Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” and “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.” After coming to America and successfully selling two tech companies, Nir began writing on technology, psychology, and business and has taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Nir Eyal!
Sean DeLaney: Nir, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing the day?
Nir Eyal: I’m doing great, thanks so much for having me.
Sean: No, like we were talking about a few minutes ago, I’m very excited for this one, but I’m really curious, just to start, it’s early on a Monday morning, is there anything you do just to get your week started off on the right foot?
Nir: Well, there’s a lot of things I do to get my day started off on the right foot every single day so I’m a big proponent of time boxing my calendar, so I have every minute of my day planned out. It doesn’t mean I never get distracted. My book Indistractable is all about how to do what you say you’re going to do. But of course, on the path to becoming an “indistractable” from time to time I might fall off track, things happen in life, but the idea is that day after day I revise my calendar so that I know how to make it easier to say what I’m going to do in the following day. So my rituals are pretty cemented and that I know I can get a lot more done when I plan in advance what I’m going to do with my time, so every day I wake up at seven I prepare breakfast for my family. As soon as I wake up, we have breakfast at 7:30 to 8, I work out from 8 to 9. then typically I’ll write from 9 to about 11:30 except when I’m promoting my book, as I am now.
In which case, writing is taking a back seat to wonderful podcast interviews like this one.
And then I have lunch at 11:30, I make lunch for my family, and then the rest of the afternoon on Mondays it’s called Message Mondays. I spend the rest of that afternoon just doing my weekly emails. I talk about in the book about this weekly process for processing non-urgent emails, and then on Tuesdays and Fridays I have the afternoon with my daughter, we homeschool my daughter so I have the afternoon with her. And then Wednesdays and Thursday afternoons are for meetings, interviews, investment opportunities, speaking engagements, things like that.
Sean: I always feel bad when I take someone such as yourself a great writer away from what they do best. But I’m really intrigued. You mentioned you’ll revise from time to time. Here we are approaching a new year. Anything you do at the outset of a year just to… Just to get a better grasp what the next year is gonna look like for you.
Nir: Yeah, so I have these various life domains that I review every year, so I have a working document that I’ve kept for, must be past… maybe eight years now or so, and I have these various values in my life that I want to make sure I’m investing into. So one of the categories is relationship, one of the relationships is self-growth, another one is family, and another one is financial resources, and another one is legacy. These different things that I wanna make sure I’m working towards a little bit every day.
And so every six months, so I do this in the New Year,and I do this in June, I’ll sit down and I’ll look at that list, and I’ll do an update, a six-month update of which rituals in my life, how do I turn my values into time by making time for those things that are important to me in my calendar, in those various domains.
Sean: It’s always important to do that midway check-in. I found 20 times in the past, if I just try to do it one time a year, that’s just not enough. So, I’m really intrigued about your schedule routines, but I’m really interested in coming to America back in 1991. I would love hearing just a bit about your own back story and how you ended up here.
Nir: ‘81, I wish ‘91. (laughs)
Sean: My apologies! (laughs)
Nir: I’m kind of on the older side, I’m 41. so yeah, my family came to America in 1981 to pursue the American dream and I’m an American citizen now, very much by choice, but at the time my parents brought me here, not by choice, because I was three years old, I couldn’t make my own decisions back then, but I’m very glad they did, I think. Yeah, I’m a very proud American, and have definitely enjoyed a lot of the fruits of the freedoms we have in this country.
Sean: Do you think even just the ability to take on that risk that your parents took on. that’s instilled in you a bit?
Nir: Oh absolutely, so my parents… My parents backstory was my father was a pilot, so he was very successful and then he started, after the military, he started a spark plug company and then he sold that company and he had about $100,000 back in 1981, and he came to America with that money with my mom as well, of course, and they had built this company together, they came to this country, and they started another business and they lost everything. They almost had to sell the home and leave America because they just almost lost everything. They actually got scammed by their American business partners. Took them for a ride, and they took advantage of these immigrants that basically barely spoke English and didn’t know how business worked in the United States and they trusted too much and they basically got they just got creamed and they almost lost everything, and then my parents started another business and seeing them through the lows and then to recover from that and be able to send three boys off to college has always been an inspiration to me.
And I remember my father, kind of always, I remember him asking me this question of “What’s money for?”
