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Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to how to live a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 75. We reached our 75th episode having released episodes every other Tuesday since November, 2021 without fail. Thank you very much for your support when the top 3% of all podcasts are listened to in over one 40 countries. For this special episode. We have an exceptional guest Who needs no introduction. Nir Eyal. Nir is a New York times bestselling author investor. An expert at the intersection of psychology, technology and business. his groundbreaking book hooked Has been used by companies like Google, Microsoft, worldwide to create engaging products,
His latest bestseller in distractible Is helping millions worldwide. And as the focus of our discussion today,
Near has invested in innovative companies like Kahoot. Canva. Evan bright. He's also taught in Stanford's graduate school of business and the hassle planter Institute of design. In our conversation, we talk about how to be. In distractible. Traction was a distraction. Internal triggers and external triggers that make us distracted willpower time boxing. Not running away from technology, but making it work for us. And ultimately how to have agency over our life.
Now here's the incredible near Nir Eyal.
Hi Nir, welcome to the How to Live podcast.
We're going to discuss all your good work, including Hooked and Indestructible, but before all that, I thought we could start with something personal.
I love how you and your friends do picnics and then you have one deep question that you ask so you get to connect deeper with each other. So maybe we start with one of
Nir Eyal: Sure, yeah.
Sharad Lal: What are you thankful your parents taught you?
Nir Eyal: My parents taught me so much, but just to fill everyone in, we do this thing called the kibbutz, and we get together with other couples on a regularly scheduled occasion.
So it's in the calendar. Every week, it's at the same time and place. You bring your own food, and we just get together. Typically, in advance, somebody will send around a topic, watch this Ted talk, read this article, or just something to spur conversation.
And it always goes deep. And I think that's really fed my soul. What's really on our minds? Because I think to answer your question in a roundabout way, my parents taught me the value of adult friendships,
Children need to see That friendships are a critical part of adult life. We think about having friends as something you do in childhood. I remember with my parents every Friday we had a sacred dinner where you could do whatever you wanted after dinner, but you had to be at Friday night dinner.
That was a family event. And always there was someone invited to that dinner. And we'd have a nice meal. But then after the meal, when the dessert was coming out, there was always some topic of conversation, kind of like what I do with the kibbutz now, what was happening in the news or some kind of philosophical question that someone would bring.
My parents really modelled that for me. I remember we would go away as kids and go play somewhere, but the parents stuck around and continued to have a conversation. Those people who would come to dinner, the usual faces, became my extended family, and I am still friends with those people today as a 46-year-old.
And so that's certainly something I'm conscious of teaching my daughter as well.
Sharad Lal: It's so wonderful. I love that when you say it. I connected a little bit of this with Gottman's work, where they talk about when you go on dates and have these open, big questions.
You get to know your spouse better, and I think doing it with friends is even more powerful. Your book, Indistractable, is such a wonderful book. I'd love for you to share what motivated you to write something about being indestructible.
Nir Eyal: Sure. Yeah. So I write books not because of what I know, but because of what I want to know.
For me, my books are very personal. It's problems that I have in my own life that I need an answer to. Yeah. And so when I looked for this answer around distraction, I,
didn't find a good answer. I read other people's books on the topic and they basically said the same thing.
Stop using technology, stop checking email, stop using social media. And they were all written by professors with tenure who have, you know, guaranteed jobs. Well, thanks stupid. I will get fired if I don't check email as helpful advice. So I wanted a tech positive approach that I could actually live with.
But if you ask, what was the inciting incident? It happened when I was with my daughter one afternoon, and we had this little daddy-daughter time plan, just some nice time together.
And I remember we had this activity book of different thingsAnd one of the activities was to ask each other this question: if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim.
But I can't tell you what my daughter said. At that moment, for whatever reason, I just started checking my phone real quick. Let me just do this one thing, honey. And by the time I looked up for my device, she was gone. I was sending a very clear message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was.
And she went to go play with some toys outside. And so that's when I realised I had to reassess my own relationship with distraction. To be honest with you, it wasn't just with my daughter. It would happen when I would say, Today's gonna be the day that I work on that big project that I've been delaying on. But yet, 20, 30, 45 minutes later, I'm still checking the news, or checking email, as opposed to doing the frickin work I know I need to do. And if you ask me today, what superpower I think is most important, it's the power to be indestructible.
Because you can have access to all the world's information, which we now do, between the internet, Google, and ChatGPT, The answers are all out there. The problem is not that we don't know what to do.
The problem is that we don't know how to get out of our own way. You can give people the best advice, but if they don't implement that advice, then it's not right. It's a big waste of time. the power to harness your attention to decide what kind of life you want to live.
So it wasn't until I learned these techniques that
I'm in the best shape of my life at 46 years old.
I have a better relationship with my daughter and my wife than ever before. My relationships with my friends are closer, and I work better because I'm consistent.
I live with personal integrity, and that's what being indestructible is all about.
Sharad Lal: about. for painting that picture. What a wonderful story, Neer. And as you were talking, I love what you said. There's theories out there.
You studied behavioural sciences, and that's the path you took for your book. How does behavioural science help us control ourselves?
Nir Eyal: actually control ourselves? By which we break bad habits is very different from the process in which we start new habits.
So new habits it's about a reward, right? And we've seen this a million times, the habit loops around, you need a cue, you need an action and then a reward for personal habits. But breaking habits is very different. It's not the same process. It's not about the reward anymore.
It's about interrupting the trigger and the action.
The stimulus and the response. And that's a completely different process. And so we have to, you can't just use the same tools for a different job. So that's really what I wanted to offer is an approach that's based on Decades of consumer psychology research and is over 30 pages of peer reviewed citations in my book because I didn't want it to just be like most business books.
I need to see the studies, right? I don't want anecdotes; I want peer-reviewed studies. So that was really important to me, and I wanted to make sure it helped me. That was the purpose of my writing the book.
Fundamentally, the goal was achieved when it could change my own life. So not only does everything in the book, period, come from these peer-reviewed studies, but it also includes some things that I have adopted in my own life and have made it so much better.
Sharad Lal: I found that part interesting where you talked about breaking habits. We get distracted, not so much for reward. But to move away from discomfort, to move away from pain, and that makes us think about it fundamentally differently. So if you can talk a little bit about that.
Nir Eyal: This is where I was really surprised. I thought I understood.
Okay, here's how to break bad habits and what you should do. But it wasn't until I really started with the first principles that I realized why we get distracted. It's such a fascinating question.
In fact, we know that Plato, the Greek philosopher, asked the very same question two thousand and fifty years ago. We think, oh, distraction is because of our cell phones or because of whatever's happening in the news. No. This has been happening for at least the past two thousand and fifty years because that's the first recorded case of people getting distracted, and I bet you they were getting distracted before that, too.
But Plato talks about acracia, this tendency to do things against our better interests. And he contemplates, why is that? And we really haven't answered that question very well. So my attempt at answering this question was to say,let's go deeper than just, why do we get distracted?
What is the seat of human motivation? If you ask most people, you'll probably get some kind of answer that sounds like carrots and sticks, right? We want to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Sigmund Freud said this and called it the pleasure principle.
Jeremy Bentham said something like this. It turns out, it's completely wrong. If you look neurologically inside the brain, now we know through fMRI studies how the brain actually works on a neurological basis. It's not about the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
It's not about carrots and sticks.
Consider that the carrot is the stick. It's not a carrot and stick.
What do I mean by that? The very pursuit of pleasure, wanting, craving, lusting, desire, hunger is itself psychologically destabilising. We say, love hurts. There's a very famous song. Love hurts. It's true. Because wanting something is uncomfortable. So the brain doesn't get us to do what feels good, but The brain gets us to do what feels good.
What that means is that all human behaviour is driven by a desire to escape discomfort. If that is true, that means time management is pain management.
Money management is pain management, and weight management is pain management. It's all pain management, which is the first step to becoming indestructible. It's called mastering internal triggers, or they will become your master.
Those studies find, 10 percent of the time that you check your phone, it is because it actually dinged a ring. And studies have verified this 90 percent of the time you check your phone. It's not because of what's happening outside of us because of what's happening inside of us, inside our own heads,
That is the driver of 90 percent of our distractions. We're not thinking about the internal triggers and that turns out to be the source of the overwhelming majority of our distractions.
