#148 Indistractible: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life with Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal (0:00)

For most people, it's not a problem. For most people, we like them. Just like people like watching television, and people like watching reading books, and like watching football on TV, there's nothing necessarily wrong with these things unless they become a distraction. And so I'm not one of these tech critics that says, oh my god, technology is melting your brain, it's addicting you, I think that's a bunch of bullshit.

Really, I think we can use these technologies to our benefit as long as we adopt some productive habits that help us put these technologies in their place.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:34)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_2 (0:35)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Nir Eyal (0:41)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (0:43)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:47)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Nir Eyal. Nir is a best-selling author, speaker and investor known for books like Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, as well as Indestructible.

Nir, welcome to the show.

Nir Eyal (1:02)

Thanks. Great to be here.

Siim Land (1:04)

Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how did you become, you know, being a writer?

Nir Eyal (1:11)

Sure. So I am what you call a behavioral designer and I help companies build products through different technologies to help people form healthy habits in their lives.

So I've worked with companies like the New York Times and fitness apps and banking apps and all kinds of different products and services to help people form healthy habits, healthy routines in their lives through the use of technology.

And let's see, so that was my first book. It's about how to build habit forming products. That was called Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products.

And my next book that was just published is called Indistractable and that's about how to break bad habits. So I took my same insights from behavioral design, consumer psychology. I taught for many years at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the design school there as well.

And so I take those same insights and I kind of show you the Achilles heel of how to hack back distraction so that you can do what you say you're going to do in life.

Siim Land (2:04)

Yeah, it's quite funny. And you're so true in a sense that the social media companies and all other platforms, they're actually trying to get people hooked to using their products and basically trying to create this very irresistible behavior routines that people just want to follow.

Nir Eyal (2:24)

Yeah, and you know what? For most people, it's not a problem. For most people, we like them. Just like people like watching television and people like watching reading books and watching football on TV, there's nothing necessarily wrong with these things unless they become a distraction. And so I'm not one of these tech critics that says, oh my God, technology is melting your brain, it's addicting you, I think that's a bunch of bullshit.

Really, I think we can use these technologies to our benefit as long as we adopt some productive habits that help us put these technologies in their place.

Siim Land (2:57)

Yeah, that's so true. But before we get into that, why don't we start with your first book, Hooked?

So what's it about and how do these companies create habit forming products?

Nir Eyal (3:10)

Yeah, so it's really about what's called a hooked model. So in the book, I talk about how we can use behavioral psychology to help people form healthy habits. So I profile companies like FitBot that helps people get hooked to exercising in the gym or products like Kahoot, which is the world's largest educational software that helps kids get hooked to in-classroom learning.

The New York Times gets people hooked to a daily habit of consuming the news. So for most businesses, they don't have a problem like Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram do where people are sometimes overusing their products. No, the problem that most companies have out there is that nobody gives a shit about their product, that nobody uses it. And so that's really what I wrote Hooked to solve is I wanted to help the kind of companies that are building products and services to help improve people's lives by unlocking the secrets of companies like Facebook and Google and YouTube, et cetera, showing people how they can apply the very same psychology so that their products and services are the kind of products and services that people use because they want to, not because they have to. And so the way you do that is through this four-part model called the Hooked Model.