This was always, I remember a few times the things that he said that really stuck with me. This is one of the things he asked me is, like what is money for? As a kid, it was to buy stuff, right? Isn’t that what you do with money? You buy things.
And he said, “No, money is freedom, that’s all money is. Money is a vehicle to help you do whatever you want to do in your life, whatever is important and valuable to you. It’s not about stuff.”
And I think that was really, really important in terms of the way I thought about what drove me, and what the higher purposes of why I do what I do. I think in many ways, the fact that I’ve sold two companies and now that has allowed me the freedom to do what I really want to do, which is to… One of my mantras that I repeat every day is my purpose, and my purpose is to explain the world so that it could be made better. And that idea like that, now I have the freedom to do that. I didn’t have the freedom when I was running my two companies because it was just about helping the business survive and making sure I could make payroll for my employees, but today the fact that I can live out my purpose of explaining the world so it could be made better is to me the freedom to live out my values.
Sean: So with that freedom framework, how do you assess new opportunities? What you’re gonna go towards next? Because I’m assuming most times in new endeavors, there’s gonna be that little bit of difficulty at the beginning. So how do you assess that, and how do you know where to continue?
Nir: Yeah, so there’s a few methods. So Derek Sivers talks about if it’s not a “hell yes,” it’s a no. And I think that’s a pretty good framework to weed out a lot of stuff that sounds good. And then if you ask yourself in your gut is a hell yes is it? Is it something I’m really excited about? Or is it… Oh, it can make me a little bit more money or could give me a little bit more status or whatever it might be. That’s a pretty good filter. And then I think another really good filter that I use is my time.
So one of the reasons I’m not a proponent of vision boards and five-year plans, and Regrets of the Dying, and all these really long-term things that humans are really bad at planning for the long-term. Many studies and social sciences have found that we’re really bad at planning for the long term, and in fact that long-term goals actually can backfire because they make you feel good today, and they don’t acknowledge the work you have to do to get to that goal.
So we know that, in fact, envisioning yourself as having an amazing body and being in perfect shape actually gives you a little bit of that joy of actually being in shape, even though you’re imagining it, it’s not real, it’s just la la land. As opposed to what you really need to do is not to imagine the outcome, it’s about imagining the time you will spend, the activities that you will actually do to get to that goal.
So one of the constraints to answer your question of how do I filter out opportunities is I look at my calendar and part of the beauty of the system that I talk about in my book, around time boxing is that it makes you force yourself to make trade-offs because without a time box, count, and I see this all the time, people just have tons of white space in their day, and when that happens, they think, “Oh I can definitely take on more, yeah, sure, bring me new opportunities. Yeah, just a pile them on! And what they’re really doing is just setting themselves up for failure and that feeling, I used to know that feeling, right? I’d get to the end of my day and I have a to-do list of 100 thingson my to-do list and I still wouldn’t finish everything on my to-do list. So every day what I was doing was reinforcing my identity that I’m a loser, right, every day that you don’t do what you say you’re gonna do, you’re basically acknowledging that it’s okay to lie to yourself.
That’s why I hate to-do lists. I think to-do lists really backfire on people because people don’t use to-do lists correctly, because they’re not planning their time, they’re only planning the outputs, not the inputs.
And so one of the ways that I can say no to things is to say, “You know what, I’m looking at my calendar and my current priorities don’t allow me time for this other opportunity. I’m really sorry, it’s just gonna have to wait.
Sean: Yeah, I think the time box calendar is incredibly beneficial. I’m really interested, though about having those huge blank spaces on your calendar. You said do not do those. What about for the creatives who are trying to find those serendipitous types of new opportunities that might come across?
Nir: Yeah, even more so.
I think it’s the creatives that… And we’re all creatives to some degree, but especially people who think this myth, which is total bologna, that I need big spots of time in my day that’s unscheduled, unstructured in order to do my best work. That ain’t true.
That Steven Pressfield quote that, I’m gonna butcher it here, but around how he seems to find inspiration every day at 9AM when he has his butt in his chair. It’s not about waiting for inspiration to happen. And I would argue that you need that structure. We know, just think about it common sense-wise, right?
The last time you had a wide open day with nothing to do, I bet that was your least productive day, right?
