Behavioral Design For Yourself And Your Customers with Nir Eyal

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to bacon wrapped business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome to bacon wrap business. This is Brad Costanzo and today I've got a very selfish guest on the show because I need his knowledge to help fix my brain, which is like a crack addicted squirrel. Quite often I'm sure if you're an entrepreneur, you can probably relate to that. A lot of us get this entrepreneurial add. Some of us battle real add. For me, it's been both a blessing and a curse. But I've spent my entire life being distracted by it could be shiny objects, it could be dull objects, it doesn't really matter. So today I invited an absolute expert, one of the world's leading thought leaders and somebody who has helped to fix a lot of people who have this same exact problem. His name is Nir Yal and he is the author of a book called Hooked, which you can get on Amazon, which I read several years ago, and a new book called how to control your attention and choose your life. He is a, he is an absolute wizard at understanding the reasons we get distracted, what distraction is really about and what it's not, and how to use simple tools and frameworks to get back on track. Invited him on the show today for you guys to get a lot out of this, but I am also looking to get a lot out of it as well. So I invite you to eavesdrop on Nir and I's conversation. Nir, welcome to bacon wrap business. It's great to have you.

Thanks so much. I appreciate it. It's great to be here, Brad.

Well, you know, this is one of those topics that is probably especially for entrepreneurs and busy executives. I mean really for everybody. But distraction is everywhere and it's a killer of productivity. And when I was reading a little bit more about your background and what you did prior to the books and where you worked in the gaming industry, it sounds like you had, like this was actually you were, you were one of those culprits trying to understand how to get people's attention and get them hooked on you. Is that right? Explain how your background kind of really relates to this topic.

Sure, yeah. So I taught for many years at the Stanford graduate School of Business Then later, at the Hasso Platter Institute of Design at Stanford, and I taught what we call behavioral design. I taught companies how to build the kind of products and services that get people hooked. Now, that can sound sinister, but believe me, the idea here is that we help people build healthy habits, good habits in their lives, not bad habits. So my goal was to steal the secrets of products like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Snapchat, these products that are able to get millions, if not billions of people to constantly check their products and services so that we can all use it for good. Right? Why is it that it's just the video game companies and the social media companies that get people hooked up? Why can't we get people hooked on exercise? Well, we can. There's a company called fitbod that I worked with, that I profiled in the book that uses the hook model to get people into the habit of exercising. If you think about products, you know, why can't we get kids to get hooked on learning? Well, we can. There's a company called Kahoot that I was fortunate enough to invest in a few years ago that's now worth over $3 billion. The founder Johan called me up and said five years ago he said, I read your book Hooked and I want to start this company to help kids engage in education. What do you think? And I said, I love it. Take my money, let me invest. And today it's a multi billion dollar company that's publicly traded whose mission is to get kids hooked. Using my methodology described in my book Hooked, to get people to get kids hooked onto learning. We can use it in all sorts of fields, right? Anywhere where people aren't doing the behaviors that would not only help the business, but also to help themselves. Remember, we're not talking about addiction here. My work is not about addiction. My work is about habits. In habits are defined as behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. So we can help people build healthy habits. And of course, that's incredibly profitable for the bottom line. Because when people come to your product because they want to, not because they have to, that means you're not spending a ton of money on advertising and spammy messaging and annoying them all the time. They're using your product and service on their own, not because of some expensive advertising. Think about how much money you could save if people came to your business on their own because they wanted to, not because they have to. In the same way that they compulsively Check Facebook or YouTube or whatever they're checking online. Why can't we steal their secrets and use the same principles in our own business? So that's the core of my first book, Hooked. Now the flip side of that is that sometimes products are made to be so engaging. They're so well designed that sometimes we find ourselves getting distracted with these different technologies and tools. And so Indistractable is about how do we break those bad habits. So Hooked is about how do we build a good habit. Indistractable is about how do we break those bad habits. And that's more of a personal productivity book. It's for people who, you know, like, you find that they know what they want to do with their time. They know they want to eat right, they know they want to exercise. They know they want to get to work. They know they have a million things to do on their to do list. And they know where they want to spend quality time with their family. And yet for one reason or another, things don't get done the way they want them to. They don't finish the tasks that they say they're going to, they're going to finish. They take longer than they expect. They've got things on their to do list that somehow just linger day after day after day. And so what I wanted to do was to help those folks with really solid research. You know, I hate these stupid business books that are all about, well, I succeeded using this tactic and this tactic, so it's going to work for you. Where's the scientific evidence? Don't worry about that. I hate those kind of books. I wanted to write a book that is based on solid science so you'll see 30 pages of citations from peer reviewed studies where you can actually see the real science behind distraction, behind why we go off track so that we can finally do something about it.

That's brilliant, man. I could talk to you about these topics for hours and hours. But I want to touch on both of those and very personally too. Right, so let's go back to building good habits. Let's go back to and let's actually talk about this in the nature of product building and how to hook people, especially if you have a good product, how to build that stickiness into it so that people, you know, they don't actually have to think twice about it or when they do, it just becomes part of their, their nature. Now there's a lot of products like software which have all different types of features. Like, you know, you mentioned Facebook in order to do that. But what about like a physical product? And I'll give you an Example. And this is a selfish example. So I'm partners in a company. I have equity in a company called Vitamin Patch Club. So we make transdermal vitamin patches you just wear on your skin just like a nicotine patch. Only instead of delivering nicotine, it delivers, like, quality vitamins, D, C, B, blah, blah, blah.

