239: “Don’t Wait Until You’re an Expert” — Scratch Your Own Curiosity Itch with Nir Eyal

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We keep guilting people into thinking that there's something wrong with them if they enjoy these technologies. There's nothing wrong with them as long as you use them on your schedule, not someone else's. Certainly not the tech companies. So anything that is decided in advance is an act of traction. Anything that is not what you said you were gonna do is an act of distraction.

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Welcome back Free Timers. I am so excited to be back on the mics today with Nir Eyal. Nir writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology and business. He's the author of two bestselling books, how to build habit forming products that many business people got hooked on and how to control your attention and choose your life. He was first on the Pivot podcast back in August 2019, the Before Times and we had a great conversation about the topics within his book Indistractable. He also blogs, has all kinds of great provocative essays@nearandfar.com, i'll put that in the show notes. His writing has been featured all over the place. Nir, I got super excited because I saw you on Diary of a CEO this week which seems like a really big win and it was your second time even at that. Tell us about that.

Yeah, second time here as well. Jenny, I'm so glad to be back with you.

That's true.

It's been too long. But thanks for having me back on.

Well now you're in Singapore so it's a little harder to bump into each other.

True, true.

This episode too. I want to tell listeners I love going behind the business on free time so it's going to be less the book report. You can read the book to get his really wonderful tips and tools around how to move toward being indistractable. Specifically, I'm curious to get into how you do this within the context of your business. But first, tell us about being on a big show like Diary of a CEO or returning to that show. Do you get nervous at all?

One of the things I talk about in Indistractable is how I have learned to do what I call reimagining the trigger. I tell this anecdote in the book about how I used to get terrible stage fright, which is not what you want to get when you're a professional public speaker, but it was the truth. And so every time before I would go on stage, my palms would get sweaty, I'd start shaking a little bit out of nerves, I'd start getting a bellyache, and I started doubting myself and saying, oh, you know, if I was a real public speaker, I wouldn't have all these doubts. You know, I'm sure that the big names don't feel this way. You know, they always seem so confident. What's wrong with me? Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I'm no good at it. And of course, that did not help my performance. And so what I learned to do was to do what's called cognitive reappraisal, or what I call reimagining the trigger. That the trigger was this event, and it was up to me to decide how I would respond to this emotion that I was feeling. And so now I don't think of it as nervousness. Some people might call it getting nervous. I don't call it that anymore. Now I reframed, I reimagined the trigger and tell myself every time I feel what I used to call nervousness, I call myself rising to the challenge, rising to the occasion. That when my heart is beating fast, that just means that my body is preparing me by taking more oxygen to my brain so I can deliver the best possible talk. I don't say I get nervous. I would say maybe I get excited because it's something that's important to me.

And we should say the reason I'm asking this question, if you haven't heard of this show, it's one of, if not the biggest, podcast in the uk, which makes it one of the biggest in the world. And I love the host. I mean, I think Stephen Bartlett does an incredible job having really deep Ritz conversations.

Yeah.

He also usually has an Oprah moment where the guest cries.

I didn't finish watching yet because I wanted to watch the version I listen on Spotify, but I didn't see all the way through. Was there an emotional moment for you in there?

There was, actually. There was, because Stephen gave me a huge compliment. He told me that my first book, Hooked, helped his father stop smoking, and that was a big reason why he had me back on. So he had me on the first time and we talked about my first book, Hooked, when it was published. I hadn't published my second book at the time. Then later on he posted on Instagram that my dad stopped smoking after I don't know how many decades that his dad was smoking because he learned about the psychology of habit formation. I think Stephen said he left the book in the bathroom or something and his dad read it while he was visiting and decided to stop smoking based on that. And so that made the whole journey of writing the book worth it. Just to hear that one person stopped smoking after they read my book. It was wonderful.

That's so touching and just so incredible. It's the power of a book that you can hand it to a person and to have such a powerful habit change in his life and just the trickle effects of that. I know that that book was beloved by so many business people. And then it kind of went through this period of turbulence where people are critiquing you and the book and now we're all hooked on apps and it's this huge problem. I'm curious less about the content of that choppy conversation, which the last few years have been full of even more of this type of discourse. How did you handle that as an author? How was it going through a period where the book kind of spikes and it's beloved and celebrated and exalted and then all of a sudden it hits this other patch where now people are casting shade at you and I don't know, I would have had a really tumultuous, I think, emotional journey around that. And I'm wondering how you weathered that's.