It’s typically the days when we have lots to do and we say, “Okay, I gotta do this, I gotta do this, this is what’s on my schedule.” That’s when we’re most productive. And look, there’s nothing wrong with planning out creative time. In fact, I would argue that that’s what professional artists and creatives do. The rookies are the ones to say… “Oh, I’ll just do it when I feel the urge, when I feel creative.” Then it never happens because you know what you’ll do. You’ll putts around on Facebook, you’ll check Instagram, you’ll google something, go watch a YouTube video dreaming about what you wanna do instead of actually doing it.
And so it turns out that you can plan time for creative work. So, for example, in my day, 9AM to 11:30 is my time to write. Now I don’t know necessarily what I’m going to write. It doesn’t really matter, sometimes I don’t write anything, right?
I’ll be completely honest with you. Sometimes I sit down at my desk… it’s not coming, right? But if I don’t make the time to sit at my desk with my butt in my chair in front of the screen and write well then certainly nothing’s gonna happen. Certainly no writing is going to happen.
So on the one day in 100 that nothing happens, okay, that’s part of the cost. But I get 99 days of productive work where as it’s exactly the opposite for people who don’t plan their time. One day out of 100 they’ll actually do something, 99 days out of the 100 by not planning, they won’t do anything.
Sean: You mentioned you sit your butt in the chair to do your writing, anyone who’s work I really respect your holding true to that I am always interested, what does that framework look like when you’re sitting down in the chair, do you have a general thought in terms of direction you might wanna go that day with the writing?
Nir: Well, it changes based on where I am in the writing process, so if I’m very early on, it might be outlining, I might use just pen and paper to sketch out some ideas. Typically if it’s very early, I’ll be using a lot of paper. I just find it’s a better medium to do mind maps or outlines and then once I have some kind of basic framework, then I’ll transition onto my computer, where I’ll have some kind of focused, some kind of distraction free-focused writing. Either way it’s a Google Doc, and I’ll use an app called Self-control, where you push this app, it’s free and it blocks out all the distracting websites for that given period of time.
There’s lots of techniques I talk about in the book about how to block out distraction by making what’s called a pact with yourself, a pre-commitment and so many times, I’ll write with another author. So I’ll sit down two days a week, a fellow author comes over to my house, we sit down together, we don’t work together, we just work near each other, we’re not working on the same thing, but just having that person also busy at work is very helpful sometimes. So yeah, that’s basically what it looks like.
Sean: Where did you hear the idea for that? I’m not sure I’ve heard someone else mentioned that before.
Nir: Yeah, yeah, so I comb for about the past four years, I did research into these various techniques to beat distraction. That’s where this indistractable model comes from. And the last step, there are four key steps, the last step is about making these pre-commitments and it’s actually an ancient technique. It comes all the way from Ulysses in the story of The Odyssey by Homer from 2500 years ago, Ulysses has to sail his ship past the island of the sirens and the sirens are these mythical creatures that sing this magical song. Anybody who hears the siren song crashes their ship onto the shore of the sirens island and Ulysses knows about this, he knows this is going to happen, so he makes it what we call a Ulysses pact. He tells his crew to put beeswax in their years and he tells them to bind him to the mast of his ship, and he says, “No matter what happens, don’t let me go,” and it works.
He’s bound to the mass of the ship and his crew does not let him go and he’s able to guide his ship and his crew past this danger past this potential distraction and get his crew safely home.
And so we can do this in our own lives, we can make what’s called the price pact, where there’s some kind of financial disincentive to getting distracted, we can use an effort pact where there’s some kind of work involved to getting distracted, or what’s called an identity pact, which is probably the most useful I think of the three, is when we make an identity for ourselves because after all, long-term behavior change, is identity change, and so we see this, this comes from the research around the psychology of religion, that when someone calls themselves a devout Muslim, an observed Christian, even a vegetarian, it makes them less likely to slip off track. So vegetarian doesn’t wake up every day and say, I wonder if all have some bacon this morning. No, a vegetarian does not eat meat. It is who they are.
And so when we can make an identity for ourselves, calling ourselves for example, indistractable, the title of my book, that’s why I called it this, is that when we call ourselves this, it makes us much easier to abide by what we say we’re going to do because it is part of who we are, it’s part of our identity.
This is really part of this national movement, a whole international movement I’m hoping to spark. That it’s kinda like I remember in the early ’80s when I was a kid, I remember in my home we had ashtrays in my home, but my parents didn’t smoke, and the reason we had ashtrays is because back in the early 80s, if someone came to your house, they just expected to light up a cigarette in your living room. This is just what people did, it was not even… It was considered rude to not have an ashtray available.
