Nir Eyal: Creating Habit Forming Products

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What's up fastlaners? Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane, which is now officially the handsomest podcast on itunes that features a millionaire from Cleveland, Ohio, who now lives in Austin, Texas and is obsessed with the Cleveland Indians and the TV show Survivor. Today we're going to be hanging out with Nir Eyal. And Nir is the author of a book called Hooked, which analyzes how to create habit forming products and also the things in our life that cause us to create habits and how we can unhook ourselves from certain habits that we don't want to be hooked to. I saw Nir speak at a conference that I was attending and it really resonated with me because there is a big emphasis in my life right now to become unhooked from the things that take up so much of our time, to recapture the attention that is lost from being on email and Facebook and all the distractions that hit us on a constant basis. Now, near is a really busy guy, so I had to actually catch him in the middle of the day. So the audio on this one isn't the best. There's a lot of background noise in this one. But I had to catch near when I could. So we're extremely fortunate to have him on. And I hope you'll deal with the audio issues on today's chat with Nir Eyal.

Nir, welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Oh, great to be here.

Nir, you had a profound impact on me, mostly because I found myself nodding and saying yes so many times when I saw you speak at Mastermind talks. But what I really want to kick things off with is you talk a lot about creating habit forming products. And I've always said, you know, the big, the big websites, the big products out there, match.com and Facebook don't have to ask me to go check in. I just, I just go check in.

Right, right, right.

So I'd like you to speak to that because you, you work with and speak to a lot of entrepreneurs about this topic, but so few of us do it. So so many of us are caught in kind of the business strategy that we miss out on this. So would you give us kind of a high little level view of creating how habit forming products.

Sure, sure. So my work over the past several years has been looking at what is it that makes these companies that are so good at changing our behavior able to do so? How do companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat and Slack, how do these companies that they all Started just a little while ago. And yet within the span of just a few years, they're having such a profound impact on our day to day lives. How do they do that? How do they change our habits? And so what I learned from looking at these companies was that they follow a predictable pattern, that there's this design pattern that I call the hook. And the hook has these four basic steps of a trigger, an action, a reward and an investment. And it's through successive cycles, through these hooks that our preferences are shaped, that our tastes are formed and that these habits take hold. And so I can walk you through if you'd like. We can walk through those four basic steps. And what's interesting is that by understanding these four basic steps, not only can we build products that I hope can improve people's lives, the idea here is that I was frustrated that when I was at my last company that I learned many of these techniques that I wanted to get them out to the public. I wanted to get them into industries other than gaming and social networking and advertising. I wanted lots of different entrepreneurs in lots of different industries that can really help improve people's lives. Learn how to build more habit forming products so that people can live better, they can create healthy habits and healthy routines. And then also by understanding this model, we can also do what was the core of the talk that you saw. We can also unhook ourselves by understanding how these technologies work, we can avoid unwanted manipulation.

Yeah, so let's dive right into that. Let's dive into those. How we get hooked to these products and services.

Sure. Yeah. So it's this four step model called the hook model, which starts with a trigger, an action, reward and an investment. Every hook starts with an external trigger which is something that tells you what to do next. We see these every day. Things like a call to action like click here or Buy now or a friend telling you about something through word of mouth. This is where there's some piece of information in the trigger telling you what to do. Then comes the action itself. Typically, this action is incredibly easy to do. It's something like scrolling on Pinterest or searching on Google or pushing the play button on YouTube. Very, very simple things to do. And then comes the reward. And typically it's a variable reward that's at the core of these hooks. It's something that feels good, but has also this element of mystery, this bit of variability. And this comes from the classic work of B.F. skinner. You probably remember Skinner from your Psych 101 class, the Father of operant Conditioning found that when he took these pigeons and he put them in a little box and he gave them a disc to peck at every time they received a food pellet, they would basically peck at the disc whenever they were hungry. But then Skinner did something a little different. He introduced this variable reward. So sometimes the pigeon would peck at the disc, but nothing would come out. 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 these pigeons pecked at the disc, increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. So that's the exact same mechanic we see on what makes slot machines so habit forming. It's what makes a good sale so enticing to people. And it's what makes scrolling through your news feed on Facebook or Twitter something that we can't seem to stop doing. That variable reward is at the core of the hook model. Finally, the last step is the investment phase. The investment phase is where the user puts something into the product for a future benefit, either to load the next trigger. So, for example, when I send someone a message on WhatsApp or any number of other messaging services, when I send someone that message, I'm loading the next trigger to bring myself back because I'll likely get a reply. And then also these investments store value in the product, either with data, with followers, with reputation, with content, something that I'm doing every time I use the product to make it better and better with use. And then over time, I start to form an association with what's called an internal trigger. An internal trigger. We talked about those external triggers earlier. But internal triggers are things in our environment. They're cues to action where I don't even need any explicit information. All I need is to feel a particular emotion, a routine, a situation. And I'm using the product on my own, unprompted. So when I'm feeling bored, I check YouTube. When I'm feeling lonely, I check Facebook. When I'm uncertain, I Google. And without any kind of external prompting, I'm using the product without even thinking about it. And that is how a habit is formed.