Distraction, it's not a technology problem. It's not a moral failing. There's nothing broken about your brain. Don't believe the hype, this overdiagnosis of adult ADHD. We can talk about that in a bit. I know that's controversial. The vast majority of distraction is simply that you have not learned the skill of dealing with discomfort.
So that has to be step one. Master internal triggers or they will become your master.
Sharad Lal: master. That is a big point that you just made. And there was this stat which I didn't read in the book that 90 percent of our distraction comes from internal triggers and 10 percent is external. So it doesn't matter, technology or next, we have AI. It's within us that we need to master. So I found that very interesting.
We talked about mastering distraction, and of course, you talked about mindfulness techniques, which I found very interesting. But what I found even more interesting was that our brain looks for that uncertain reward. So instead of finding it outside, why don't we focus and find it in our work?
Why don't we find something novel about our work? And that way we can get more focused on our work. So if you can talk a little bit about that.
Nir Eyal: So the, if we can find it, great.I talk about in the tech, in the book, there's a dozen different techniques about how you can master internal triggers. And one of them is to learn to reimagine the task, to think about it differently.
How do you do that? One of the techniques, and again, there's over a dozen in the book, is to learn how to play anything. And this comes from the work of Ian BOGOs at Georgia Tech, and Dr. BOGOs tells us that the way you. Using a reward is not to have a spoonful of sugar. We've all heard the Mary Poppins technique.
If you just make a reward for something, then you'll be more motivated to do it. And that can work partially for short term behaviours.
It's the stupid trophy at the end of a race. If you give that to kids and adults, the trophy becomes the motivation, not the joy of running.
When we say, just do it for fun, people work on it longer, they have better results, they're judged to be more creative. So extrinsic rewards for creative tasks or long term tasks can actually backfire. What we want to do instead is to learn how to play anything. it turns out Bogos tells us that in order to play something, It doesn't have to be enjoyable.
What? That doesn't make any sense. It turns out all it has to do is to harness our attention long enough to help us complete the task. Now, if that is already intrinsically in the behaviour, great. That's no problem. This is where the concept of flow comes in.
That's nice, If you can find it, the problem is people think, Oh, I can apply flow to anything and that is false. If you read the book flow, he talks about people playing basketball and people painting and he talks about people doing things they enjoy doing.
Ain't nobody got a problem sticking to stuff they like doing. The problem is doing the stuff we don't like doing. It's the stuff that's difficult.
It's a totally different toolkit that we need to perform difficult behaviours. According to Bogost, instead of trying to escape the discomfort, a much better technique is to learn how to play the task.
And you do that in two ways. one, you add constraints. By adding a constraint, you make it an environment for play.
So when you can put a constraint around a difficult task, a time, a place constraint, some other kind of constraints, right? That's the first step. The second thing you can do is to look for the variability. To delve into the mystery of that task.
So for me, writing is really hard work, right? Every author knows that to write an original piece, to write a blog post, to write a script, It's really tough. All I want to do is, watch something on YouTube or do anything but the task at hand.
But when I can focus on the mystery, the uncertainty, the variability behind what I'm writing, that's when it becomes a game.
And I don't have to enjoy it. It just has to sustain my attention long enough for me to do the task.
Sharad Lal: That's such a wonderful point. And I loved when you talked about you thinking of it as a mystery and you solve it and that gets you into it.
I'm wondering how we can take these two—things that we talked about and used in the corporate world—and use them in the corporate world. How can people go to their jobs every day, have people to deal with, and put constraints on themselves so they can get a disproportionate reward, which gets them excited? If any get a disproportionate reward, which gets them excited, any example. To make time for traction is to turn your values into time.
Nir Eyal: So when you have a time constraint, you add a constraint as opposed to what most people do. They say, Oh, I'll get to it when I find time, right? You're never going to find the time.
I'll get to it. I'll scroll Facebook.
I'll watch a YouTube video. I'll do everything, but. when I say I'm going to work on this task from 9 a. m. to 9 30 a. m. And the challenge is the constraint is how far can I get when I do nothing but that task without distraction, that becomes a great constraint, the time constraint.
And then one of the ways we add variability is by letting curiosity drive us. So one of my favourite Dorothy Parker quotes is that the cure for boredom is curiosity. There's no cure for curiosity. So whenever you feel bored, If you can lean in to the
Whether it's, ah, making these sales calls is so boring or making this slide presentation sucks. If you can find the mystery, the unknown, the uncertainty, the curiosity, that's the fun, right? That's, that is where the play comes
Sharad Lal: we've touched upon time boxing and maybe we go deeper into this
Do you have a planning cycle to it? How long, what are the brass tracks of time
Nir Eyal: All right, so let's start with the big picture here. What are we talking about? What is a distraction? So the best way to understand something is to understand the antonym. If you ask people what is the opposite of distraction, they'll tell you it's focus.
That's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is traction, right? Traction and distraction. Both words end in the same six letters.
A C T I O N that spells action. Reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us, it is an action that we ourselves take. So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Towards your values, helps you become the kind of person you want to become.
Distraction is anything else. So when it comes to making a time box calendar, making a to do list sucks. Okay.
Now, let me be very clear: Taking things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper is great and wonderful, but that's where most people stop.
And then what does that say? If you have this big long list of all the things you said you were going to do, that you didn't
Sharad Lal: You're never happy.
Nir Eyal: You start thinking loser. Start thinking there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you.
So getting things out of your brain, onto a piece of paper, and into an app is fantastic. That's step one. Step two is putting it on your calendar. Because you cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.
So if you have a calendar with white space, You cannot say you got distracted. There has to be something on your calendar. I want you to put time, live out your values. What are values?
Values are attributes of the person you want to become. so this is where I give these three life domains of you, Your relationships and then your work. So looking at these three life domains, you can ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time?
And this forces you to operate under a constraint to do list.
As opposed to a time box calendar, it forces you to say, if I spend time with my kids, that means I can't work on my business. It's forcing you to make a trade off. That's part of being a grown up.
And Most people abdicate that responsibility.
Do it! I'm not going to tell you not to, but do it according to your values and your schedule, not someone else's. And here's the kicker, okay, here's what's going to blow people's minds.
The goal is not to finish. Your metric of success, so with a to do list, is how many QBoxes I checked off. And then, so what do you do? They do the easy stuff. They do urgent tasks.
As opposed to with a time box calendar. The goal is to not finish the task.
Here's why people who use a timebox calendar finish more than people who keep a to do list. When you say to yourself, I will work on just that task, for as long as I said I would, without distraction. Now that becomes a metric of success, and for the first time you have a feedback loop.
As opposed to people who use a to-do list, here's what happens. Here's what I used to do. I'd work on something for ten minutes. Oh, then I have this ping of an email. Let me just check that real quick.
And, so I never can track how long things actually take me to complete.
We have what's called the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy says that it takes people, on average, three times longer to finish a task than they estimate because they have no clue how long things take. With a time box calendar, you're going to work on those sales calls for 30 minutes.
The point here is, that when you work on that task, you are only doing that task without distractions.
I was going to make this slide presentation, which has 30 slides. I finished three slides in 30 minutes, which means I need nine more time blocks to finish the entire task.
This is the first time that people have experienced a feedback loop about how long things take. A to-do list can't give you that.
Sharad Lal: How do you plan it? Do you have a planning process for time boxes, a review process, how does that work system work with time boxes?
Nir Eyal: So you put time in your calendar to make your weekly calendar.
Sharad Lal: So you have a weekly time boxed entry, maybe on a weekly basis. And then you do that and you have like your values
Do you make sure you hit all of them or you don't overcomplicate
Nir Eyal: I really wanted to keep it simple, because it's too much work.
What are your values? Nobody can answer what your values are. The only way to know your values is to look at how you spend your money and how you spend your time. You can say your values are your family and your health
That ain't your values.
So here's what I do. And this works because about 80 percent of people out there can do this once a week, 20 percent of their schedule changes from day to day. They have to do it every day. for me it's Sunday evening, 8pm, I sit down and I look at my calendar for the week that just passed, okay?