Storm just to fill everyone in. So Hooked was about how to build habit forming products. And in the beginning I really had to convince people that Silicon Valley was using psychology to change your behavior. When the book came out, I was having a hell of a time telling business leaders, no, no, no, you don't understand. These people understand what makes you click and what makes you tick better than you understand yourself. Whereas the response I was getting was, nah, you know, this Zuckerberg kid, he just got lucky. Jack Dorsey, you know, just stumbled on it, the Instagram guys, whatever, anybody could do that. Now nobody Says that. Right. I don't have to convince anybody that psychology is used by these companies to get you hooked. But I think now in a way, the pendulum has swung the other way. The power of these techniques, I think, is, I don't want to say overestimated, because they are incredibly powerful. And I'm very proud, in fact, that I could democratize these techniques. Right. I didn't write the book for the tech companies. Where do you think I got the techniques? I stole their secrets so that the rest of us could use it for our benefit. So in many ways it validates the book. The fact that people are saying these techniques are so good that it's mind control. It's not mind control, by the way, that people are saying you're getting addicted. You're probably not getting addicted, by the way. But that's what people are saying, that in many ways it's validated these techniques. And I'm so super proud that my book Hooked is used by all kinds of companies that are not the social media companies, that are not the gaming companies. Right. It's used by edtech companies like Duolingo used my book to help people learn new languages. Fitbod used my book to get people hooked, to exercise. There's all kinds of products out there in every conceivable industry that have used these techniques to get people hooked for good. So I'm very, very proud of that. Now, I think where the pendulum has swung too far is in terms of what to do about it. That I will tell you. These techniques are good. They're not that good. Right. There's been many books that have come out since mine with titles around stolen. Focus. What a terrible title. Your attention is not being stolen. You are giving it away. And that's the message of indistractable is that we do have agency, we do have power. But the sad fact of the matter is that people like to hear gloom and doom. I was a journalism major in college, and I'll tell you, the first rule of journalism is if it bleeds, it leads. And so a book that tells you how you're under attack and that some of these critics say that, you know, technology is hijacking your brain. Give me a break. Hijacking is not. I like to play Candy Crush a lot. Hijacking is what those did to us on 9 11. Show some respect. Right? Hijacking these terminologies that they're using to describe technology makes it seem as if we are completely powerless. And you know what? Ironically, ironically, if you want to get people to give up on changing their behavior. The best way to do that is to tell them their behavior can't change. This is called learned helplessness. When you are told you're addicted, your brain is being hijacked, your attention, your focus is being stolen, well then it's hopeless. There's nothing you can do about it. Why even try? And the message of my second book is there is so much, much we can do about this. It is in our control. Sure. These products are designed to get you hooked. I know all their tricks. I wrote the darn book hooked. I know all these techniques. And I will tell you that you are way more powerful than these technologies. So in many ways I'm honored that people ask me, well, what's been my response? I love it because it's so much easier for simple minded people to look for simple minded answers. And the simple minded answer is, oh, technology's addicting everyone. It's so bad, the sky is falling. This is moral panic. Societies have always had moral panics. We did it about the radio, we did it about the television. Socrates did it about the written word. This terrible technology of the written word, he said 2,500 years ago, would enfeeble men's minds. Every new technology on this scale has these moral panics. And simple people with simple minds gravitate to these simple explanations for much more nuanced answers that the truth is that there's nuance here. It's not just as simple as technology good, technology bad. The answer is it's both. It's how you use it, how much you use it, who is using it and what you would be doing instead of using it. So that's really what I want to add to the conversation is a bit of nuance for much more sophisticated listeners.

I love your passion around this. And even hearing you describe your stance, it sounds like this was less of a thing where all of a sudden you felt like, oh, there's something wrong with the message or the book or even with me. And instead you're actually, I just completely disagree. Like you're actually opening up the forum for debate because you're just not gonna take that sitting down of, oh, Nir, your book is horrible. It's like, yeah, you pulled out. You helped make us aware of what these techniques were even in the first place so that we could not have the steal our attention. And it's really interesting hearing how your clarity and your passion.

I wrote the book not only for companies to use these techniques for good. Right. I really do Believe in the promise of technology to standards of living. That is the only thing that has improved standard of living. The only thing that has improved standard of living is technological progress. We need to use these tools and techniques, and we need entrepreneurs to save the world. We need people to build better products and services so that things can get better for all of us. So I'm very proud that my book has been used to help people build better products and services. It's about the nuance of how we use them in the appropriate way. And the second reason I wrote the book was that just like we started the conversation even not knowing your question, right around how Stephen Bartlett's father stopped smoking when he realized what was happening, when he read my book and realized, oh, this is how they get me hooked, that was very empowering for him. And so that was the other reason why I wrote Hooked was that I wanted people to see, oh, wait a minute, this isn't an accident. This is by design that you use products as much as you do. And by the way, we want that, right? This ridiculous narrative that somehow technology is bad if we want to use it a lot. Well, that's stupid. What? Hey, Netflix, can you stop making good shows? Because I want to watch them a lot. Hey, Apple, your phones are so user friendly. Can you stop making your products so user friendly? No, that's stupid. The fact that we like our products and services, that we want to use them, this is the price of progress. This is the price of having the world's information at your fingertips is. You know what the price of that is? You have to learn how to use them. I don't think that's too high of a price to pay for many people. They want everything done for them. They want someone to blame. They want to be a victim. They want to think that Zuckerberg is hijacking their brain. And I'm here to tell them, you know what? That's not true. Because we like this narrative that we're getting addicted, but for the vast majority of us, we're not addicted. We're simply distracted. But we don't like that narrative. We don't like saying, oh, I'm getting distracted, because now that means, wait a minute, I have to do something about that. That's no fun. Can't I just blame someone else?