And I remember when my mom first told her friends who smoked, that we are non-smokers and then if you wanna smoke you have to go outside and people were really offended. What you’re gonna tell me to smoke outside? Now, that would be incredibly rude to assume you could smoke inside but that changed because people like my mom had this identity that said, “No, we are non-smokers, this is what we do. I’m sorry if that’s a little different, but that’s who we are.”
And I’m hoping that’s a big reason why I wrote this book. I want to spark this movement of people who say I’m indistractable, I control my attention, I control my time and I control my life. I don’t let all these outside distractions, whether it’s the pings and dings and rings on your phone, whether it’s other people, whether it’s the media, politics, whatever it is I want a movement of people to say, “I’m indistractable, I control my attention in my life.”
Sean: Pings, rings and dings. You got a little catchy jingle you can put up there with the holidays coming. You mentioned about identity, so I wanna know then how did you initially become involved with technology? Now, you’re a brilliant writer. How did you first get involved with technology? I know you mentioned you ended up selling two companies, how did that come to be?
Nir: Well thank you for the kind words. But so my journey into online technology… So my first business was a solar energy business, but I wouldn’t really call that… That’s a different kind of high-tech and it’s energy tech, as opposed to online products, but really was that I went to Stanford for business school, and Stanford is actually the only school I applied to because it was either Stanford or continue running my solar energy business, so I owned it was the only business school I applied to, and I was fortunate enough to get in, and the reason I wanted to go, as I remember back in… This must have been 2005, no, 2006, early 2006. I remember reading about companies like Facebook, getting started, and Google and all these companies and I thought, “Wow, these people can sell bits as opposed to inventory as opposed to atoms. These people are making money on bits rather than atoms.”
And I thought, “That’s amazing,” because here I was, I had this solar energy company and I had a whole warehouse full of solar panels that if I couldn’t sell I’d be personally liable for it. I had terms from the manufacturer that I had to pay them back if I didn’t sell, I’d be in a lot of trouble. And I thought wouldn’t it be amazing to not have any inventory to just write code and be able to make a business and I thought, wow, that’s amazing. So I thought what better place to learn how to do that then in Silicon Valley, and then of course Stanford is kind of the hub of tech innovation, and Palo Alto. And so I applied to Stanford and that’s kind of where I got exposure to that industry. I had very good timing in that when I went to Stanford, there was a class there taught by Dr. BJ Fogg, who’s kind of the godfather of this behavioral design. I don’t know if you call it a movement, or a field, what’s called a field, where people like Kevin Systrom were in the class, he went on to start Instagram. And Ed Baker was one of my classmates, he worked at Facebook, and a lot of people who were in that class kind of learned these tactics around how to design, how to use tech products to design behavior, and that just really fascinated me. And so that was kind of my entry into that world and then in my second year of business school I started, I co-founded another tech company with my classmates as well as my wife.
At the time, this was before apps meant apps on your iPhone because the Apple App Store didn’t even exist yet. This was 2007. The App Store wouldn’t come out for another year, and so we were actually placing virtual goods inside games on the Facebook app platform, and so that’s really where I got exposure to a lot of the people who were building various products and services that it would blow my mind. Two engineers would sit in their basement for a couple of weeks, and crank out a game that would engage ten million people, and I just thought that was unbelievable how they could do that and I wanted to understand what were they doing to do that, noy only to reach people? What was really interesting is that sometimes there were literally thousands of developers making these games, and they were really silly, I don’t know if you remember these, it’s about throwing sheep at each other or virtual farming. It was, it was all pretty ridiculous.
But what was interesting is that some of these games managed to last and engage people and most of them just crashed and they would get millions of users and then we would call them leaky buckets because users came in and then users dripped out and I wanted to understand the difference. Why were some of these people who, some of them ended up being my clients at my second company, why were some of them successful, and why some of them failed?
And that’s where I understood that even though everybody wants things to go viral, business people want one growth, that’s kind of their top priority.
The fact the matter is growth without retention is almost impossible.