I look at it and I say, okay, how can I make this schedule easier to follow?
It doesn't take very long to make this schedule, but you're forcing yourself to make these tradeoffs. Now, once you have that template, I use Google Docs, and I just have repeating calendar appointments. It's actually really fun.
You're going to ask yourself, how can I make this schedule easier to follow?
I'm going to take a walk as opposed to how you can be flexible with what your calendar looks like in the day ahead. That's fine. but once that day arrives, you have to stick with the plan. even if you don't finish a task, especially if you don't finish a task.
The goal is to work on what you say you're going to do for as long as you say you will without distraction, whether you finish or not.
That doesn't mean you won't fall off track.
You will absolutely fall off track and that's fine. The difference is a distractible person when they get distracted. They don't know how to fix the problem. Puella Coelho had a wonderful quote. He said a mistake repeated more than once is a decision
What are you gonna do to prevent it from happening again? That's the difference between a distractible person and an indestructible person.
An indestructible person recognizes the distraction and makes plans today to prevent it from happening again tomorrow.
Sharad Lal: Let's talk about willpower. I'm glad you brought it up in your book and you've talked about it. And you talk about the ego depletion theory where the theory was willpower is limited. And then you talked about new research where if you think you have willpower, you have willpower.
So what's your current understanding of willpower and how should we think about
Nir Eyal: Sure. So I put this under the category of how we should think about these internal triggers. One of these unhealthy beliefs out there is the idea that willpower is a limited and depletable resource.
There was a researcher who I'm not going to name, but he made a lot of ways and he said, Oh, you can replenish willpower And basically he made this case that he called ego depletion is what he called this phenomenon that willpower
It's used up, you run out of it. And of course, this was a very comforting thought for a lot of people. I know I liked it, right? I would come home from work and I'd say, oh, I'd have such a, I've had such a rough day.
Sharad Lal: Let me have icecream.
Nir Eyal: right. You're right. Let me watch some Netflix and gimme a pint of ice cream. I have no more willpower left. I can't make any more good decisions.
So Whenever we have these kinds of fishy smelling studies in the social sciences, what do we do?
We replicate the study. And it turns out as far as we know, this idea of ego depletion does not exist. Turns out it was probably a statistical fluke, And so, that was the case except for in one group of people. This came from Carol Dweck, who did a beautiful study. You might know her book Mindset. And she found that, in fact, there is a group of people who do really experience ego depletion. and only those people, who believe that willpower is a limited resource.
If you believe in ego depletion, it is true. It's almost like a nocebo, the opposite of a placebo. It hurts to believe it. And so this is incredibly relevant because the media narrative right now around technology is that technology is bad for you.
So when you tell people that you are powerless, there's nothing you can do.
And that is exactly the opposite.
The world is getting better in every conceivable metric. It's getting better. And yet you don't see that on the news. Why? Because
The news wants you to spend as much time watching the news,
So we have got to fight back against this narrative, and teach people, teach ourselves, teach our kids, that we do have control as long as we believe we do. Because if you believe you're addicted. right, You are addicted, right?
The word addiction comes from addictive in Latin slave. That's what that means. So when you believe that you're a slave, you're going to act in accordance with that. Whereas if you believe, no, I'm free. I can make my own decisions. I have agency and control that then becomes true.
Sharad Lal: You're doing such a big service.
telling us that we have agency, we, otherwise, you're right. The whole thing is we can't fight those algorithms. And you said, look, this is not a new problem. It's always existed. We have agency. I like the section on helping manage digital social media and digital devices. And there's so many good suggestions there.
But maybe you can talk about one suggestion on how we can manage devices, social media, which you found very powerful.
Nir Eyal: Yeah. if you want to say, I know there's a lot of people listening who are sceptical. My kids are always using their devices. Clearly they're addicted.
I can't stop checking my phone. Clearly I'm addicted, right? There's nothing I can do. Let's do a little thought experiment here. if you say, Oh, it's not digital devices. I can't find time to exercise. I can't find time to exit.
I can't find time to start my business. And I want to show them that it's not that you can't, it's that you can.
You aren't.
There's a big difference. And how do I show you that? It's very simple. Let's do a thought experiment. I had a woman recently who told me how she just can't find time to exercise. Can't. Impossible. And I said,
Let's say I told you that if you, actually, how many times a week do you want to exercise? Oh, I want to exercise four times a week, three times a week, let's say I told you that if you exercised three times a week and the amount you said you wanted to exercise three times a week next week, I will give you 10, 000.
But if you don't get the 10, 000. Are you going to exercise three times a week? Of course I am. Not a doubt in my mind. So we prove it. And do this thought experiment for anything you think you can't do. I can't get off social media. I can't finish that book. I can't work on my business, like whatever it is.
If the stakes were high enough, could you? And if the answer is yes, then we've established you can. So let's first understand that we can. Once you have that agency, and, asterisks here, I will say there are some people if you have a severe illness, we're talking
about, yeah, if you've got some kind of severe psychiatric disorder,
We're talking about something maybe severe OCD or ADHD. But for the vast majority of people, we're talking 99 percent of the public, but We can do this if we believe we can. So that's the most important thing.
There's no one magic bullet, but I can't say these four simple strategies. Number one, master internal triggers. You don't try to escape it.
You use it as rocket fuel to propel you towards traction Step number two, make time for traction. There's no excuse. If you don't have a calendar in place, you can't say you got distracted, right? Step number three, hack back the external triggers.
So those rings—we tend to blame these things—but there's a half-page in my book about how to make your phone indestructible. The much deeper problem is the stuff we don't think is a distraction or that we can do anything about, right?
Stupid meetings that didn't need to be called, right? Emails that didn't need to be sent or received. That's the kind of external triggers we can go one by one and hack back all those external triggers.
Finally, step four is preventing distraction with a pact. When you use these four strategies in concert, you will become indestructible.
Sharad Lal: And that's the thesis of your book that you just described very nicely. So thank you for doing that. I know in Hooked as well as this, you think in models, you have these MISI frameworks which are very deep and go in. How does your thinking
Nir Eyal: your thinking work? I love a good model. I
Sharad Lal: love a good
Nir Eyal: part model. And I'll tell you that
My goal is to make a simple but not simplistic model. If you can't understand and communicate it, you can't follow it.
Because I want to give people the answer on a silver platter, right? It took me five years to write this thing. It's backed by 30 pages of peer reviewed studies. the, I had to make it in such a way that
If you can draw this picture, traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers, If you can see that model in your head, you can remind yourself hey, these are the four steps I can follow.
So to me, that was super important. And typically wisdom is found in simplicity, right? Look at E equals MC squared. it's just so simple that it must be true.
Sharad Lal: How does the process to make models work for you?
Nir Eyal: Painstakingly.
Sharad Lal: Are you sitting and scratching stuff over a year, testing it out? Oh, this doesn't work.
Nir Eyal: over five years. It takes forever. and the reason it takes forever is because I try and absorb as much as I possibly can,
And the hardest part is
excluding what's not relevant. That's the hardest part. It's almost like Michelangelo, you know, removing the excess marble to reveal the David. That's the hard part. That's what takes the most time, to figure out what's really essential.
Sharad Lal: Yeah. You're doing so many things now, Nir. You're investing, you're writing, you're doing podcasts, you're talking. what's the day like in your life?
Nir Eyal: It's very planned.
Sharad Lal: It's time-boxed.
Nir Eyal: It's very time-consuming.
I remember for the longest time when I was a proponent of time boxing people would find some random example of someone and say, but they're super productive and they don't use time boxing. Like Marc Andreessen for the longest time, from Andreessen Horowitz.
He's one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world. And look, he says he doesn't keep a schedule. Yeah.
And What's amazing is Marc Andreessen actually recently came out and said, I now have moved to a time box calendar, right?
Because he said notoriously, I don't make a schedule. If you need me, you just come and see me.
Now Elon Musk also keeps a time box calendar.
Yeah, welcome to adulthood. It's or don't complain right if this if you say to yourself, I don't need this I'm doing what I need to do in life.But
If you know you're not doing what you know you're capable of to be the person you want This is where we need to start.