Right.

And it's better bioavailability. You don't have to swallow a patch. That's great. However, one of the things we're trying to do, because we've noticed, is that a lot of folks get on there and they, you know, they'll wear the patch, they'll buy it for a month or two, and then they'll. They'll sometimes stop wearing it or they'll stop ordering. And we ask them, well, why did you stop? And they just, you know, I kind of forgot to wear the patch. And I've got a lot of them still that I haven't used. And, you know, they're not doing it every day. So one of the initiatives that we're doing is just, how do we make this. I guess I'll use the pun. Sticky. How do we build habits into. How do we encourage positive habit building with our products so that they can. They can get the benefits that they're buying?

Yeah. Yes. So there's four steps to creating a customer habit with a product. The first step is to create a trigger. So the trigger is either an external trigger, which is, you know, we all see these things. They're pings, dings, rings, anything in our outside environment that tells us what to do next. Utilizing leveraging we call an internal trigger. An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that we seek to escape from. Now, this is a really important concept that everybody in business needs to hear. Okay? Everybody in the world needs to hear, which is the root of behavior. You know, why do we do what we do? Right? If you fundamentally think about it, what is the nature of motivation? Most people will tell you motivation is about carrots and sticks, right? It's about pain, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That, in fact, is not true. It is not true that everything we do is not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but rather we do everything we do for one reason and one reason only, and that is the desire to escape discomfort. It's pain all the way down. Everything you do. Everything you do, it's called the homeostatic response, is about escaping some kind of discomfort. So what that means, therefore, is that any action we want to prompt in a user, a customer in ourselves, we need to find the discomfort. We don't make the discomfort. That's sadistic. We would never want to make the user uncomfortable. We want to find the discomfort. So for example, let me give you some examples. So you're feeling lonely. Check Facebook, you're uncertain. Before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer. Google it, you're bored. Tons of solutions for boredom, right? Check the news, stock prices, sports scores, a million different things, Pinterest, Reddit. There's a hundred different things you can do when you're feeling bored. The point being here you have to understand your customers internal trigger. You have to understand that itch not just to get them to build, to buy the product once, okay. But to create repeat engagement. If there is no discomfort, there is no repeat use. Super.

That's a writer downer. I like that.

Yes. You know, you have to find that there's no. Yeah, right. It's about finding that itch you seek to scratch, okay? So that's really what your product has to do. If you need repeat habitual behavior, you have to ask yourself, what is that frequently occurring internal trigger that your product is going to satisfy? Okay? That's what the hook model is all about. It's about connecting your user's problem to your product with enough frequency to form a habit. Okay? That's what a hook model is all about. So that's. Step one is about understanding the external trigger catering to the internal trigger. Step number two is the action phase. The action phase is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of reward. The simplest thing the user can do to get relief from that psychological itch. So open an app, scroll a feed, push a play button, take a vitamin, whatever the case might be. What is the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward? Now the third step of the hook model is kind of the engine of the hook model. It's called the variable reward phase. The variable reward phase acknowledges that it's not good enough to just give people what they want. Okay? Habit forming products have what we call an intermittent reinforcement. And let me explain a little bit about this because this is fascinating research. This is very old stuff. By the way, if you ever took a Psych 101 class, you will have heard of B.F. skinner. B.F. skinner, operant conditioning. He had what today we call a Skinner box where he put pigeons inside this little Skinner box and he gave them a disc to peck at. And every time they peck to the disc, they would receive a reward, a little food pellet. Okay? So very quickly, as long as the pigeons were hungry, by the way, the experiment did not work. If the pigeon wasn't hungry, he actually used to starve his pigeons. And the reason I tell you this is to reinforce that like these pigeons, if your customer doesn't have the pain, if they don't have the discomfort, in this case, the pigeons pain was hunger. They will not do what you want them to do, okay? So you have to find customers who are hungry in one way or another psychologically for your product. So as long as these pigeons were hungry, Skinner could train them to peck at the disc to get their little food pellet. Great. That's called operant conditioning. If you've ever trained a puppy, this is exactly the technique you do, right? You see the behavior, get a treat. But then one day, Skinner ran out of these food pellets. He didn't have enough. He was running low. And he realized that he couldn't afford to give the pigeon a food pellet every time they pecked at the disc. He could only afford to give it to them once in a while. So sometimes the pigeon would peck at the disc, no reward. The next time the pigeon would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward. And what Skinner observed was that the rate of response, the number of times the pigeon pecked at the disc, increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. So in all sorts of products and services, the things that we find most engaging, most habit forming, the things that capture your attention and won't let go, you will always find an element of variability. Let me give you some examples. When you watch a sports match on tv, I mean, if you ever take a step back, like if an alien landed on our planet and watched the obsessive nature of spectator sports, they would be so confused. I mean, here we are, millions of people watching, a bunch of people we don't know, wearing colors representing cities. They're not from bouncing around or moving around a ball to get it into a little hole somewhere. It's ridiculous, right? It's silly. Why? Why are we so entranced by spectator sports? And you name the sport, people love it because of the variability. We don't know what's going to happen. Where is the ball going to fly? What team is going to win? It's all about the same. Skinner and variability. Think about the news. How does the news keep us hooked to the day's events? Well, the first three letters of news is N, E, W, right? What's new? Nobody wants yesterday's news. We'll pay people to haul our Newspapers away. If they're yesterday's newspapers, we want today's news. What's the latest that happened? What don't I know? In this drama that we call the news, the news, companies don't care a bit about whether you know what you need to know. They just want to make sure you keep coming back. And they'll feed you whatever sensational interpretation they can get away with, because that's what keeps you coming back, that unknown, the variability. Maybe the best example is slot machines, right? When people go to Vegas and play these games of chance, there's uncertainty around what you might win. Whether you're playing blackjack or slot machine or whatever, there's uncertainty there. Nobody ever turns their eyes away from a slot machine that's rolling because we want to see what's going to happen. We want to see if we're going to win one of these games of chance.