So the example that comes to mind for me is Facebook. I feel bored, I check Facebook. And the variable there is that red button that says I have a new notification. It's not always there, but when it's there, it's the first thing I click. And then if I post something to my timeline, I'm investing for the future, where I'm going to get a bunch of Comments and likes. And that's variable too, because I have no idea what comments or likes are going to show up. Exactly.

And every time you do that, you're loading the next trigger. Every time you post, you're loading the next trigger. Because every time somebody else comments on that post or likes that post, guess what, you're going to get a notification that brings you right back through the hook once again.

And now they're doing it more and more with the bringing up of this is what you posted three years ago. And I get, I get a little, ooh, I remember this from three years ago. So now I want to post more. So this, this all makes sense to me in theory, I guess. But from a practical standpoint of how I do this with my products and services, this makes me, this sounds hard from a creation standpoint. It's like I get how the, the big companies of Google and Facebook are doing this to my brain. But from a selfish standpoint, I kind of want to go, how do I create this type of habit forming ideas in my products and services?

Sure. So first of all, let me just say that not every product or service needs to form a habit. Right? This isn't magic pixie dust that you pour in every business and hey, you're going to get the next Facebook. That's not necessarily how this works. And there's lots of companies that frankly don't need what's called unprompted user engagement. They don't have to create a habit with, with their users. But those, of course, that can, can create a tremendous amount of economic and customer value. So there's a lot of benefits to creating habits, but you don't have to create one if your business model doesn't require it. But that being said, if you're building the kind of business that you need people to come back on their own without relying on ads, without relying on lots of messaging. You can ask yourself basically these four fundamental, I'm sorry, these five fundamental questions of what's the user's itch? What's the internal trigger that would bring the customer back with enough frequency to form the habit? What's the simplest action done? Oh, sorry. What's the external trigger that gives the user some kind of information for what to do next? What's the action and how can it be made simpler? What's the variable reward? What's the thing that gives the user what they want and then leaves a bit of mystery? And then number five, what's the investment? What's the bit of work the user does to bring themselves back. And it really doesn't matter what kind of product you're building if it's used with sufficient frequency, if it's used at least once a week and you want people to use that product and come to it on their own without advertising, without spammy messaging, well, then you have to answer these five fundamental questions to make sure that you have your hook in place.

Can you walk us through this from a practical standpoint, either with a client or another company that you've seen use these so we can kind of put this together.

Sure. So name something that you find yourself habituated to a product that you find yourself using. We did face give me a product and we can see, let's do a tear down of it with this hook model.

I use my cell phone every day. I use some sort of supplement every day that I take in the morning. I shop at Whole Foods at least once a week.

Yeah, yeah. So those are all habits. Now if we take, let's say use your cell phone, the first one you mentioned email habits to be the, in my opinion, the mother of habit forming products. It's got amazing hooks and I thought of that because you say you check your phone many times a day, but our phone in fact is habit forming for many reasons. One of them happens to be all these different products that we use and services that we use on our phone. But if we take for example, email, one of the main reasons we keep checking our phones 150 times a day.

The internal trigger is when we're feeling bored, maybe we're feeling stressed about, hey, what am I supposed to be doing here at work or is somebody waiting for me? Every time I feel that internal trigger, that anxiety, the solution to that anxiety, the way to scratch that itch is to open the app. That would be the action phase, the variable reward. Well, you know, there's all kinds of variable rewards when it comes to using email or checking our phone. Right. What messages did I get and who are they from and what might they say? And all kinds of variable rewards are associated. Sometimes when I open email, there's nothing special and other times I have an opportunity to work with a new client. Other times it's, you know, some junk. So there's this variability about what I might find. And then the investment is every time I reply to someone over one of these, over an email, or over any number of different apps, I'm loading the next trigger because I'm likely to get a reply. And so that loads the next trigger, the external trigger, and brings Me back again with another notification, another message to send me to the hook once again.