You can’t spend enough money if your churn is too high, if you’re leaking customers, you’re wasting money getting them into your product. And this is where most companies, big or small, tend to focus their efforts, most companies, they find it really easy to spend money to acquire customers, but they don’t do hardly anything to figure out how to keep the customers they already have. And of course, it’s a multiple better ROI on your time and your money to figure out how to keep the customers you already have, and almost nobody focuses on that. And so that’s what I really became really curious about and wanted to crack the code on. How do you keep people engaged? And so, I also had the good fortune of having these companies growing in the valley, like Facebook and YouTube and WhatsApp, and Slack and these companies, and Twitter, that were masters of engagement, the engagement rates on these products were unbelievable, unheard of prior to these products and so I kinda had this front row seat and I wanted to learn how they did that. How did they keep people coming back? So that’s the long story of how I got into this field of behavioral design.
Sean: No, I love hearing about that.
There’s almost this recurring theme, and that’s just your overall understanding of trends and where things are going. So I’d really like to hear your perspective, where do you think things are going? I know your recent writing you talk a lot about how technology is impacting us, and even though this does go back in history, anything else that you don’t really work on, but just you see as an overall trend moving forward?
Nir: Overall trend in terms of tech trends or…?
Sean: Yeah, we can stick with tech trends.
Nir: Yeah, I think there’s the stuff that gets over-hyped, that people keep talking about is typically not the stuff that surprises you. It’s usually the stuff that people aren’t expecting. The non-consensus ideas that tend to be the ones that are the most world-changing that people don’t see see coming on the horizon. So clearly there’s gonna be opportunities I think in many different domains.
I think we’re gonna see the proliferation of what I’m really excited about, I think, is I think the integration of biometric information, real-time biometric information. I’m really interested in that right now I’m wearing three different devices on my body right now that are tracking different biometrics like heart rate variability, and heart rate, and different things, and typically… We’ve seen the first generation of that with the Fitbit and step trackers and things like that, but for most people these products are pretty awful, they don’t… Because they all provide what we call lagging indicators. So if you get home at the end of the day, it’s 8PM and your Fitbit says “Hey, you only walked 5000 steps, you need to go walk 5000 more.”
That’s not very useful, it’s too late, right?
What I think we’re going to start seeing the future our products that have leading indicators, there’ll be an integration between a biometric device that says, Hey, we looked at your calendar and we know you have a trip coming up, that means you’re going to have a bit of jet lag. You should probably start sleeping more now because last time you made this trip, your sleep was disrupted so you should start banking more deep sleep now and giving you recommendations on how to do it and when to do it, based on the data it’s collecting on you. Of course you know there’s privacy issues. We have to be concerned about, but I think that there’s a lot of promise for that type of predictive information, and leading indicators as opposed to what we have now, which is mostly lagging indicators.
Sean: Yeah, the leading indicators. I love these questions, ’cause I get to hear about new interesting ideas. Are there any companies if someone wanted to just study this further and see what’s on the horizon that might be interested to look into?
Nir: Yeah, one company that I’ve taken a real interest in is a company that makes this ring called Oura ring. O-U-R-A. And the four-factor is amazing. It’s this little ring to be, now it’s even a biometric device, but it’s tracking your heart rate, and sleep, and steps, and all this stuff in this tiny little ring that they’ve done a beautiful job on. So I think this type of thing where you can’t tell it’s necessarily a technology, it’s pretty non-intrusive. I think that’s a cool a cool tech to check out.
Sean: Awesome, will be sure to keep our eyes on that. So you mentioned non-consensus ideas and you were also talking a lot about the gamification. So, as a writer, where do you find that intersection with your books?
Nir: Well, I, I do use some tactics that I talk about in the book in my writing. So for example, one thing I use, I don’t know if I wouldn’t call it gamification per se, I’m not the biggest fan of gamification, but one technique that I used is this idea of commitment bias and this idea is that when you invest work in something, you become more tied to it. You like it more. And in fact, Dan Ariely calls this the IKEA Effect that we know that when people assemble IKEA furniture, even though it’s just cheap furniture, the fact that you made it yourself you’re proud of it. “Look what I did, right?” And so on both my books, this wasn’t the reason I did this, but it was a by-product. So both books that I wrote after I had an initial draft before I sent it to my publisher, I asked my blog readers if anybody would like to be in my contributor program and the terms of the contributor program, you had to apply, but if you were accepted, then the terms where you would get complete access to my manuscript, my unedited manuscript, and you’d be asked, I think we gave folks three weeks to read it and provide line edits, like big picture details, whatever they want, but I’d want them to read the whole book, and give me edits. And the deal was if you did that, I would put your name in the back of the book and that’s exactly what I did.