Yeah, you're right. That power of novelty and surprise is so powerful.

Huge, huge. So that's a very, very important aspect. Of course, social media is totally driven with these variable rewards, right? What do people post? What are the comments say? How many likes does something get? Exactly the same psychology as pulling on a slot machine. So you have to have those variable rewards. And I talk about, in the book Hooked about these three types of variable rewards, rewards of the tribe, hunt and self. Then finally, the last step, and this is probably the most overlooked of the four steps of the hooked model, is the investment phase. The investment phase is where the user puts something into the product to improve it with use. Okay, this is super important. And this is where most products that are not habit forming fall down, is that they don't do something that improves the product with use. And this is, this is, you know, there's many ways to do this. We can do this by collecting data, contacts, uploading content, followers, anything that makes the product better and better with you. So online, it's very easy to illustrate if you think about how every time you use Instagram and you accrue followers and friends and comments and likes, the algorithms are getting better at feeding you content based on what you did in the past. The product gets better and better with use. If you use ebay or Airbnb, the comments on your reputation, right? The more comments you have, the better, or sorry, the more money you can charge for your goods and services, right? You can charge more for a room on Airbnb if you have a reputation score because people have invested in the platform. Even if a better service comes along, you're not likely to leave because you've invested in it. Let's do an offline example. When you go to your barber, if you're, you know, I used to go to a barber a few years ago. Every time I would go there, he didn't recognize me from Adam, right? It was like sitting down. And so I didn't form any kind of bond from him. Now, my barber, not only does he remember how I like my haircut, he remembers the name of my daughter. He remembers what I do for a living. Of course he remembers my name. He checks up on things, and I see him, you know, maybe once a month or so. But I've invested in that relationship. So whether it's offline or online, online is certainly easier because you can deploy technologies to accrue information. But that's no excuse. I don't care if you run a. A dry cleaner or a restaurant, a barbershop, it doesn't matter. You have to collect information on people to improve the experience with use. Not in a creepy way, but in a friendly way. This is what friends do for each other. They learn what's going on in each other's lives so that they can have a better relationship. And that's what the investment phase is all about. Now, of course, you know, that's been put on steroids, so to speak, when it comes to these online companies collecting data in mass and using that algorithmically to make the product better with use. But that's still the core four steps of the hook model. The trigger, the action, the reward, and finally the investment. And so now that we have that framework articulated, and of course, there's a lot more in the book that actually gets down to the brass tacks of how to use this stuff, we can look at a product like this vitamin patch that you're describing. So the external trigger you've nailed. And by the way, before we dive into this, you got to make sure that everyone understands that every successful product needs to be a gem. Okay? GEM stands for growth, engagement, and monetization. Okay, Every successful product needs to be a gem. Growth, engagement, Monetization. Growth is about how do you acquire customers. Engagement is about how do you keep them coming back. And monetization is about how do you sustain your business and make sure it's profitable so that you can keep your employees employed, your customers happy. So what we're going to talk about is not growth or monetization. We're only going to talk about engagement. Why? Because that's what I'm an expert in. So if you need Growth hacks go to somebody else. If you need monetization tricks and tactics, that's somebody else. What we want to talk about is engagement. How do you keep people coming back? So you know, stuff that is out of scope for our discussion here is, you know, advertising, you know, customer acquisition, that's a one time thing. So getting someone to buy the vitamin patch the first time, out of scope. Why? Because that only happens once, right? Or maybe it happens very rarely, right? Once every few months. A habit has to occur within a week's time or less. It has to be something that people do with little or no conscious thought. So for sake of this discussion, growth, you know, sales, advertising, that's out of scope. Let's talk about engagement. How do we get people to use the product? Because if they don't use the product, they're going to churn, right? And I don't care whether it's a software, as a service, whether it's, you know, any. You name your product, if people don't consistently use that product, you're in trouble. Now not every, I have to give a little disclaimer, not every product needs to be habit forming, right? So like let's say you sell car insurance, okay? Car insurance is never buying car insurance is never going to be a habit, right? Because you just don't use car insurance. You buy it and you have it and just in case, God forbid something happens, it's there, right? So you don't use car, you actually.

