radio. If it's not the radio, it's romance novels. You know, if you're looking for escape from discomfort, you will find it. Somebody will be happy to sell it to you. The question is, what kind of tools do you use to solve your pain? Do you solve your pain with something that improves your life, that helps you do what you want to do, what I call acts of traction? Or are you using tools that move you further away from the life you want? What I call distraction. So that's really the answer. It's what do we do when we encounter these painful moments in our life?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:34) I'm taking notes, man. I like acts of traction. Like, that sounds good. You know, one of the important things to be able to do to communicate effectively to people is to be able to provide memorable names to concepts. And I really like the acts of traction. That's really good.

(Nir Eyal at 00:26:51) Thanks. Yeah, you can almost think of it like a number line that on one end of the spectrum, you know, going into the negative end of the number line, you have distraction, which takes us away from what we want. And on the other side, on the positive side, we have traction, so traction and distraction. It's important to remember that both of those words end in the word action, reminding us that it's what we do. It's not what happens to us. It's the acts that we take that defines whether it's an act of traction or distraction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:20) That is correct. Like, one of my favorite tidbits is decision means, like, to cut off from.

(Nir Eyal at 00:27:28) Mhmm. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:28) To make a decision means to cut off from all other possibilities.

(Nir Eyal at 00:27:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:32) I'm like, oh, that's such a good origin behind the word because you don't think of it as decision. You think of it as this light thing that you just pick. I'm going to pick a decision. I'm going to pick a decision. It's just like, no. When you decide on something, you're cutting off from all other possibilities.

(Nir Eyal at 00:27:43) Right. Right. Yeah. Etymology. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) Yes. I couldn't think of the word, man. I wanted to throw it out there so bad.

(Nir Eyal at 00:27:52) That's the thing that I looked for the Latin roots of traction, and it's Trahere, which means to pull. So that's why I got this idea of the number line of traction versus distraction. Are you pulling towards what you want or away from what you want? And the thing is, it's nothing about the behavior itself. Right? There's nothing that says that watching Netflix or going on Facebook is necessarily a distraction. In fact, in my day, I make time for those activities. I have time in my day scheduled to go on Facebook, to putz around on YouTube, to check out Reddit. It's no longer distraction if I plan time for it. Now it's an act of traction because that's exactly what I want to be doing in that period of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:32) So the distraction is when you're being pulled away from something that you want to do. You're being pulled on the other end of that spectrum that you really, so you have this goal or this outcome that you want to hit, and that's on one end of the spectrum. Right? And your dot being on that far right side of the spectrum is you being fully engaged, taking complete acts of traction to hit the outcome. And then the distraction is literally the pulling of that dot down the spectrum to the other side where you're doing nothing towards your goal.

(Nir Eyal at 00:29:02) Right. So it's not necessarily goal driven per se. What I would say is, you know, there's this question that I think you're hitting on, which is how do I know the difference? Right? Like, in the moment, when you are using Facebook and when you don't want to be, and I'm sorry I keep picking on Facebook, but I don't know. It's just been in the news a lot. So when you're doing something you don't want to do, and you can substitute any distraction here. Right? Drinking too much, watching too much TV, you know, even reading too much. Right? Anything that in the moment you find yourself sucked into. You know, in that moment, if I came up to you and I said, hey. Do you really want to be doing this? You'd probably say, yeah. I do. But so asking yourself in the moment whether you really want to do this is not the right question. What you have to do in order to tell the difference between what is traction and distraction is to plan ahead. That's the only way to tell the difference between the two, is to ask yourself what you would regret doing in that moment. And anything other than that act that you really want to do would be something you'd regret. So you have to plan ahead. And this brings me to this really important point. You know, when I started studying this topic of distraction and technology, kind of, you know, this supposed addiction that we all have that I don't really believe we all are addicted, but, you know, a lot of people think this is the case. And then I asked people. I said, you know, you told me how distracted you are and how impossible it is to get anything done. Can I see your calendar? Can you show me your phone? And I want to see what you plan to do today. And they hand me their phone, you know, they open up their calendar app, and it's empty. Right? There's, like, big white open spaces throughout their calendar. And, you know, this brings me to the point that you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:43) Oh, that's good.