Sharad Lal: would start. Such a good point. Nir, you've met so many smart people. You're in Stanford, you've been around the world. Just an off question, who's one of the persons who's left a lasting impression on you who you met in person?
Nir Eyal: Ooh, ah, there's so many people. As it comes to distraction
Sharad Lal: from anything. Someone who just stands out right now in this moment
Nir Eyal: So I had a teacher in ninth grade. Tracy Sullivan, unfortunately she's passed. I took a class called peer counselling. And this was a time when my parents' marriage was having a very tough time. They were fighting constantly.
this peer counselling class, I remember we had a class where you helped your peers in some way. So you learned to be what's called a servant leader. And she gave us this. It wasn't even a worksheet because we didn't fill it out.
It was just a piece of paper. And at the top it said, Rules for Fair Fighting. And there were very simple rules: not bringing up the past, not calling each other names, not raising your voice using I statements, staying on your side of the net. These fundamental rules, I looked through this and I was like, Wow, my family does the exact opposite of all these things.
I remember learning this stuff and sharing it with my parents. They started using it in their marriage, and we still talk about how it saved their marriage, like these rules for fair fighting.
It's like these 10 very simple rules that you should never do in a fight with someone you really love, how to have a good-faith argument. I think that really opened my eyes to the power of having these systems around things that felt squishy, you know, like.
I think many people, I certainly used to believe, if you love each other, then you shouldn't fight. No, that's completely wrong. If you love each other, you should fight fairly. You should fight the right way. And I think that kind of turned me on to, wow,there's ways to have a better life.
It doesn't just organically happen.
Sharad Lal: Such a beautiful story, Neer. It gave me goosebumps. fifteen year old Neer taking something to his parents.
What a beautiful story. Thank you very much for sharing that. Before we end, I have one last question for everyone: How would you know you've lived a good life at the end of your life?
Nir Eyal: So this is what I think about every day. In fact, it's about minimising regret. Spending my life the way I want it to.
To me, it's not about ticking off goals and accomplishments. It's about the daily process. What's that quote? The score takes care of itself if you practice. So I know I will have a great relationship with my wife if I put in the time and effort, and I know I will have a great relationship with my daughter.
I know my business will succeed, I know I'll be able to write more books, and do all these things that I, yeah, I care about the outcome. But really, what I care about is the daily process as opposed to just fantasising about some future so I can look back on my life and say, you know what? I spent the majority of my days doing what I said I was going to do.
and even when crises happen, unexpected events happen, but saying in advance here's how I want to be able to deal with it in advance.
So leaving things to the very last minute, they're going to get you. It's only when you decide in advance with forethought that you can have the kind of life you want.
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful point to end with. Nir, as you were describing this, I couldn't help notice that all these concepts that you've arrived at, with so much data, strong frameworks, and proof, have spiritual elements in them.
You talk about being conscious, you talk about your natural state being discomfort, all in a spiritual context, but you've come to it in an interesting way, so I wonder if you ever noticed that.
Nir Eyal: No, to be honest. All spiritual
Sharad Lal: concepts, which people have arrived at
Nir Eyal: When you say spiritual, you mean supernatural?
Sharad Lal: Spiritual means for example, plays a huge role in Vedic wisdom in, among the Hindus in Buddhism. the natural state is unsatisfied. So all these principles, consciousness, forethought, slightly not perfectly related, is the core concept of mindfulness.
These are deep spiritual laws that form part of your models. Make them powerful, simple, and deep.
Nir Eyal: interesting. so to me spiritual means supernatural.
No, but perhaps not. Look, there's nothing new under the sun, right? Many of these techniques are ancient. I don't think that necessarily; I think that's where I probably diverge.
I guess where I Struggle a bit is that they do make value judgments, right that I think
Certain strains of Buddhism are popular. They are about Escaping the desire that the way to reach enlightenment is detachment, and that's fine.
If that's your goal, fine, but there's a moral judgement around the right path versus the wrong path. And that to me is a little bit scary.
Sharad Lal: I can add to that, if you don't mind. So, there's a lot of good work done in Buddhism. And there's a great book by Mark Epstein. I don't know if you've read it. Yes, that's true, Open to
Nir Eyal: to desire.
Oh, sorry. I thought a different same
Sharad Lal: I think he's written a few books. He's written open to desire where he talks about the Buddha.
So there's, like you said, interpretation is written in Pali, different people have interpreted in different ways, and you can easily take any thought and make it judgement
Nir Eyal: The core,
Sharad Lal: The core, as I understand, and we all have different versions, is where he talks about desire. There's nothing wrong with that, but it can set up this dopamine cycle that you've talked about desire is not the problem, but it is how you manage that discomfort is something that you need to think about.
Nir Eyal: Yeah. And I think, so this is again, where forethought comes in if you look at the statistics on how many Buddhists have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences,
It's like close to zero. It's probably zero.
That tells you something. Yeah.
Because to me, sitting in isolation and meditating is good for you, fine. But was it good for mankind?
Did you save any lives? Did you reduce suffering for the people who are actually in this world?
That's a tough one. I'm not judging if that's how you want to spend your life.
Like I want the person who is animated and excited by solving problems who has a burning desire to do that.
and they're chasing the dopamine
rush of solving the problem. That's a beautiful thing. And in many ways going away and meditating can be an escape from reality.
And again, I'm not characterising, of course, all Buddhism or all. Of course there are days when people will write to you and say, That's not what Buddhism says. I know, but there are undoubtedly people who will use all kinds of paths to escape reality, just as someone might use drugs or use social media or television as an escape from reality.
So as long as that's what you want to do consciously, I don't think that's necessarily the only path.
Sharad Lal: certain aspects of this that I like. I don't know who could be a good example. Like Sam Harris. He's not like a Buddhist, but there are certain aspects. principles of Buddhism that he takes, but he believes like you, progress, performance, and achieving potential is an important part of
Nir Eyal: Right,
And what I like about this approach is that there's a buffet of different techniques to try.
For some people, I know Sam Harris is a huge proponent of meditation. Meditation can be great for some people; there are some people who meditate, but it absolutely backfires. It takes them into this egocentric hole that they can't come out of.
Sharad Lal: lady who's talked, who Tim Ferriss interviewed, I've forgotten her name, who talks about how bad meditation can be. And she's got data to
show and it can go either way. It can make you, like you said, self indulgent. It can certainly go in that
Nir Eyal: That way. Right. Which is why I think that the most important thing is to look at this journey that we're all on, not as a drill sergeant.
Some people interpret timeboxing in that way. no, the right approach is not being a drill sergeant. The right approach is being a scientist.
A scientist, what's the job of a scientist? A scientist makes a hypothesis, runs an experiment, looks at the result of that experiment, and then runs more experiments.
I would say, stick to it. If you say you're going to do it, but be willing to be flexible the next day in the next experiment.
Sharad Lal: Such a wonderful message. And that brings in your second, your point of play as well. The uncertainty, the having fun along with the point of making sure you're on the task.
Nir Eyal: I think the thing that strings all these things together, if there's one consistent point, it's agency.I think meditation is powerful because it makes you agentic. Cold plunging.
I, I'm very sceptical of all the, we've, we've been, we met, we met each other at the cold plunge.
The reason it's so powerful is again, it gives you agency. Like I, every, when I first went into a cold plunge, I lasted 30 seconds. Now I can do five minutes. I still don't believe it's doing anything for me. That's great physiology.
Placebos are really powerful.
And there's no reason we shouldn't be taking more of these placebos. If they're working and they give us more agency, they give us more control. That's actually magic.
Sharad Lal: Agency is such a good word. Thank you very much, Nir. I've taken up more of your time than you intended to give.
I'm very grateful for that. What a wonderful conversation. I wish you all the very best in your future work.
Nir Eyal: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Sharad Lal: Thank you for such an insightful and inspirational conversation for more near you can check out the show notes. Here's something all of us could try. Time boxing. To get started. You can hit up. Near and far.com/timeboxing. All information is out there. There's also a template to get started. Wish you all the very best. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next episode will drop two weeks from now on September 10, Do join us for that till next time. Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye bye.