Never want to, you have to use it.

Exactly. The problem is if you don't have some kind of habit or other competitive advantage, you are competing with people based on only two features, price and features, right? That's all you're competing on price and features and you're beating each other up, right? So Geico says, oh, 15 minutes will save you 15% on car insurance. And then somebody else says, oh yeah, well working with us will save you 20% and it'll only take you 10 minutes, right? So you're constantly competing on price and features and price and features. And of course we know what that does to margins. It kills your margins. Whereas when you have a habit with a product, you don't even check if the competition is any better. Think about how amazing that is from a competitive angle, right? When you Google something, when was the last time before you googled something, you said, hey, I wonder if Google is the best search engine.

Yeah, let me check Bing or Yahoo. Yeah, nobody ever does that.

Why? Because we are in the habit of checking. Google is what we do with little or no conscious thought. So we have crowded out, we have boxed out the competition just because we have formed a habit. And that is an incredibly powerful place to be as a company. And that's where you see these businesses that have crazy margins is when they form these habits. Okay, so that's the companies I study like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Snapchat, Google. All of these companies have this basic habit, the hook model we just described embedded in the products you use. So let's, with all that long preamble for diving into your vitamin company, see if we can dissect what might be going on, why people don't continue to use the product. So they buy the product. The external trigger is the product itself. Okay, so products that have an offline manifestation, right? The fact that someone just paid, I don't know how much money, how much does it cost?

Let's say about 25 bucks a month.

Okay, great. So they just paid 25 bucks. They got these vitamin patches. They're sitting on the table in front of them. They can see it. That is the external trigger. That is the prompt to action. Okay, the action. Let's skip the internal trigger for a quick second. The action is pretty clear. It's put on the patch. How often do I put on the patch?

Once a day.

Okay, every day. All right, So I got to put on the patch once a day. That's the action. Let's go back for a second to the internal trigger. Can you think what the internal trigger might be? What's the pain, the discomfort, the itch that the customer seeks to scratch?

So I believe it'd be twofold. Well, number one would be the itch they want to scratch. They want to be healthy. They want to not be unhealthy. They want to be healthy. So to take their vitamins, right? So that, that's assumption number one is that, is that they want to take vitamins. Number two, and I don't know if.

This feeling give me the discomfort.

The feeling is maybe they feel lethargic, maybe they feel unhealthy, maybe they feel lack of like brain fog and all this stuff. And they realize that, man, I need some vitamin supplementation. Maybe I'm not getting enough, right? So that's, I'm going to turn to my vitamins. Maybe they'll help me feel better. And then the other one. And this is a big part of the value proposition. There is like a lot of people just hate having handfuls of pills to swallow. And, you know, some people have real Problems with it. Some people just don't like it. So this solves that problem. You no longer have to swallow pills. You can just simply, you know, slap on a patch.

Yeah. Okay, so great. So the pain here, we assume, is feeling bad. The first one you said about. The second one is about the competitive advantage over a different solution. But let's talk about why someone would take this, any vitamin for that matter. It's about, I don't feel good somehow, you know, so every time I don't feel good, I'm going to take this vitamin. Now there's a problem there. And the problem is that people who take vitamins tend to already feel good because they're health conscious and vitamins themselves.

They'Re not like, it's not like a painkiller, Right? Yeah. So it doesn't.

When I have a headache. Right. So what you're describing is a painkiller is the kind of product, okay, I have a headache, give me some Tylenol. Now I feel better with vitamins. That's not the case. Because if I only take a vitamin, if you hang your hat on this internal trigger of take it when you don't feel well. Well, thankfully most people feel pretty good most days. Right. Every day feel crappy. So you're staking the habit on an infrequent itch, which is dangerous. Instead, I would ask you to consider whether the internal trigger should be something a little different. Maybe it's fear. How could fear play into taking a vitamin? What if it's something around the fear of not getting proper nutrition?

I was just, yeah, I was just going to say that, like, are you worried that you're not eating enough vegetables, that you're not getting enough vitamins and nutrients?

Because now you're catering to the people who are already well and are the kind of. Because the kind of person who, you know, eats a Big Mac every day and a large Coke followed by a Slurpee, you know they're not going to take vitamins, right? Like, they're not in that market. They might feel crappy, but they don't think that the solution to that discomfort is going to be by taking a vitamin. It's certainly not this crazy new patch idea. So maybe it's about market segmentation and finding that customer that actually has the pain point you can address, which is the fear of getting proper nutrition. Perhaps. Now, again, you know, it's just the two of us talking. You have got to go out there and as Steven Blank says, you know, the answers are not going to be in this room, the answers are going to be out there with your customers. You have to do customer development to see if this is actually true. This is just a hypothesis as far as we're concerned. I don't have the secret answer. Your customers have the answers. Okay? So let's say for the sake of discussion, that the internal trigger is this fear of not getting proper nutrition. The action is putting on the patch every day. What's the variable reward?

The variable reward on that. Man, that's a stumper.

Exactly. This is why. This is a big reason why people will try your product for a while and then move on. Because the next time a slick salesman comes to them and says, oh, that stupid patch. I got the better patch.

Something new. Yeah, that's why we're all distracted to shiny objects.