(Nir Eyal at 00:30:44) And in this day and age, if you don't plan your day, somebody else will. So the only way to know what is the difference between traction and distraction is to plan ahead. You know, to go about your day with a big open calendar and say, oh, you know, I didn't get anything done today. Well, guess what? You didn't plan to get anything done. And so we've got to make time. You know, in this day and age, there's just so much out there that we can waste time doing. Not that any one of these activities are so bad. It's just we shouldn't do them as a default state. We shouldn't do them when we can't think of anything else better to do. So in this next book I'm writing, Indistractable, I talk about how one of the first things we have to do is to actually plan out your day for when you want to get done the things you want to get done so that you could tell a difference between when are you doing acts that are moving you forward, acts of traction versus distraction?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) Oh, man. Everyone here in the office is smiling. And I'll tell you why. We've got this thing called the value tracker.

(Nir Eyal at 00:31:38) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:38) And it's a spreadsheet that we all share, nothing fancy. And we chunk the day into thirty minute chunks, you know, and we copy and paste each new day. And then inside of every thirty minute chunk, we just have to do something that brings the company value. And so we have a literal list of 16 things every day that we do that moves us forward and value. And so at the end of the day, we can look at all those thirty minute increments and know exactly what we did inside of what blocks and that's how we, it's not about restricting down to where you have such a tight list that you can't move and that it's so rigid and rote and boring that there's no variety to it. It's about in every block, in every thirty minute chunk, we have to have an awareness of something we're doing that's helping us. Now refueling is an awesome one. That's eating lunch. Like, we refueled. That's like a recurring one. Like, taking time, continuous learning is another one. We actually say in this block, we're going to go learn something new. We're going to learn how to edit the podcast better. We're going to learn how to make the video. But, like, we keep it. We go for walks. Right? We'll do a block for walks and to be physically active, because it's all the things that actually work and not just about the push push push hard hard hard lifestyle. It's like, let's be effective in what we do.

(Nir Eyal at 00:32:51) Right. No. Yeah. I think you're a couple of steps ahead of the game already. I mean, this is something that very few people actually bother to do, but I think is absolutely critical, especially in a team context because, you know, we know that human beings, there's been study after study that find that people are terrible at estimating their output. Right? So if you've got to, you know, do a big presentation or write a blog post or whatever it is that you're working on, studies have found that you are pretty bad at estimating how long it's going to take you to actually complete it. Studies have found that people, you know, it takes people two or three times longer than they estimate to do most of the jobs they think they have to do. So this brings me to this point that you can't plan output. You know, most people, they have a big to do list, and they say I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, and then do this. And that's it. However, you know, day after day, they don't finish everything on their list because they're super bad at estimating, we all are. And they haven't made time on their calendar for when to actually do it. So the trick here is don't estimate your output. You should estimate and plan for the one thing that you can actually control, which is your input, the time itself. That, you do have control over. So that's where we have to, you know, for myself, I don't say, oh, I'm going to crank out, you know, a thousand words today. No. No. No. I say I'm going to spend two hours at my desk writing because that I can control.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:11) Yes. We, man, I love it. We call it, we have to, before it was called the value tracker, we called it our to done list. And the rule is you don't get to make a list of things to do. Here's a block of time, and you have to do something and put it in there. And list making very very quickly eats up your thirty minute block, and you got nothing to put in there, but I made the list. You know, like, so people, we don't do that. We just say, alright. Let's go do something that will improve what we want and we know what our outcome is. So we just go take an action and we go put it in the thing and we say, alright. Cool. And that's just, that's working for us so far.

(Nir Eyal at 00:34:45) Yeah. What we have to be careful of is, you know, a lot of people say, well, I don't want to plan because it takes so long. But then what they often find is that they run really, really fast in the wrong direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:56) Yes. I see that quite a bit. That's why at the, we have the outcome listed. So everyone's focused to do something in the block to hit that outcome. And it's less about, like, the restrictions, more about just the awareness of the time. Because, you know, some days we don't hit it, you know, it's not, and you look back and, like, oh, man. Like, we'll do better tomorrow. Now, dude, you're awesome, man. I love the way you think.

(Nir Eyal at 00:35:16) Thank you. No. This is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) When does the book come out?