The transcript is computer generated. There may be errors.
Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to how to live a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 75. We reached our 75th episode having released episodes every other Tuesday since November, 2021 without fail. Thank you very much for your support when the top 3% of all podcasts are listened to in over one 40 countries. For this special episode. We have an exceptional guest Who needs no introduction. Nir Eyal. Nir is a New York times bestselling author investor. An expert at the intersection of psychology, technology and business. his groundbreaking book hooked Has been used by companies like Google, Microsoft, worldwide to create engaging products,
His latest bestseller in distractible Is helping millions worldwide. And as the focus of our discussion today,
Near has invested in innovative companies like Kahoot. Canva. Evan bright. He's also taught in Stanford's graduate school of business and the hassle planter Institute of design. In our conversation, we talk about how to be. In distractible. Traction was a distraction. Internal triggers and external triggers that make us distracted willpower time boxing. Not running away from technology, but making it work for us. And ultimately how to have agency over our life.
Now here's the incredible near Nir Eyal.
Hi Nir, welcome to the How to Live podcast.
We're going to discuss all your good work, including Hooked and Indestructible, but before all that, I thought we could start with something personal.
I love how you and your friends do picnics and then you have one deep question that you ask so you get to connect deeper with each other. So maybe we start with one of
Nir Eyal: Sure, yeah.
Sharad Lal: What are you thankful your parents taught you?
Nir Eyal: My parents taught me so much, but just to fill everyone in, we do this thing called the kibbutz, and we get together with other couples on a regularly scheduled occasion.
So it's in the calendar. Every week, it's at the same time and place. You bring your own food, and we just get together. Typically, in advance, somebody will send around a topic, watch this Ted talk, read this article, or just something to spur conversation.
And it always goes deep. And I think that's really fed my soul. What's really on our minds? Because I think to answer your question in a roundabout way, my parents taught me the value of adult friendships,
Children need to see That friendships are a critical part of adult life. We think about having friends as something you do in childhood. I remember with my parents every Friday we had a sacred dinner where you could do whatever you wanted after dinner, but you had to be at Friday night dinner.
That was a family event. And always there was someone invited to that dinner. And we'd have a nice meal. But then after the meal, when the dessert was coming out, there was always some topic of conversation, kind of like what I do with the kibbutz now, what was happening in the news or some kind of philosophical question that someone would bring.
My parents really modelled that for me. I remember we would go away as kids and go play somewhere, but the parents stuck around and continued to have a conversation. Those people who would come to dinner, the usual faces, became my extended family, and I am still friends with those people today as a 46-year-old.
And so that's certainly something I'm conscious of teaching my daughter as well.
Sharad Lal: It's so wonderful. I love that when you say it. I connected a little bit of this with Gottman's work, where they talk about when you go on dates and have these open, big questions.
You get to know your spouse better, and I think doing it with friends is even more powerful. Your book, Indistractable, is such a wonderful book. I'd love for you to share what motivated you to write something about being indestructible.
Nir Eyal: Sure. Yeah. So I write books not because of what I know, but because of what I want to know.
For me, my books are very personal. It's problems that I have in my own life that I need an answer to. Yeah. And so when I looked for this answer around distraction, I,
didn't find a good answer. I read other people's books on the topic and they basically said the same thing.
Stop using technology, stop checking email, stop using social media. And they were all written by professors with tenure who have, you know, guaranteed jobs. Well, thanks stupid. I will get fired if I don't check email as helpful advice. So I wanted a tech positive approach that I could actually live with.
But if you ask, what was the inciting incident? It happened when I was with my daughter one afternoon, and we had this little daddy-daughter time plan, just some nice time together.
And I remember we had this activity book of different thingsAnd one of the activities was to ask each other this question: if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim.
But I can't tell you what my daughter said. At that moment, for whatever reason, I just started checking my phone real quick. Let me just do this one thing, honey. And by the time I looked up for my device, she was gone. I was sending a very clear message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was.
And she went to go play with some toys outside. And so that's when I realised I had to reassess my own relationship with distraction. To be honest with you, it wasn't just with my daughter. It would happen when I would say, Today's gonna be the day that I work on that big project that I've been delaying on. But yet, 20, 30, 45 minutes later, I'm still checking the news, or checking email, as opposed to doing the frickin work I know I need to do. And if you ask me today, what superpower I think is most important, it's the power to be indestructible.
Because you can have access to all the world's information, which we now do, between the internet, Google, and ChatGPT, The answers are all out there. The problem is not that we don't know what to do.
The problem is that we don't know how to get out of our own way. You can give people the best advice, but if they don't implement that advice, then it's not right. It's a big waste of time. the power to harness your attention to decide what kind of life you want to live.
So it wasn't until I learned these techniques that
I'm in the best shape of my life at 46 years old.
I have a better relationship with my daughter and my wife than ever before. My relationships with my friends are closer, and I work better because I'm consistent.
I live with personal integrity, and that's what being indestructible is all about.
Sharad Lal: about. for painting that picture. What a wonderful story, Neer. And as you were talking, I love what you said. There's theories out there.
You studied behavioural sciences, and that's the path you took for your book. How does behavioural science help us control ourselves?
Nir Eyal: actually control ourselves? By which we break bad habits is very different from the process in which we start new habits.
So new habits it's about a reward, right? And we've seen this a million times, the habit loops around, you need a cue, you need an action and then a reward for personal habits. But breaking habits is very different. It's not the same process. It's not about the reward anymore.
It's about interrupting the trigger and the action.
The stimulus and the response. And that's a completely different process. And so we have to, you can't just use the same tools for a different job. So that's really what I wanted to offer is an approach that's based on Decades of consumer psychology research and is over 30 pages of peer reviewed citations in my book because I didn't want it to just be like most business books.
I need to see the studies, right? I don't want anecdotes; I want peer-reviewed studies. So that was really important to me, and I wanted to make sure it helped me. That was the purpose of my writing the book.
Fundamentally, the goal was achieved when it could change my own life. So not only does everything in the book, period, come from these peer-reviewed studies, but it also includes some things that I have adopted in my own life and have made it so much better.
Sharad Lal: I found that part interesting where you talked about breaking habits. We get distracted, not so much for reward. But to move away from discomfort, to move away from pain, and that makes us think about it fundamentally differently. So if you can talk a little bit about that.
Nir Eyal: This is where I was really surprised. I thought I understood.
Okay, here's how to break bad habits and what you should do. But it wasn't until I really started with the first principles that I realized why we get distracted. It's such a fascinating question.
In fact, we know that Plato, the Greek philosopher, asked the very same question two thousand and fifty years ago. We think, oh, distraction is because of our cell phones or because of whatever's happening in the news. No. This has been happening for at least the past two thousand and fifty years because that's the first recorded case of people getting distracted, and I bet you they were getting distracted before that, too.
But Plato talks about acracia, this tendency to do things against our better interests. And he contemplates, why is that? And we really haven't answered that question very well. So my attempt at answering this question was to say,let's go deeper than just, why do we get distracted?
What is the seat of human motivation? If you ask most people, you'll probably get some kind of answer that sounds like carrots and sticks, right? We want to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Sigmund Freud said this and called it the pleasure principle.
Jeremy Bentham said something like this. It turns out, it's completely wrong. If you look neurologically inside the brain, now we know through fMRI studies how the brain actually works on a neurological basis. It's not about the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
It's not about carrots and sticks.
Consider that the carrot is the stick. It's not a carrot and stick.
What do I mean by that? The very pursuit of pleasure, wanting, craving, lusting, desire, hunger is itself psychologically destabilising. We say, love hurts. There's a very famous song. Love hurts. It's true. Because wanting something is uncomfortable. So the brain doesn't get us to do what feels good, but The brain gets us to do what feels good.
What that means is that all human behaviour is driven by a desire to escape discomfort. If that is true, that means time management is pain management.
Money management is pain management, and weight management is pain management. It's all pain management, which is the first step to becoming indestructible. It's called mastering internal triggers, or they will become your master.
Those studies find, 10 percent of the time that you check your phone, it is because it actually dinged a ring. And studies have verified this 90 percent of the time you check your phone. It's not because of what's happening outside of us because of what's happening inside of us, inside our own heads,
That is the driver of 90 percent of our distractions. We're not thinking about the internal triggers and that turns out to be the source of the overwhelming majority of our distractions.