So the primary benefit was that the book, both books actually, I did this twice, were just 100% better, right? That if you go back and forth with your editor at a publishing company and the editor says, “Well I don’t like that paragraph and you say, “Well I do, I’m the author.” Well, okay, case closed. It’s your opinion versus mine, but when as an author 20 readers say that paragraph sucks, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, it’s really boring. Well, then that’s pretty good evidence that you should do something about it.
So in both cases I thought I had a pretty good manuscript and it was dramatically revised based on people’s input. When you have 700 people reading it, reading your… This is a real pain to collate all this. But it was very worth it was really hard work for me, not only to see people not liking everything in the book, but also to do all this editing between 700 people’s comments, but at the end of the day, the book was so much better. I revise so much based on people’s input, but then the secondary benefit this comes for a circle to where we started here around how I use some of these tactics.
So who do you think were the most enthusiastic fans of the book when it came out?
Well, it was the people, the 700 people whose name was in the book, and so that was kind of my uber fans that I could engage and say, “Hey guess what? The book is so much better because of your contribution. It’s out now. Get a copy.” I even did a buy one, get one free thing so that they could show their friends and family that their name is in the book. And so they really became my super fans and I owe a lot of gratitude towards their work.
Sean: No, I love the genius in that technique. But how did you handle that mentally? Getting so much… We’ll just call it negative feedback or things that you needed to change. That’s gotta be tough to deal with him.
Nir: Oh, I love it, though, I love it that because you gotta remember. So for an author, the worst thing for an author is when someone finds fault in their work after it’s published.
Sean: Yeah.
Nir: Every time someone finds fault in my work before it’s published, I just dodged a bullet.
That’s wonderful, alright, if somebody says, “Oh you cited the wrong study, or I think you misinterpreted this, or whatever the case might be.” Thank goodness they did that. Because it’s one thing to do it before it’s published, it’s a whole another thing when the New York Times gets a hold of it, and read the book and finds an error, that’s horrible. So I was very thankful. The more feedback, the more mistakes they caught the better in my eyes.
Sean: Yeah, so your work as a whole. I actually had a friend who’s in tech send it to me, I was working on a consumer product.
And your writing is almost this guy just to help companies they create the behavior and then also benefits the users, and it really educates us. So that’s why I love your writing, as a whole, but I wanna know how do you go from tech and then end up becoming a writer?
Nir: Yeah, that’s a good question.
And so sometimes people who want to get started in writing will ask me for advice, how do I follow this path? And I don’t know if it’s replicable, to be honest. I was really fortunate in that I started two companies, I got on my feet financially after those companies were acquired and only then did I get serious about writing and the only reason I got serious about writing was that I asked myself if money was no object, what would I do? And what I really wanted to do was to explain the world so that it could be made better.
But I didn’t write when I was running my last company, who had time? I was too busy trying to make ends meet. And so I really didn’t start writing until after I had some financial cushion.
We weren’t independently wealthy, yet. I knew I would have to get to work at some point but I thought, “Well, I can certainly take off a year or two and nothing would happen and I could write for a bit,” but what was so interesting is that when I took that leap it wasn’t actually much of a leap, I just knew that I would be spending more than I would be making for a few years.
Interestingly enough I never… Actually that began to support me because I was doing something that I really enjoyed. It turns out people took note and I started getting more consulting engagements and I thought that would be temporary for a while, but then people asked for me to write a book out of my blog and then I self-published my book and then after I self-published the book, I was invited to teach these classes at Stanford for five years, I taught there, and then after that, my book got professionally published and got picked up by Random House, and then it kind of just snowballs from there, but none of it was planned, it was… Well, let me take some time off to answer this question of, what would life be like? I almost thought it was a sabbatical, right?
I busted my butt. Starting two companies finished business school, and now I wanted to take a year to just explore something else. But it turns out that the something else turned out to be something not only that I really enjoy, but actually became my next career.
Sean: I love those unforeseen surprises and I’m wondering how self-belief played in all of this. Obviously just being able to take some time off. You have to have some type of cushion, but did you think you’d really end up doing great things along the lines of writing?
Nir: No, definitely not.
Sean: Really?