(Nir Eyal at 00:35:19) I don't know yet. Okay. That's fair enough. Out of my control, unfortunately. So it's going to be with the publisher for a while, but hopefully sometime this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:28) Okay. So you're expecting it this year?

(Nir Eyal at 00:35:30) Yeah. Yeah. It's, there's a lot of different folks who have their hands in it. So, hopefully, it'll come out. The sooner, the better. But I did post, I'll give you a link to a talk I gave recently that I'm happy to share with you that kind of highlights the basic model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:43) Yeah. Please do because I'm excited. We're actually going to, I'm going to, you have the audible. Right? It's on audible, the Hooked, and the new one will be too?

(Nir Eyal at 00:35:52) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:53) Yeah. And did you do the voice over for audible?

(Nir Eyal at 00:35:57) No, I didn't. I hired a voice actor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) Okay. You have a beautiful voice, Nir.

(Nir Eyal at 00:36:01) Oh, thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:02) Yeah. I've actually convinced three authors to do their own voice when they had already hired a person just by coming on the show. Only because I'm a huge Audible fan. Right? Here's my pitch. I'm a big Audible fan. I listen to infinite audio books. Right? It's just like, I don't, it's always playing around me. Right? And when the author does it, if they have a good voice, which you do, it is just leaps and bounds, like, better. It's so good.

(Nir Eyal at 00:36:32) Yeah. I know. You're right. You're right. So for the updated version, I'm going to, after I finish Indistractable, I'm going to write a revised version of Hooked to update it, and I will record, I'll rerecord it myself. Actually, I recorded it. So I self published the book at first thinking, you know, whatever. I'll just do it myself. Who's going to buy it anyway? And I recorded this podcast. And speaking of, like, a good example of how we're really bad at predicting output, you know, the book's like 250 pages. I was like, okay. 250 minutes. Big deal. That won't take me very long. You know, in the afternoon, I can do it. No problem. So I hired this audio technician, and we went to a studio and we recorded it. And it took so much longer than I expected. It took, I think it took, like, eighteen hours or something that we spent trying to finish this thing. Because, you know, every time you read a book and you stumble and you stop, you got to go back and fix it. It just took forever. So I did do my own recording, but then we have to actually leave the studio, and we had to record it in my car because the studio closed. And there was, like, a train noise in the background. It was awful. So I was like, oh, I can't do that again. So I just hired somebody. But I think on the next version, I will actually do it right and go to a real studio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) Yeah. Oh, for sure. You know, we record stuff here in our studio, and it's taken a little practice. But if you listen to books by, like, Gary Vee or, I don't know, Ray Dalio, any of the big books and you listen to their Audible, they, it's really, it's a lot more flexible than the actual book. They'll break the script and, like, inject something, and then they'll be more personable. It's, it took, I don't know. It took, like, four or five hours for me to figure out how to record the book, because it's, you know, obviously very different than the podcast because you have to read. But man, I'll tell you what, I love it. So we're just wrapping up our audible version of the book right now.

(Nir Eyal at 00:38:20) Nice. Yeah. I will never hire somebody again. I'll do it definitely. Next time, I'll do it myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:25) Yes, dude. I'm telling you what we found, I found that the production houses or whatever they're called were pushing it onto the author. They were not wanting the author to do it. And I'm like, what? Like, get out of here.

(Nir Eyal at 00:38:39) I'm like, you got it. Always prefer the author reading audiobook. I'm a huge audiobook fan as well. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:45) We need to hear, Nir. Man, thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to get out there into the world?

(Nir Eyal at 00:38:52) No. I really appreciate the question. This was a lot of fun. And, yeah. If anybody wants to reach out to me, you can check out my blog. It's at nearandfar.com. Near is spelled like my first name, n-i-r, nearandfar.com. And my first book is Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products. You know, feel free to check that out. And, you know, it's available on Amazon, but I don't really care if you find it somewhere that you can pirate it. That's fine with me. It's okay. I already got my advance. Just go get it. Build great stuff. I want to see a lot of awesome habit forming products out there that help people live better lives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) Oh, man. That's why we produce the content we produce. We just want to change and improve and help the next generation grow up into technology. And, man, you're the best, Nir. Thank you so much.

(Nir Eyal at 00:39:35) Oh, thank you. This is a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:42) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.