Now, there's. There's plenty of things that we're addicted to or we have habits. But I'm wondering if all habits come back to this formula. For example, I have a yoga products company, and there's plenty of people say they're addicted to yoga. They can't go more than a day and a half without going to yoga. And I can see some variability there of who's going to be in class and what type of moves we're going to do. But do they all follow the same method? Is it the same type of habit?

Well, you have a few questions embedded therein, and I think one of them is a distinction between habits and addiction. So I would. A lot of people use the word addiction and habits interchangeably, but they're actually very different things. A habit is just an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. That's all a habit is. It's about 40% of what you do every day is done out of habit, behaving without really thinking about what you're doing. An addiction is something different. An addiction is a compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance. And it's always bad. Addictions are always bad. They hurt the user. It's part of the definition of what an addiction is. So if somebody is hurting themselves because they can't stop doing yoga, then yes, that's an addiction. But if it's because as long as it's not hurting them, that to me, is a healthy habit. If they're benefiting from it, they enjoy it and it's not hurting them, then that would just be an example of a healthy habit. Now, one of the defining characteristics of a habit is that when not doing, the behavior actually causes a bit of pain. When not doing the behavior causes a bit of pain. Just as you said so eloquently just a minute ago, it totally illustrates the point that when somebody says, gosh, I can't go a day and a half without doing yoga, it hurts me not to. That's exactly a habit. Same with me with flossing my teeth. I didn't use to floss my teeth when I was a kid. I hated flossing my teeth. But now that I've been doing it for decades, if I go to bed without flossing my teeth, it literally hurts my mind. It hurts my brain to think, oh my gosh, I didn't floss my teeth. I got to get out of bed. I got to Floss my teeth. I forgot.

That'S the ultimate goal of these habit of forming products as well, is to make it so that not using it hurts. If I shut off Facebook tomorrow, or maybe if Zuckerberg tomorrow says, you know what, I'm rich enough, I'm going to retire, I'm tired of this Facebook thing, I'm short at shutting it off. Oh, my God. People would have conniption fits, right? People would be riding the streets if you all of a sudden turned off Facebook. But of course, a few years ago, nobody had Facebook.

And that's what's so fascinating about these products. They become essential. They become things that would hurt us if we stopped using them.

So you said earlier that not everybody is going to have a product that's kind of relevant to this formula. And I think in my mind, floss is not one of these products that falls into this formula. But you have a habit of flossing. Just like I wake up in the morning and I have a habit of taking my probiotic. And I don't get a certain amount of variability or investment really for taking a probiotic, except maybe like, I may or may not poop today, so I better take my probiotic. So how do we use this formula or these ideas with products that may or may not have all of the baked in variability that a Facebook or a Snapchat might have?

Yeah, well, variability is very important in the beginning. It becomes less important the more entrenched the habit becomes. After a while, it's actually not as important. The behavior has become something that is painful to stop, like flossing your teeth or, you know, it becomes part of your. It's a little bit more complicated. But, you know, if it becomes part of your identity, becomes part of who you are, you're the kind of person who takes vitamins every day because you're health conscious or you floss your teeth because you're the kind of person who does want gross teeth, then it becomes part of your identity. It becomes hard to stop doing that habit over time that actually is formed through this identity of. I've been doing it so often. Look, I did it yesterday, the day before that. I've been doing it since I was a kid. It's just part of who I am. It's just part of what I do every day. When investing in that repeat behavior through that investment phase becomes part of who you are, then it's something that's a habit that becomes even difficult to break. But I would say in the beginning, these kind of things actually do involve a fair bit of variability when you think about how do you start a habit like this? How do you start a habit around taking a vitamin or flossing your teeth? Part of it is, in fact, when you take the vitamin that you celebrate it. You say, yeah, I did it today. Done. I closed my little. You know, some people use that daily medicine and a little plastic thing that has every day you take, you take what's in that little jar, the medication tray. I don't forget what those things are called. But the fact that, like, you did it today. And there's a sense of completion, a sense of mastery of. Yep, I checked the box. That's called a reward of the self. It's this completion mechanic. We see something similar online. When we finish steps in a process, there's this almost like a video game, like getting to the next level, the next accomplishment, the next achievement can itself.

Be a type of reward.

That makes sense. So to your clients and the entrepreneurs that you advise, do you encourage this? As you know, how do you bake into the use of a product, a regular form of consumption, so that habits can be built and then become automatic?