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's because of the variability. So the variability in the health and wellness market is always the next thing. Let me tell you, everybody, there is no goddamn way to lose weight without exercise and calorie restriction, okay? I don't freaking care if it's keto schmido, vegetarian, vegan, low fat, low carb. It's all bullshit. You have to cut calories and exercise. We know this. And yet every other day there's some stupid diet book that tries to convince people that, no, this is the miracle. Just do this, just do that, just drink this, just eat that.

Mm.

Why? Because it's a variable reward. Yeah. It's a slot machine. If I buy this book, if I eat this pill, if I drink this noni juice bs, then I'll be skinny. Yep.

And I went down that path a couple years ago.

I used to be clinically obese. I know this stuff like the back of my hand, okay? I tried all of it, and it's all ridiculous. But now I understand why I became almost addicted to this health and wellness stuff. Because as opposed to having to actually do the hard work of eating right and exercise, I could lose myself in the research around which products I should buy, what kind of protein should I drink, what kind of juice is the best, what kind of this, what kind of that? And none of that matters.

Yeah, I went down this. I went down this rabbit trail with Keto a couple years ago. I was like, oh, Keto. Like, you guys have had some. Maybe. Maybe that's what it'll do. And, like, all of. I guess my variable reward there is. Hey, you get to eat bacon more than you used to.

Yeah.

That. You've been saying, no, I don't want those. So now that's really cool. And just like anything, after a long period of time doing it, that stuff is no longer a reward. If anybody knows about keto, and I'm sure you do, the variable, the variability in your diet is actually very small. Tons of fancy stuff and you just get bored.

Exactly. So it or so a you get bored, by the way, just to just have a little asterisk here. I'm not anti the benefits of keto. There are some benefits for sure that I know we're in the middle of researching. The research is inconclusive here. You know, we know that for epilepsy, for example, there's some real benefits to a ketogenic diet. There are benefits, we'll see more of them, but for the average person, it's on the margin. Okay? For the average person, you know, I hear this all the time when it comes to what I do with distraction. People say, well, what about this, you know, magic mushroom thing that I can take that's going to increase my brain power? What about this drug I can take, you know, the ADD medications, the this, the that, all this stuff I can do. And I say, yes, that stuff might be helpful on the margin, but why don't we start with planning your day? Yeah, how about we make a calendar? How about we define what is distraction for you today and what do you actually want to accomplish with your time? Oh, that's no fun. Can't I just buy a magic mushroom powder?

You know, that's an amazing.

It is the same way.

Perfect segue. This is a perfect segue into the indistractable.

I want to, I want to finish one thing at a time.

So do I.

But, but for the. Let's get back to the vitamin, for the vitamin exam because I, this is really, really important. So for your product and for your example, the problem, a part of the problem is that the variability isn't there. Okay? That over time I put on the patch, I don't feel different. I put on the patch, I don't feel different. I put on the patch, nothing happens. And so what do I do if I want something to happen? I don't actually do the hard work of eating right and exercising. Now that's boring. Let me go buy the next new thing to seek variability. And now you're done. Okay, now people aren't buying your product anymore. So how do other companies do this? Well, you know, we know that there's this company, a great example in the, in the history of marketing from Pepsodent. Nobody buys Pepsodent anymore, but Pepsodent was the first toothpaste to use an irritant in the toothpaste. You say, why would you want an irritant in your toothpaste? Well, since then, all of us have irritants in our toothpaste. It's called that minty, tingly feeling. Yep. Right. So why is it there? Mint does nothing for your dental health, but it makes you feel like something is happening.

Okay, so I want to stop you right here because I. And I love this because one of the things that we have been looking at lately on some of these patches and just double checking is if we put a very small amount of lidocaine, which is kind of a numbing agent, and it causes a little bit of a tingly numb, we're like, well, I wonder if that would create at least the perception of something working. Kind of like the toothpaste example you're talking about, which is like, okay, I feel the tingly. I feel that. So that kind of triggers me to believe it's working, is that I don't know if this is kind of the direction you were going down.

Yeah. So I'm not advocating for this because part of it feels like a scam to me.

Yeah. That's where we were talking about it. We haven't putting that in, but we were like, how do we get that same thing that happens in toothpaste? Because we literally thought about that.

Exactly. So I'm giving you examples. I don't know how I feel about it in terms of would I actually use it? Because it feels like a little bit of a scam. I mean. Yeah, I mean, it actually works. Right. If you can actually have a vitamin that you could absolutely see was doing something for you, that would be amazing in some way right. Now, again, that's not easy to do because, you know, it's vitamins. You and me and everyone else who's listening right now. Most vitamins, you just pee right out.

But.

But if you could figure out, okay, here's something that actually worked and made people feel better and made their bodies better, that would be the best. But if it's just, you know, making sure that you have the baseline requirements of vitamins, that you need vitamins and minerals in your diet, so to speak, well, then, you know, if there's a way to show that somehow, like, could you represent them that on the patch, you know, for example, I'm just making stuff up here. Right. Talk about this for all five minutes. But imagine if your patch, you know, change color in a way, and said, oh, you were low on vitamin C, but now because of the patch, that dot changed from red to green.

Yeah, I like it.