Distraction, it's not a technology problem. It's not a moral failing. There's nothing broken about your brain. Don't believe the hype, this overdiagnosis of adult ADHD. We can talk about that in a bit. I know that's controversial. The vast majority of distraction is simply that you have not learned the skill of dealing with discomfort.
So that has to be step one. Master internal triggers or they will become your master.
Sharad Lal: master. That is a big point that you just made. And there was this stat which I didn't read in the book that 90 percent of our distraction comes from internal triggers and 10 percent is external. So it doesn't matter, technology or next, we have AI. It's within us that we need to master. So I found that very interesting.
We talked about mastering distraction, and of course, you talked about mindfulness techniques, which I found very interesting. But what I found even more interesting was that our brain looks for that uncertain reward. So instead of finding it outside, why don't we focus and find it in our work?
Why don't we find something novel about our work? And that way we can get more focused on our work. So if you can talk a little bit about that.
Nir Eyal: So the, if we can find it, great.I talk about in the tech, in the book, there's a dozen different techniques about how you can master internal triggers. And one of them is to learn to reimagine the task, to think about it differently.
How do you do that? One of the techniques, and again, there's over a dozen in the book, is to learn how to play anything. And this comes from the work of Ian BOGOs at Georgia Tech, and Dr. BOGOs tells us that the way you. Using a reward is not to have a spoonful of sugar. We've all heard the Mary Poppins technique.
If you just make a reward for something, then you'll be more motivated to do it. And that can work partially for short term behaviours.
It's the stupid trophy at the end of a race. If you give that to kids and adults, the trophy becomes the motivation, not the joy of running.
When we say, just do it for fun, people work on it longer, they have better results, they're judged to be more creative. So extrinsic rewards for creative tasks or long term tasks can actually backfire. What we want to do instead is to learn how to play anything. it turns out Bogos tells us that in order to play something, It doesn't have to be enjoyable.
What? That doesn't make any sense. It turns out all it has to do is to harness our attention long enough to help us complete the task. Now, if that is already intrinsically in the behaviour, great. That's no problem. This is where the concept of flow comes in.
That's nice, If you can find it, the problem is people think, Oh, I can apply flow to anything and that is false. If you read the book flow, he talks about people playing basketball and people painting and he talks about people doing things they enjoy doing.
Ain't nobody got a problem sticking to stuff they like doing. The problem is doing the stuff we don't like doing. It's the stuff that's difficult.
It's a totally different toolkit that we need to perform difficult behaviours. According to Bogost, instead of trying to escape the discomfort, a much better technique is to learn how to play the task.
And you do that in two ways. one, you add constraints. By adding a constraint, you make it an environment for play.
So when you can put a constraint around a difficult task, a time, a place constraint, some other kind of constraints, right? That's the first step. The second thing you can do is to look for the variability. To delve into the mystery of that task.
So for me, writing is really hard work, right? Every author knows that to write an original piece, to write a blog post, to write a script, It's really tough. All I want to do is, watch something on YouTube or do anything but the task at hand.
But when I can focus on the mystery, the uncertainty, the variability behind what I'm writing, that's when it becomes a game.
And I don't have to enjoy it. It just has to sustain my attention long enough for me to do the task.
Sharad Lal: That's such a wonderful point. And I loved when you talked about you thinking of it as a mystery and you solve it and that gets you into it.
I'm wondering how we can take these two—things that we talked about and used in the corporate world—and use them in the corporate world. How can people go to their jobs every day, have people to deal with, and put constraints on themselves so they can get a disproportionate reward, which gets them excited? If any get a disproportionate reward, which gets them excited, any example. To make time for traction is to turn your values into time.
Nir Eyal: So when you have a time constraint, you add a constraint as opposed to what most people do. They say, Oh, I'll get to it when I find time, right? You're never going to find the time.
I'll get to it. I'll scroll Facebook.
I'll watch a YouTube video. I'll do everything, but. when I say I'm going to work on this task from 9 a. m. to 9 30 a. m. And the challenge is the constraint is how far can I get when I do nothing but that task without distraction, that becomes a great constraint, the time constraint.
And then one of the ways we add variability is by letting curiosity drive us. So one of my favourite Dorothy Parker quotes is that the cure for boredom is curiosity. There's no cure for curiosity. So whenever you feel bored, If you can lean in to the
Whether it's, ah, making these sales calls is so boring or making this slide presentation sucks. If you can find the mystery, the unknown, the uncertainty, the curiosity, that's the fun, right? That's, that is where the play comes
Sharad Lal: we've touched upon time boxing and maybe we go deeper into this
Do you have a planning cycle to it? How long, what are the brass tracks of time
Nir Eyal: All right, so let's start with the big picture here. What are we talking about? What is a distraction? So the best way to understand something is to understand the antonym. If you ask people what is the opposite of distraction, they'll tell you it's focus.
That's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is traction, right? Traction and distraction. Both words end in the same six letters.
A C T I O N that spells action. Reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us, it is an action that we ourselves take. So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Towards your values, helps you become the kind of person you want to become.
Distraction is anything else. So when it comes to making a time box calendar, making a to do list sucks. Okay.
Now, let me be very clear: Taking things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper is great and wonderful, but that's where most people stop.
And then what does that say? If you have this big long list of all the things you said you were going to do, that you didn't
Sharad Lal: You're never happy.
Nir Eyal: You start thinking loser. Start thinking there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you.
So getting things out of your brain, onto a piece of paper, and into an app is fantastic. That's step one. Step two is putting it on your calendar. Because you cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.
So if you have a calendar with white space, You cannot say you got distracted. There has to be something on your calendar. I want you to put time, live out your values. What are values?
Values are attributes of the person you want to become. so this is where I give these three life domains of you, Your relationships and then your work. So looking at these three life domains, you can ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time?
And this forces you to operate under a constraint to do list.
As opposed to a time box calendar, it forces you to say, if I spend time with my kids, that means I can't work on my business. It's forcing you to make a trade off. That's part of being a grown up.
And Most people abdicate that responsibility.
Do it! I'm not going to tell you not to, but do it according to your values and your schedule, not someone else's. And here's the kicker, okay, here's what's going to blow people's minds.
The goal is not to finish. Your metric of success, so with a to do list, is how many QBoxes I checked off. And then, so what do you do? They do the easy stuff. They do urgent tasks.
As opposed to with a time box calendar. The goal is to not finish the task.
Here's why people who use a timebox calendar finish more than people who keep a to do list. When you say to yourself, I will work on just that task, for as long as I said I would, without distraction. Now that becomes a metric of success, and for the first time you have a feedback loop.
As opposed to people who use a to-do list, here's what happens. Here's what I used to do. I'd work on something for ten minutes. Oh, then I have this ping of an email. Let me just check that real quick.
And, so I never can track how long things actually take me to complete.
We have what's called the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy says that it takes people, on average, three times longer to finish a task than they estimate because they have no clue how long things take. With a time box calendar, you're going to work on those sales calls for 30 minutes.
The point here is, that when you work on that task, you are only doing that task without distractions.
I was going to make this slide presentation, which has 30 slides. I finished three slides in 30 minutes, which means I need nine more time blocks to finish the entire task.
This is the first time that people have experienced a feedback loop about how long things take. A to-do list can't give you that.
Sharad Lal: How do you plan it? Do you have a planning process for time boxes, a review process, how does that work system work with time boxes?
Nir Eyal: So you put time in your calendar to make your weekly calendar.
Sharad Lal: So you have a weekly time boxed entry, maybe on a weekly basis. And then you do that and you have like your values
Do you make sure you hit all of them or you don't overcomplicate
Nir Eyal: I really wanted to keep it simple, because it's too much work.
What are your values? Nobody can answer what your values are. The only way to know your values is to look at how you spend your money and how you spend your time. You can say your values are your family and your health
That ain't your values.
So here's what I do. And this works because about 80 percent of people out there can do this once a week, 20 percent of their schedule changes from day to day. They have to do it every day. for me it's Sunday evening, 8pm, I sit down and I look at my calendar for the week that just passed, okay?