Right. That's exactly the kind of clients I work for. I don't work for gaming companies and gambling companies and pornography companies and alcohol companies for this exact reason that they already know how to do this stuff. Right. They know how to make these products. These products are already habits, Sometimes bad habits, sometimes addiction. What I want to help people do is to help them form healthy habits. Because there's so many things that we can do by applying healthy habits to help us live better lives. And a lot of that, I think, can be done through commerce. Right? Can be done by the entrepreneur who can make a great new product or service that helps people live better.

So let's talk about the opposite of this, because we're all hooked to some things that aren't such healthy habits. It's not healthy to check email 500 times a day, nor is it healthy to check Facebook as often as any of us do. So you talk a lot about getting unhooked as well.

Right? Right. So the two reasons I wrote this book was, number one, I wanted to help people who are building products with healthy habits to succeed. Right. I want people building products that can improve people's lives to actually be effective. And the second reason is that I want us all to become more aware of these products that are perhaps changing our behavior in ways that we don't like, in ways that we wouldn't prefer. And so the way we can get control over these unwanted habits is to understand how they work is to understand these four steps of the hook so that we can break the hook where it doesn't serve us, so that we can put technology in its place. And so the first place to start is to understand these four steps of the hook and then systematically. And I think this is going to be something that all of us are going to have to do, figure out how do I break these hooks? By removing unwanted triggers, by making the action more difficult, by removing or displacing the variable rewards, and then finally by not investing in these products in the first place. And so I'm just as much of an advocate for breaking hooks as I am for creating healthy hooks.

I've noticed, and I've told you this privately, that when I don't carry my cell phone on me when I go and be with friends without having email locked and Facebook locked, I feel so much more present, so much more creative, so much happier. And sometimes I ask myself, who would I be if I didn't have all of these things connected to me? And I know that if I go to a conference and don't carry my phone on me, I'm going to have more ideas than if I'm sitting there checking email all the time. So working these habits out of my life is very important. It's actually a primary focus of mine right now. So what would you say to those of us who are hooked to all these pieces of technology, know that we could perform and live better lives if we weren't hooked to them, but the process of getting out of it seems really daunting.

Right. So I don't want to vilify these services because I think overall they're fantastic. I mean, I, I think these technologies are great. By and large, they've enhanced my life a great deal. But it's, it's an age old struggle. Right. You know, Socrates and Aristotle were debating the nature of Akrasia, this tendency that we have as humans to not do the things we know we should be doing. It's nothing new. If it's not Facebook, then it's too much TV or watching too many sports or reading too many trashy magazines. There's always a distraction out there when we know we should be doing something else. The challenge with any of these services to figure out why the big myth here, the lie, is that we do these things because we think it's just us.

I just need a break or it's something that I just like to do. Well, it turns out that these products are actually designed for this purpose. They are designed to be super engaging. That's not a coincidence. And that's fine. That's free market economics. And thank goodness that they made these products so good that we want to use them. And by and large, they're free. So that's wonderful. But that just means we have to be more of a savvy consumer and to understand, look, if I. If I use these tools recklessly, then I don't get the things I really want to do with my life done. That comes down to figuring out, look, how do I. I think part of the solution is how do I use tech to fight tech, right? There's all these tools out there that make it actually much easier now to break these hooks. So one example of a product that I use is called Freedom. And every morning, freedom shuts off my Internet connection for two hours. So I can write very simple tool every day. Turns on at 7:30, turns off at 9:30. And I can't use the Internet. I can't use the web unless it's very difficult to turn it off. So I just have to wait and I do my writing. And even when it's hard, I have to focus. And it's very, very useful. There's other tools as well. There's all kinds of new technologies now that I call attention retention devices. And you can actually read more about them on my blog. I've written a few articles about these different products that essentially break the hook for products we don't want to use in the right time and place. So I think we're all going to have to become a little bit more savvy. I think we've kind of used these technologies without really thinking about what the negative consequences are. And now we're going, you know, we're swinging the other way. We're starting to say, oh, you know what? Maybe one thing I did recently, I uninstalled Twitter from my phone because I just saw myself checking and checking and checking. So now I only check Twitter when I'm at my. At my laptop, which is, you know, once or twice a day, as opposed to when I was on my phone, I was checking it all the time and rather needlessly. So it's this reevaluation of is this technology serving me or am I serving the technology?