Right. For again, I'm just making this up.

No, but I know, I understand the psychology behind it of creating some degree of like, like it is a reward, right?

Yeah.

Oh, I'm wearing this. I get to see something it doesn't. It's not always going to happen. And when it does, it gives me a degree of like, satisfaction.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So if there was some way to have that feedback that changed somehow based on, oh, yesterday was a stressful day, you're low on B6 vitamin, and now you're like fully recharged, you know, something like that. And again, just spitballing here, but something to that effect that could provide some element of variability in one way or the other would be great. And then finally the investment phase, that fourth step that we have to complete. This is another challenge that I work with a lot of health and wellness companies and this is constantly a challenge for them is how does the product get better with use? Because most health and wellness companies say, hey, we gave people what they want, we gave them the trigger action, the reward, we're done. But that's not enough. The customer must invest in the product with use. And that's a tricky thing. So I'll give you an example of a health and wellness company I've worked with called fitbod. That is a fitness tracking app. And the way that they integrate an investment in the product. And this is an age old problem. How do you get people to work out, to go actually exercise? Very difficult problem because there's a lot of complex behaviors there. Typically not a habit. What they wanted to turn into a habit was not the exercising. Okay. They targeted the kind of person who goes to the gym. And this is exactly the kind of person I used to be. I would go to the gym pre corona.

I was just going to say I used to be that too, before California shut them down.

Yeah. But I would go there and I would look around and there'd be all these muscle heads who all seemed to know what they were doing. And here I was this skinny, scrawny guy, previously chronic. I used to be obese. And here I was trying to go to the gym and I would have no clue what to do. So the internal trigger was uncertainty. The action is open, the app, the variable reward is what is the app going to tell me to do? And you know, it would tell me. Reps, sets, exercise, everything. And the investment was after I did the exercise, I would put in the data of what I did. So I did this exercise. Here's how many reps, here's how many sets. Now here's where the miracle happens. The next day, the app would generate my next workout based on my previous workout.

Yeah. So, yeah, the more you use it, the better it becomes.

The smarter it is, and then the.

Less you want to go find something else. Because you're already pot committed on this one.

Exactly right. It's like a personal trainer who knows your entire history and knows your injuries and know how. Knows how much you can lift and what you can do. You invest in that relationship. In this case, you invest with your data in the app, and it gets better and better with you. So if I showed up for a workout, I wouldn't even know what to do, because the app tells me every time. If I don't have the app, I won't know what to do. And it doesn't really feel like it counts unless I invest in the app by putting more data into it. So, that being said, that's an example of an investment phase. I don't know what it would be for your product, to be honest, but that's maybe where you can do some thinking.

Yeah. That said, this has been a very phenomenal discussion on ways that I need to think about this in. In a deeper way. And I appreciate that. And I want to segue over to now, really. Distraction.

And one of the things real quick, though. One. One quick idea just to leave you with. So one idea could be just a simple way to track adherence. So several years ago, I worked with a vitamin company, a pill form that made this bottle that was really interesting that every time you dispensed, told you the day of the week you were on. You know, kind of. It's like those pill cases. But why does that work so well? Because you can see, oh, I took the vitamin on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, oops, I forgot. On Thursday. And it reminds you because you can see it there. So that's a form of investment. The data, it's very binary, right? Did you take it? Did you not take it? But that can actually be a form of investment.

So, hey, I actually thought about that every day. For example, yeah, I actually thought about that because our patch comes in a sheet, and there's typically 30 on a sheet. Now, this would have been, you know, we'd have to redo all the printing, but I was like, well, what if we numbered the patches and then that somebody knew, okay, I'm on Patch 15.

An advent calendar style.

Exactly.

That's how if you put the calendar, if you instructed people, put this calendar on your wall, on your dresser in front of you first thing in the morning. And it's like an Advent calendar. Watch. Watch the usage rates. Watch what people do.

I can even imagine, like you peel off the patch and it reveals the date and then you put it on.

Right. Yep. I love it.

A lot of ways to go with that. That's awesome, Nir. I love that.

That's.

That gives me a lot of stuff to think about with my partner.

And the idea here isn't to say, oh, now I know the answer. The idea is to get you thinking. Right. So anybody listening to this? Of course. Course, you know, very few people are working on vitamin businesses, but you can use this model to trigger action, reward investment, to guide your thinking no matter what product you're working on.

Absolutely. What. It definitely changes the way you think about.

Yeah.

If I'm creating a product like, wait a minute, does it. You know, not everything has to have all these, but if you can find a way to integrate them, your product's going to be a lot more successful. And some products absolutely depend upon this, especially if you're trying to get them hooked up. So distraction, like you said, this is how to get people hooked on stuff. And now it's like, how do you keep from getting hooked on everything else that pulls you away? I know. And I'll preface this. One of the things I loved, one of the little epiphanies I had in reading the book and really kind of understanding the way you think about this is that a lot of us think that the opposite of distraction is focus. And it's not. And I'll let you talk about that. But I just remember thinking like, ah, that's brilliant.