I look at it and I say, okay, how can I make this schedule easier to follow?
It doesn't take very long to make this schedule, but you're forcing yourself to make these tradeoffs. Now, once you have that template, I use Google Docs, and I just have repeating calendar appointments. It's actually really fun.
You're going to ask yourself, how can I make this schedule easier to follow?
I'm going to take a walk as opposed to how you can be flexible with what your calendar looks like in the day ahead. That's fine. but once that day arrives, you have to stick with the plan. even if you don't finish a task, especially if you don't finish a task.
The goal is to work on what you say you're going to do for as long as you say you will without distraction, whether you finish or not.
That doesn't mean you won't fall off track.
You will absolutely fall off track and that's fine. The difference is a distractible person when they get distracted. They don't know how to fix the problem. Puella Coelho had a wonderful quote. He said a mistake repeated more than once is a decision
What are you gonna do to prevent it from happening again? That's the difference between a distractible person and an indestructible person.
An indestructible person recognizes the distraction and makes plans today to prevent it from happening again tomorrow.
Sharad Lal: Let's talk about willpower. I'm glad you brought it up in your book and you've talked about it. And you talk about the ego depletion theory where the theory was willpower is limited. And then you talked about new research where if you think you have willpower, you have willpower.
So what's your current understanding of willpower and how should we think about
Nir Eyal: Sure. So I put this under the category of how we should think about these internal triggers. One of these unhealthy beliefs out there is the idea that willpower is a limited and depletable resource.
There was a researcher who I'm not going to name, but he made a lot of ways and he said, Oh, you can replenish willpower And basically he made this case that he called ego depletion is what he called this phenomenon that willpower
It's used up, you run out of it. And of course, this was a very comforting thought for a lot of people. I know I liked it, right? I would come home from work and I'd say, oh, I'd have such a, I've had such a rough day.
Sharad Lal: Let me have icecream.
Nir Eyal: right. You're right. Let me watch some Netflix and gimme a pint of ice cream. I have no more willpower left. I can't make any more good decisions.
So Whenever we have these kinds of fishy smelling studies in the social sciences, what do we do?
We replicate the study. And it turns out as far as we know, this idea of ego depletion does not exist. Turns out it was probably a statistical fluke, And so, that was the case except for in one group of people. This came from Carol Dweck, who did a beautiful study. You might know her book Mindset. And she found that, in fact, there is a group of people who do really experience ego depletion. and only those people, who believe that willpower is a limited resource.
If you believe in ego depletion, it is true. It's almost like a nocebo, the opposite of a placebo. It hurts to believe it. And so this is incredibly relevant because the media narrative right now around technology is that technology is bad for you.
So when you tell people that you are powerless, there's nothing you can do.
And that is exactly the opposite.
The world is getting better in every conceivable metric. It's getting better. And yet you don't see that on the news. Why? Because
The news wants you to spend as much time watching the news,
So we have got to fight back against this narrative, and teach people, teach ourselves, teach our kids, that we do have control as long as we believe we do. Because if you believe you're addicted. right, You are addicted, right?
The word addiction comes from addictive in Latin slave. That's what that means. So when you believe that you're a slave, you're going to act in accordance with that. Whereas if you believe, no, I'm free. I can make my own decisions. I have agency and control that then becomes true.
Sharad Lal: You're doing such a big service.
telling us that we have agency, we, otherwise, you're right. The whole thing is we can't fight those algorithms. And you said, look, this is not a new problem. It's always existed. We have agency. I like the section on helping manage digital social media and digital devices. And there's so many good suggestions there.
But maybe you can talk about one suggestion on how we can manage devices, social media, which you found very powerful.
Nir Eyal: Yeah. if you want to say, I know there's a lot of people listening who are sceptical. My kids are always using their devices. Clearly they're addicted.
I can't stop checking my phone. Clearly I'm addicted, right? There's nothing I can do. Let's do a little thought experiment here. if you say, Oh, it's not digital devices. I can't find time to exercise. I can't find time to exit.
I can't find time to start my business. And I want to show them that it's not that you can't, it's that you can.
You aren't.
There's a big difference. And how do I show you that? It's very simple. Let's do a thought experiment. I had a woman recently who told me how she just can't find time to exercise. Can't. Impossible. And I said,
Let's say I told you that if you, actually, how many times a week do you want to exercise? Oh, I want to exercise four times a week, three times a week, let's say I told you that if you exercised three times a week and the amount you said you wanted to exercise three times a week next week, I will give you 10, 000.
But if you don't get the 10, 000. Are you going to exercise three times a week? Of course I am. Not a doubt in my mind. So we prove it. And do this thought experiment for anything you think you can't do. I can't get off social media. I can't finish that book. I can't work on my business, like whatever it is.
If the stakes were high enough, could you? And if the answer is yes, then we've established you can. So let's first understand that we can. Once you have that agency, and, asterisks here, I will say there are some people if you have a severe illness, we're talking
about, yeah, if you've got some kind of severe psychiatric disorder,
We're talking about something maybe severe OCD or ADHD. But for the vast majority of people, we're talking 99 percent of the public, but We can do this if we believe we can. So that's the most important thing.
There's no one magic bullet, but I can't say these four simple strategies. Number one, master internal triggers. You don't try to escape it.
You use it as rocket fuel to propel you towards traction Step number two, make time for traction. There's no excuse. If you don't have a calendar in place, you can't say you got distracted, right? Step number three, hack back the external triggers.
So those rings—we tend to blame these things—but there's a half-page in my book about how to make your phone indestructible. The much deeper problem is the stuff we don't think is a distraction or that we can do anything about, right?
Stupid meetings that didn't need to be called, right? Emails that didn't need to be sent or received. That's the kind of external triggers we can go one by one and hack back all those external triggers.
Finally, step four is preventing distraction with a pact. When you use these four strategies in concert, you will become indestructible.
Sharad Lal: And that's the thesis of your book that you just described very nicely. So thank you for doing that. I know in Hooked as well as this, you think in models, you have these MISI frameworks which are very deep and go in. How does your thinking
Nir Eyal: your thinking work? I love a good model. I
Sharad Lal: love a good
Nir Eyal: part model. And I'll tell you that
My goal is to make a simple but not simplistic model. If you can't understand and communicate it, you can't follow it.
Because I want to give people the answer on a silver platter, right? It took me five years to write this thing. It's backed by 30 pages of peer reviewed studies. the, I had to make it in such a way that
If you can draw this picture, traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers, If you can see that model in your head, you can remind yourself hey, these are the four steps I can follow.
So to me, that was super important. And typically wisdom is found in simplicity, right? Look at E equals MC squared. it's just so simple that it must be true.
Sharad Lal: How does the process to make models work for you?
Nir Eyal: Painstakingly.
Sharad Lal: Are you sitting and scratching stuff over a year, testing it out? Oh, this doesn't work.
Nir Eyal: over five years. It takes forever. and the reason it takes forever is because I try and absorb as much as I possibly can,
And the hardest part is
excluding what's not relevant. That's the hardest part. It's almost like Michelangelo, you know, removing the excess marble to reveal the David. That's the hard part. That's what takes the most time, to figure out what's really essential.
Sharad Lal: Yeah. You're doing so many things now, Nir. You're investing, you're writing, you're doing podcasts, you're talking. what's the day like in your life?
Nir Eyal: It's very planned.
Sharad Lal: It's time-boxed.
Nir Eyal: It's very time-consuming.
I remember for the longest time when I was a proponent of time boxing people would find some random example of someone and say, but they're super productive and they don't use time boxing. Like Marc Andreessen for the longest time, from Andreessen Horowitz.
He's one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world. And look, he says he doesn't keep a schedule. Yeah.
And What's amazing is Marc Andreessen actually recently came out and said, I now have moved to a time box calendar, right?
Because he said notoriously, I don't make a schedule. If you need me, you just come and see me.
Now Elon Musk also keeps a time box calendar.
Yeah, welcome to adulthood. It's or don't complain right if this if you say to yourself, I don't need this I'm doing what I need to do in life.But
If you know you're not doing what you know you're capable of to be the person you want This is where we need to start.