Yeah, in a way, it kind of feels like we can use the same triggers that get us addicted to pieces of technology to build really healthy habits that service in some way, whether it's going to the gym or eating the right food. If we know how the triggers are working, then we can kind of stack the deck in our favor to build really healthy habits. It reminds me of what Gary Keller talks about, about using selective willpower until a habit is built. You know, the same habit of going over and checking Facebook, we could. We could use to. To funnel into something else.

Right, Right.

So you've talked about some practical things that people can do to start to become unhooked and kind of capture our attention back. Would you dive some more into those?

Sure. So let's work through some of the four steps of the hook. So we talk about removing triggers. So one thing you can do to remove triggers, we talked about using these attention retention devices so that.

You can't. You're not triggered with notifications.

There's stats that show that only 25% of the population ever changes their notification settings. That's crazy, right? We should all turn off notifications for everything except the most crucial apps. Right. The things that you absolutely have to be interrupted in your day for. Everything else should be off because it's.

They totally disrupt our day. So that's one thing we can do, is remove those unwanted triggers. We can make the actions more difficult. We can add friction to using these products, such as services like Freedom, that make it very hard for me to get online unless I take a lot of steps to turn off or disable those services. We can save the variable rewards for later. That's one easy technique. So, personal example, I found myself checking and checking on news sites. I would go onto a news site and I would start reading one article, and then after I finished that article, I would go to another article, another article, another article. It's not just me that didn't serve me. And so what I did instead is now every time I see an article that I want to read, I save it to Pocket. I send it over to this great app called Pocket. There's also Instapaper as a competitor. And so then I read the article later on and I can get those variable rewards of what's interesting in the article. Not right then and there where it's going to distract me from what I really should be doing, but on my schedule. And then finally, we got to make sure not to invest in particular in services that go on forever. That if we're not clear about products that ask us to continue to use and use and use and use without any kind of clear end in sight, that's pretty dangerous. That's. There's a lot of risk there. So we want to make sure that we're investing in the kind of products that have some kind of finite end in mind. So that's why, you know, this is not going to be very popular if I say this, but, you know, I don't watch TV series. You know, I don't watch Game of Thrones, I don't watch House of Cards because I know how the psychology of those things work. They go on and on and on. The more you invest in them, the more you want to know what these characters are doing. The more you become emotionally bought into these characters, these fictional characters, the more you want to see what happens next. And you never know what's going to end. As opposed to movies. I love movies because I know 90 minutes, two hours, it's done.

So, Neera, I think this is one of the most important conversations for us as a society to have, especially us tech entrepreneurs or Internet entrepreneurs who are at computers all day long where we have stuff flying at us constantly. And I've recommended things like meditation to recapture our attention since our attention is so limited now. But when I heard your presentation, it was kind of like next level for me, if you will. So where can entrepreneurs and other people who love this conversation find out more and read Hooked and discover more about what you're. What you're up to?

Sure. Yeah. So my book is named Hooked how to Build Habit Forming Products. And it's available wherever books are sold. And my blog is at near and far.com near spelled Nir, like my first name, near and far.com. and yeah, there's a lot more resources there that I write about this topic, about both how to create healthy habits and how to break unhealthy habits. And yeah, thank you so much for asking these great questions.

Hey, thanks for sticking with us through not the best audio, but a topic that is very near and dear to me right now. You know, I've discovered that when I'm hooked to technology that just my total capacity drops off a cliff. So a big focus of my life right now is recapturing my attention and recapturing the precious commodity of our focus and our attention, attention and the amount of mental bandwidth that we have at the end of the day. And one of the things I've been doing lately is I just log out of Facebook when I'm not using it, which forces me to have to re log in. So instead of just seeing that happy red dot that appears in the top right, that says I have a notification or a message, I see a login screen which reduces the dopamine response of that habit. And that has added extra time to my life because I'm not as hooked to email and Facebook anymore. And these are simple things. I'm working into my routines in order to recapture that attention. You know, that's why you get so creative on an airplane or when you go to a conference somewhere because you have three days of uninterrupted attention on something. Speaking of three days at a conference, tickets for Freedom Fast Lane Live are on sale. We just added billionaire Jeff Hoffman, one of the co founders of Priceline.com to the lineup. What, you thought we were done adding keynote speakers? We're just getting started. We're continuing to release new speakers and tickets are selling extremely quickly. So if you're thinking about joining us in December, I'd highly recommend you go over and take advantage of the early bird pricing@freedomfastlanelive.com as always, thank you for listening to Freedom Fastlane and I'll see you on the next show.