Thanks. Yeah, let me dive into that. So, you know, the best place to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. And this is a really important point because I think even that term, distraction is a term that we think we understand even when we don't. Most people don't. I certainly did not before I wrote this book that I thought that the opposite of distraction, like you said, is focus. And it's not that. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. That both words come from the same Latin root trajare, which means to pull. And you'll notice that they both end in the same six letters. A, C, T, I, O, N. That spells action. So traction, by Definition is any action that pulls you towards what you say you're going to do. Things that you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. The opposite of traction is distraction. Distraction is any action that moves you further away from what you plan to do, farther away from your goals, your values, and pulls you away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. So why is this so important? Okay, is Nir just hung up on stupid definitions? No, this is actually really important because I would argue anything can be traction or distraction. Let me give you an example. So before I wrote this book, I would sit down on my desk and I would say, okay, today I am not going to get distracted, I am not going to procrastinate. I'm going to work on this thing I've been putting off. I'm going to work on that big project, the proposal, whatever that thing is. You know, everybody's got one that they know is super important but they haven't done yet. I'm going to do it. Okay, Today's the day. It's top of my list. I'm going to get started right now. Here I go. Nothing's going to get in my way. But first, let me check email, right? Does that sound familiar to anybody out there? I used to do this all the time and I would justify it to myself and say, well, email, that's a work task. It's important, right? I'm a productive person. I need to do my email. That's important to do. And I got to do it anytime. I got to do it sometime today. Might as well just do it now. And what I didn't realize is that that is the most dangerous form of distraction. The distraction that tricks you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important. And so this is why it's so important to understand that anything that is not what you plan to do with your time is a distraction even. And especially the stuff that looks worky, right. That looks like you're being productive. Right. I just gotta check that Slack channel real quick. Let me just check the news real quick. Let me just do this one thing real quick. And of course, it's never real quick. It takes you off track because you're not doing the thing you said you were going to do. So anything can become a distraction, even the stuff that feels work related.

Yeah. And that whole concept of busy but not productive is. Man, that's a killer. When you look back in the rearview mirror. And then you feel like at the end of the day, you're spent and you're like, oh, man, this must have been a good day. And you look back at what you got accomplished, and you're like, I don't think it was a damn thing.

Right, Right. Yeah, totally. I went to meetings. I had phone calls. But did you actually move the ball forward in the important stuff? No. So very, very important. Anything. I call that pseudo work. Right. It feels like work, but it's not your top priority. It's not what you said you were going to do with your time. And that is just as much of a distraction. So work can be a distraction, of course, from the real work. And alternatively, everything can be traction. So, you know, these days, we vilify fun. It drives me crazy. We have this ridiculous attitude that if it's fun, it must be wasteful. And it's so silly. Right? And particularly when it comes to technology. Oh, video games, that's a waste of time. Social media, that's silly. That's frivolous. That's hijacking your brain. That's addicting you. No. I am not one of these Chicken Little tech critics that says technology is bad. You know, I hated the movie the Social Dilemma. It was. I don't know if you've seen it on Netflix. Actually, they interviewed me for that film. I'm in the credits. But they didn't use anything I had to say because I directly contradicted their.

It didn't fit the narrative that they wanted to.

Yeah, they wanted to tell everybody, no, this stuff is so powerful, you can't stop using it. It's so bad for you, et cetera, et cetera. It's bullshit. It's just like food, right? There's nothing wrong with eating a chocolate cake on your birthday, but have it with intent, right? Eat with intent, as opposed to stuffing your face whenever you're trying to resolve bad feelings or escape discomfort. Use these products and services on your schedule and according to your values, not somebody else's. So if you want to play video games, awesome. You want to go on social media, great. Do you Want to watch YouTube videos? Do it. But do it on your schedule with intent. That's the difference between distraction and traction. The time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So now we have in our head, finally, this definition between what is traction? Anything you plan to do, anything you're doing with intent. Everything else is distraction. So that's the most important place to understand how to become indistractable. That's the first axes we have to understand.

I love that. And you talk a lot about time blocking your calendar, like scheduling out as opposed to having a to do list. Right. I know. I've tried both. I still have not found the productivity system that works perfectly for me. But I'm constantly tinkering with, you know, what feels the best. I know that when I tried to plan out my day using my calendar and say, okay, from this hour to this hour, I'm going to work on this and these, this is meetings and this, et cetera, what I invariably find are two problems occur. One of them is that maybe something takes a lot longer than it should. I run into something, it's like. And unless it's a meeting with another person, I end up going way over, I getting stuck. And I don't, I guess, you know, plan for those things that just arise. And then the other part is that it's hard to know, you know, if I'm in doing strategic work, creative work, routine, basic work, et cetera. My brain just sometimes might not be set up for, I don't know, creative work at this. Like, I don't know, from 9 to noon on a Tuesday, for instance, if I block that out and then some, then I just get distracted on and I go work on something else that my brain kind of feels like doing. And I know those are some of the issues that I've personally run into while trying to follow some simple.