Nir: Yeah, I just started blogging and when I look back and read, I actually left these blog posts on my blog, but they’re horrible. Every once in a while I’ll go back and read one of my first blog posts. They are just, they’re terrible.
They’re so bad… But I was just writing for fun, because in many ways, when you get started in something that’s when you have no expectations because nobody cares. Nobody is reading your stuff, and so that’s where you can experiment and you can play around and you can do whatever you want because nobody’s watching and then you can start to improve your style. You can see what’s more enjoyable for you. And so my rule has always been around writing is to follow my curiosity. The reason I write is not because I know something, it’s because I want to know something, right? I take on these topics because I’m struggling with something in my own life and the way I find the answer is to read as much as I can and write and process for myself around what I’m learning, and many times I come up with a what if actually this belief that everybody thinks is true, it turns out it’s actually not true, or it’s actually the opposite, or it’s not helpful. And so that’s the kind of stuff I like to share with others to help them improve their wives as well.
But really I write for me, first and foremost. And so when you don’t have an audience, and many times I try to remind myself now that I do have an audience and I have 1,000 plus blog subscribers and hope to sell a quarter million copies. Now, I have to intentionally remind myself. Look, I’m writing for me. If other people like it, that’s great, but the book will be a success if it answers my question. Period. And I don’t really care about the external metrics. Now, that’s not always easy to do. I have to convince myself of this, but the nice part about getting started is that you don’t have to convince yourself because it is true, there’s in fact a luxury, I think that a lot of people don’t appreciate for when you first get started.
Sean: That curiosity and writing for yourself, maybe this is the answer to my next question and then. You seem to be one of the most articulate and understanding of your work out of all the authors I’ve talked to. Is this something, a skill you naturally had or is this something you actively work on?
Nir: Well thanks, I don’t know, maybe I think I… That’s interesting, I haven’t… What do the other authors say about their work?
Sean: I feel like I could pick up any page in any of your books, and just start reading a few sentences, and you would dive into every bit of research into that. You understand it in and out, and I think that’s incredibly hard to do even when you spend the amount of work you do on your books. So, I’m wondering this has anything to do with you lecturing at Stanford and just having to revise your writing that way, as well?
Nir: Yeah, okay, so I write the kind of stuff I enjoy reading, the kind of stuff that convinces me, and so a lot of my writing is my argument to myself and for me, I need data, so a lot of books out there, particularly in the personal development and product design space and business books, it’s a lot about anecdote.
It’s “Here’s what works for me. So it’s gonna work for you.” And I hate that stuff, because I… I want the peer review journal study citation, right? It’s great that it worked for you but you could be an outlier. This could be terrible advice. Where is the study? And so I need that to convince me and I would think that’s what other people need is what everything else is just here say is just my personal anecdote. And so, that’s what convinces me now that means that for me to crank out a book takes about five years in all that lit review and getting my bearing straight. I’m basically earning a PhD in the topic, from all the research I’ve been reading on one particular topic, the topic of distraction. After five years, I better know my stuff because I’ve read everything I can possibly find, about it.
It would be much easier if I was like, “Okay let me just sit down in a cabin in the woods and just type out what I think about distraction,” but frankly, to do that, I would just be regurgitating stuff that everybody already knows. It’s by diving into the research and saying “Actually, To-Do list don’t really work and willpower is probably a myth and all these things that most people don’t believe or don’t know yet because they just haven’t been exposed to the literature but the research is all there.” Part of the reason I have an opportunity as a writer is because there’s so much academic research that nobody reads, and that’s my job, my job is to explain the world so it can be made better by showing people what academia is revealing to us. And of course, the scientific method doesn’t mean that this is stuff is conclusive, many times these things are revised, but to the best of what we know today, here’s what we have, here’s what’s out there.
And unfortunately, it sometimes can take decades for what academia already knows, and typically, the average PhD is a horrible writer. If you’ve ever read an academic journal, it’s a slog. It’s really hard to read an academic journal, and many times I think actually that’s done, interestingly enough, because they don’t actually want you to really understand what’s going on. Many, I think academics, and this has come from years now of reading academic journals, I think they write the way they write because if they wrote simply it’d be like a one-page paper.
But in order to officiate the fact that the results are really not that interesting, they have to embed so many, so much language that doesn’t need to be there, that no one can understand so that I don’t know that they sound smarter or something anyway, but that’s my opportunity my opportunity is to be able to sift through thousands of studies so I can find maybe 50 in my book, that really I think can impact people’s lives.