Sharad Lal: would start. Such a good point. Nir, you've met so many smart people. You're in Stanford, you've been around the world. Just an off question, who's one of the persons who's left a lasting impression on you who you met in person?
Nir Eyal: Ooh, ah, there's so many people. As it comes to distraction
Sharad Lal: from anything. Someone who just stands out right now in this moment
Nir Eyal: So I had a teacher in ninth grade. Tracy Sullivan, unfortunately she's passed. I took a class called peer counselling. And this was a time when my parents' marriage was having a very tough time. They were fighting constantly.
this peer counselling class, I remember we had a class where you helped your peers in some way. So you learned to be what's called a servant leader. And she gave us this. It wasn't even a worksheet because we didn't fill it out.
It was just a piece of paper. And at the top it said, Rules for Fair Fighting. And there were very simple rules: not bringing up the past, not calling each other names, not raising your voice using I statements, staying on your side of the net. These fundamental rules, I looked through this and I was like, Wow, my family does the exact opposite of all these things.
I remember learning this stuff and sharing it with my parents. They started using it in their marriage, and we still talk about how it saved their marriage, like these rules for fair fighting.
It's like these 10 very simple rules that you should never do in a fight with someone you really love, how to have a good-faith argument. I think that really opened my eyes to the power of having these systems around things that felt squishy, you know, like.
I think many people, I certainly used to believe, if you love each other, then you shouldn't fight. No, that's completely wrong. If you love each other, you should fight fairly. You should fight the right way. And I think that kind of turned me on to, wow,there's ways to have a better life.
It doesn't just organically happen.
Sharad Lal: Such a beautiful story, Neer. It gave me goosebumps. fifteen year old Neer taking something to his parents.
What a beautiful story. Thank you very much for sharing that. Before we end, I have one last question for everyone: How would you know you've lived a good life at the end of your life?
Nir Eyal: So this is what I think about every day. In fact, it's about minimising regret. Spending my life the way I want it to.
To me, it's not about ticking off goals and accomplishments. It's about the daily process. What's that quote? The score takes care of itself if you practice. So I know I will have a great relationship with my wife if I put in the time and effort, and I know I will have a great relationship with my daughter.
I know my business will succeed, I know I'll be able to write more books, and do all these things that I, yeah, I care about the outcome. But really, what I care about is the daily process as opposed to just fantasising about some future so I can look back on my life and say, you know what? I spent the majority of my days doing what I said I was going to do.
and even when crises happen, unexpected events happen, but saying in advance here's how I want to be able to deal with it in advance.
So leaving things to the very last minute, they're going to get you. It's only when you decide in advance with forethought that you can have the kind of life you want.
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful point to end with. Nir, as you were describing this, I couldn't help notice that all these concepts that you've arrived at, with so much data, strong frameworks, and proof, have spiritual elements in them.
You talk about being conscious, you talk about your natural state being discomfort, all in a spiritual context, but you've come to it in an interesting way, so I wonder if you ever noticed that.
Nir Eyal: No, to be honest. All spiritual
Sharad Lal: concepts, which people have arrived at
Nir Eyal: When you say spiritual, you mean supernatural?
Sharad Lal: Spiritual means for example, plays a huge role in Vedic wisdom in, among the Hindus in Buddhism. the natural state is unsatisfied. So all these principles, consciousness, forethought, slightly not perfectly related, is the core concept of mindfulness.
These are deep spiritual laws that form part of your models. Make them powerful, simple, and deep.
Nir Eyal: interesting. so to me spiritual means supernatural.
No, but perhaps not. Look, there's nothing new under the sun, right? Many of these techniques are ancient. I don't think that necessarily; I think that's where I probably diverge.
I guess where I Struggle a bit is that they do make value judgments, right that I think
Certain strains of Buddhism are popular. They are about Escaping the desire that the way to reach enlightenment is detachment, and that's fine.
If that's your goal, fine, but there's a moral judgement around the right path versus the wrong path. And that to me is a little bit scary.
Sharad Lal: I can add to that, if you don't mind. So, there's a lot of good work done in Buddhism. And there's a great book by Mark Epstein. I don't know if you've read it. Yes, that's true, Open to
Nir Eyal: to desire.
Oh, sorry. I thought a different same
Sharad Lal: I think he's written a few books. He's written open to desire where he talks about the Buddha.
So there's, like you said, interpretation is written in Pali, different people have interpreted in different ways, and you can easily take any thought and make it judgement
Nir Eyal: The core,
Sharad Lal: The core, as I understand, and we all have different versions, is where he talks about desire. There's nothing wrong with that, but it can set up this dopamine cycle that you've talked about desire is not the problem, but it is how you manage that discomfort is something that you need to think about.
Nir Eyal: Yeah. And I think, so this is again, where forethought comes in if you look at the statistics on how many Buddhists have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences,
It's like close to zero. It's probably zero.
That tells you something. Yeah.
Because to me, sitting in isolation and meditating is good for you, fine. But was it good for mankind?
Did you save any lives? Did you reduce suffering for the people who are actually in this world?
That's a tough one. I'm not judging if that's how you want to spend your life.
Like I want the person who is animated and excited by solving problems who has a burning desire to do that.
and they're chasing the dopamine
rush of solving the problem. That's a beautiful thing. And in many ways going away and meditating can be an escape from reality.
And again, I'm not characterising, of course, all Buddhism or all. Of course there are days when people will write to you and say, That's not what Buddhism says. I know, but there are undoubtedly people who will use all kinds of paths to escape reality, just as someone might use drugs or use social media or television as an escape from reality.
So as long as that's what you want to do consciously, I don't think that's necessarily the only path.
Sharad Lal: certain aspects of this that I like. I don't know who could be a good example. Like Sam Harris. He's not like a Buddhist, but there are certain aspects. principles of Buddhism that he takes, but he believes like you, progress, performance, and achieving potential is an important part of
Nir Eyal: Right,
And what I like about this approach is that there's a buffet of different techniques to try.
For some people, I know Sam Harris is a huge proponent of meditation. Meditation can be great for some people; there are some people who meditate, but it absolutely backfires. It takes them into this egocentric hole that they can't come out of.
Sharad Lal: lady who's talked, who Tim Ferriss interviewed, I've forgotten her name, who talks about how bad meditation can be. And she's got data to
show and it can go either way. It can make you, like you said, self indulgent. It can certainly go in that
Nir Eyal: That way. Right. Which is why I think that the most important thing is to look at this journey that we're all on, not as a drill sergeant.
Some people interpret timeboxing in that way. no, the right approach is not being a drill sergeant. The right approach is being a scientist.
A scientist, what's the job of a scientist? A scientist makes a hypothesis, runs an experiment, looks at the result of that experiment, and then runs more experiments.
I would say, stick to it. If you say you're going to do it, but be willing to be flexible the next day in the next experiment.
Sharad Lal: Such a wonderful message. And that brings in your second, your point of play as well. The uncertainty, the having fun along with the point of making sure you're on the task.
Nir Eyal: I think the thing that strings all these things together, if there's one consistent point, it's agency.I think meditation is powerful because it makes you agentic. Cold plunging.
I, I'm very sceptical of all the, we've, we've been, we met, we met each other at the cold plunge.
The reason it's so powerful is again, it gives you agency. Like I, every, when I first went into a cold plunge, I lasted 30 seconds. Now I can do five minutes. I still don't believe it's doing anything for me. That's great physiology.
Placebos are really powerful.
And there's no reason we shouldn't be taking more of these placebos. If they're working and they give us more agency, they give us more control. That's actually magic.
Sharad Lal: Agency is such a good word. Thank you very much, Nir. I've taken up more of your time than you intended to give.
I'm very grateful for that. What a wonderful conversation. I wish you all the very best in your future work.
Nir Eyal: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Sharad Lal: Thank you for such an insightful and inspirational conversation for more near you can check out the show notes. Here's something all of us could try. Time boxing. To get started. You can hit up. Near and far.com/timeboxing. All information is out there. There's also a template to get started. Wish you all the very best. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next episode will drop two weeks from now on September 10, Do join us for that till next time. Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye bye.