Yeah, so let's, let's, let's do first things first. Okay, so now in everyone's head, I want you to envision this like number line. So to the right is an arrow, you know, point to the right is an arrow pointing towards traction. The left is distraction. Okay? So now we know everything that you plan to do with your time is traction. Everything else is distraction. Now I want you to picture two arrows pointing to the same center of that horizontal line. Okay? So two vertical arrows, one from the top, one from the bottom, pointing towards the middle. These represent the triggers, okay? The triggers, as we talked about earlier with the book hooked, the triggers are exactly the same when it comes to distraction. We have external triggers and we have internal triggers. The external triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction. And then we have the internal triggers, the uncomfortable feelings that can lead us towards distraction. And you said that just now. You said my brain doesn't feel like it. Fundamentally, distraction, procrastination is not a character flaw, okay? There's nothing wrong with You. It drives me crazy. No offense, when people say, oh, I have undiagnosed adhd. No, you don't. Stop telling yourself this psychobabble bullshit. There's nothing wrong with you, okay? I'm telling you, if you've gotten as far as you have in life, there's nothing wrong with you. And if there is, it doesn't help you to think that you're deficient.

Right?

Because what we're doing to ourselves is convincing ourselves that we are incapable of doing something that people have always struggled with. Distraction is nothing new. Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about distraction 2500 years ago. In the Greek, he called it akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. This is not a new problem, okay? So stop thinking of yourself as disabled. Stop thinking of yourself as incapable. Don't tell yourself you're a morning person, you have a short attention span, an addictive personality. Ridiculous. Unless you bring me a doctor's note, you don't have any of this stuff. What you have is that you haven't learned the skills to deal with discomfort. When you, quote, unquote, don't feel like it, you make up a story that your brain is incapable and it's not true. You just don't feel like it. You know why? Because, again, remember what we said earlier. All human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort. All human behavior is spurred by desire to escape discomfort. So when you feel bored, lonely, frustrated, fearful, anxious, uncertain, you look for an escape. We all do. Whether that's with a drink of booze, reading the news, watching football, going on Facebook, we look for distraction when we feel uncomfortable. So the first step is to realize. Write this down. Time management requires pain management. Time management requires pain management. If you don't know how to deal with discomfort in a healthy manner, and we don't learn this in school, we have to learn how to deal with that discomfort so we can plow through it. So that when we feel like this is really hard, let me just go check email for a quick minute, or let me just make that phone call. Or I better do this or I better do that. We recognize. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Do I actually have to do that? Or is this distraction rearing its ugly head? Because I'm looking for an emotional escape. So I give you the tactics on how to do that. I tell you exactly how to master these internal triggers. This is the most important first step. The second step is to make time for traction, is to put down in your calendar, what is traction. So that you know, everything else is distraction. It has to be on your calendar. I tell you exactly how to do that based on your values. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your time. I'm going to help make sure that whatever it is you want to do with your time gets done. Okay? That's the second step. The third step is to hack back the external triggers to make sure that when you have these pings, dings and rings, you know, today it's our kids, if we're working from home, they can be a huge source of distraction. It's not just our technologies. You know, the superfluous meetings, the emails, other people, all of these things can be sources of external triggers. I show you how to hack back every single one of those. And the fourth step is to prevent distraction with pact. I show you how to make pre commitments to make sure that you do. We say you're going to do as the last line of defense as the firewall to make sure you don't get distracted. And when you use these four techniques in concert, and this is the real takeaway here, don't fall for these 10 tricks to not being distracted. 10 ways to make your smartphone less addictive. Those articles are horrible. It's about a holistic approach using good psychology that has been verified in peer reviewed studies time and time again. These four steps are all you need. Master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers and prevent distraction with packs. If you use these four techniques in concert, if you read the book Indistractable, I promise you you will overcome this. But you have to do what the book says.

Well, that is a perfect way, perfect way to wrap this up. I know one of the things I'm going to be doing is including going back through the book, you've got a lot of great bonuses and workbooks and and additional resources on your site in the book, et cetera. But if somebody wants to go right now, and probably if they've listened to this whole thing, they should be chomping at the bit to buy two books right now. Hooked and Indistractable is the best place your website or where Would you like to direct some folks if they want to.

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you. If you go to near and far.com, near spelled like my first name. So that's N I r&far.com so Nir and far.com made some play on my name there. That's my website. That's the best way to get my latest content. I publish an article every two weeks. And if you go to nearandfar.com there's actually a workbook, an 80 page workbook that's completely free. We couldn't fit it into the final edition of the book because the book got too long. But you can get that for free whether you buy the book or not@nearandfar.com and that'll get you started on your path to becoming indistracted.

I've got it open on my browser as we speak. Nir I really appreciate you taking the time. This has been just absolutely fascinating and this is one of those things that I will selfishly put to work and do this because yeah, I want to hook more people into my products and I want to get less distracted on other people's stuff.

So anyway, we should do a follow up to see how you've implemented some of these techniques. I'm so curious to see how they work out for you.

I will absolutely follow back up with you and keep you posted on that. And to all my listeners, go check out near and Far N I R A N d f a r.com grab his books. You can see that he is coming with a lot of heat here and understands exactly what he's talking about. A lot of my friends, a lot of my followers I know have told me they were really excited when they heard that I was interviewing Near. So go get his books and subscribe to the show. If you're not. If you have any questions, shoot me an email to ask. Bradakenwrappedbusiness.com Nir, I look forward to keeping in touch and letting you know how this goes for me.

Awesome. Thanks so much Brad. Great being here.