Sean: No, I appreciate you being so open and how far and down these rabbit holes you have to go to understand that. I think that’s a good perspective for anyone trying to get better in a certain skill, and understand the amount of time. I’m also just curious about just your ability to articulate. Do you practice public speaking or doing interviews? Because you seem to be very good at this, as well.
Nir: Thank you, I appreciate that. I think being a good speaker inherently makes you a good writer, and vice versa. So I try and write like I speak. And so that actually makes writing so much easier because you just bring out the words right, you just bring out the voice in your head.
And so, I think I’ve had to actually re-train myself to do that because I think in school we learned in the first paragraph I’m going to state by hypothesis and here’s my three points and then paragraph two I’m gonna state my point A, then my point B, then my point and then point C, and then at the end of the last paragraph I’m gonna read, I’m gonna summarize what I just said. Well, nobody actually talks like that in real life, right? That it would be a really boring person to listen to.
And so I try and combine the human element of why this is personally interesting to me, as well as the academic points. And of course, it’s hard to maintain that balance, but yeah, other than that, I think it’s a lot of practice. I do do a lot of speaking, my profession these days, I guess, in terms of how I get paid is mostly through public speaking today, and I really enjoy it. I think I do less academic lecturing today because when you teach grad students, a lot of times it’s about… “Well, is it gonna be on the test?” As opposed to when I teach industry or conferences I can see people’s eyes light up and say, “Oh, that’s what I’ve been looking for,” and I love that audience interaction and even it’s interesting, when I first started speaking, I would get really upset when people were on their phones. It is, “Oh my God, how dare you? I’m up here on stage, I prepared for this presentation for countless hours. Now, how dare you look at your phone as opposed to listening to me?” And now I’ve really flipped that… Because I think actually the phone is the best thing to ever happen to public speakers, because it tells you you’re boring and so I love it.
If I see if I look out at the audience and I see very few people looking at their phone, that means I’m doing a great job, but if I start seeing a lot of people are looking at their devices, well I gotta step it up. Either the contents not interesting, my presentation is not interesting. Sometimes this is real-time feedback for me, and that’s incredibly helpful. I don’t get that kind of feedback when I write, you can’t… When I’m writing something, I don’t know in real time whether people are resonating with it, but when I’m speaking, I actually can get some of that feedback now, thanks to these devices.
Sean: Yeah, that feedback loop is incredibly valuable right there.
So you mentioned how you identify today as mostly a speaker, then also an author. You seem to be able to combine multiple things. So you started in tech now you’re in writing and then you’ve also been an active investor. Even in companies like Eventbrite and Product Hunt. Are there commonalities amongst all those just to help you rise to the top of the field?
Nir: Oh, definitely. So, I only invest in companies that use the health model that’s my investor thesis because that’s what I know, that’s kind of my competitive advantage. I don’t know anything about Crypto, I don’t know anything about pharmaceuticals. What I know about is how to design habit forming products. So those are the kind of companies I look for the ones that as a competitive advantage need to build habits in their business model.
Sean: Very good point there about the competitive advantage. I know we need to wrap up here in a minute. Your first book Hooked was a huge influence on me. It’s funny, it seems like every few months, I’m still gifting that out to someone and then the new book Indistractable: How to Control your Attention and Choose Your Life. Are there any final points? I know this was a book that was incredibly valuable to me, but you just wanna lead the listeners with for them to go pick up.
Nir: I really appreciate that, Sean. Thank you so much, I’m so glad I had an impact on your life. And I think the lesson I’d love to leave folks with when it comes to how to build habit-forming technology, as well as how to break these bad habits in our life that lead to distraction, is that we are in control that we actually have much more power than we know that most people, when it comes to the site this idea of distraction many people now, I think, in the media is subscribes us to this idea that we’re powerless, than it’s addicting all of us that it’s hijacking our brain, and I just don’t think that’s true.
And so what I wanted to do was to give people a tech positive approach to get the best out of these technologies without letting them get the best of us, but it requires us to believe that we have agency and power over them, and I certainly think we do.
Sean: Yeah, no, it starts inside. Well, there’s so many great takeaways action steps, workbooks in the book, so I highly recommend you guys checking it out but Nir, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.
Nir: My pleasure, thank you so much, Sean!