We'll be right back just after this.

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It brings to mind when you talk about the streaming companies, the famous now famous Hulu quote that we're not competing with other streamers, we're competing with sleep.

Right? Reed Hastings and Netflix actually said that? Yeah.

Oh really? Okay. May the record be corrected. I love this paradigm, this spectrum of traction versus distraction. That was one of my favorite parts of Indistractable. I would love for you to take us behind the business and behind the book. How have you gained traction for your work? And even then this is now a two parter in the broader business sense. How do you steer clear of distraction? Because when you're self employed there's so much that you could do or say yes to and I'm just curious to hear your take on that behind the business. Like sure. Did book sales ever hit a lull? How do you get things back on track toward that traction where things are really pulling for you? Love to hear you take us kind of behind your business around this spectrum.

Sure. So I'll tell you, as an angel investor, I've invested in 36 companies and I have six unicorns that I've been fortunate to invest in over the years, all using my hooked methodology. I only invest in companies that use that methodology. When I talk to the team and I think about investing, I always look for entrepreneurs that are good at one thing. I think there's only one essential skill to being an entrepreneur. One. And that one essential skill as an entrepreneur is the ability to prioritize. That's it. That your job as a CEO or an entrepreneur is to prioritize. And people who are bad at prioritizing make bad executives. They make bad CEOs. Because that is truly your only job is simply to know how to prioritize. Everything else can be done by other people. You can get help to do those things. But if you can't prioritize correctly, that is your one job. You are sunk. So how do you do that? How do you do that the way you do it is that you learn the difference between distraction and the opposite of distraction. What is the opposite of distraction? Most people will tell you the opposite of distraction is focus, but that's not exactly right. That if you look at the origin of the word distraction, it comes from this root word in the Latin trajare, which means to pull. And both distraction and its opposite, traction, come from that same Latin root to pull, trajare. You'll also notice that traction, as well as distraction 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 we ourselves take. So you've got traction. Things that I say I am going to do, things that I do with intent, things that move me closer to my values and help me become the kind of person I want to become. And the opposite of traction is distraction. Anything that takes me away from what I said I was going to do, away from my values, away from becoming the kind of person I want to become. This is really the fundamental thesis of the book, is that anything that you decide in advance is what you want to do is fine. So I think we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing otherwise perfectly fine behaviors. Right? If you want to play a video game, if that's your way to relax, do it. There's nothing wrong with playing video games or going on social media or watching Netflix. We keep guilting people into thinking that there's something wrong with them if they enjoy these technologies. There's nothing wrong with them as long as you use them on your schedule, not someone else's. Certainly not the tech companies. So anything that is decided in advance is an act of traction. Anything that is not what you said you were gonna do is an act of distraction. So I'll give you a perfect example. For years before I wrote indistractable, I would sit down at my desk and I would say, okay, now I'm going to work on this big project. I'm gonna work on this most important thing right now. I have to do this. Here I go. I'm gonna get started. But first, let me check some email. Right? How often does that happen to us entrepreneurs out there? All the time. Right? Let me just check my email real quick. Let me check that Slack channel. Let me just see this one thing that I need to do real quick. Let me do that easy task on my to do list. And what we find is that if you don't know the difference between traction and distraction, you will Allow these other distractions to take you off track. And especially, especially the worst type of distraction, which is the kind of distraction that you don't even realize is happening to you. So just because it's a work related task doesn't mean it's not a distraction. If you said you were gonna make those sales calls, if you said you were gonna work on that big project, if you said you had to finish that slide presentation, but now you're checking email or Slack channel, justifying it to yourself because you say, well, it's a work related task, I have to do it anyway. You are just as distracted as if you were playing a video gamer on social media because it's not what you said you were going to do. So that's one of the biggest distractions I see as endemic to a lot of entrepreneurs these days. They're out there doing what's called reactive work. There's two kinds of work. Reactive work is reacting to notifications, reacting to messages, reacting to all these external factors. And there's what's called reflective work. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Planning, being strategic, being creative. Thinking, for God's sakes, requires you to work without distraction. So the biggest mistake that I saw in my own life and in other people's life now that I teach about becoming indistractable, is that they don't make time to think. The brain is a cognitive miser. We don't like to think. Thinking is hard work. And most people out there would rather not do it. They'd rather be told by their emails, by their bosses, by their customers, by their colleagues, by the Slack channel, tell me what to do so I don't have to think for myself. And if you do that, you're going to run real fast in the wrong direction. So it's absolutely critical. If you just sit down with a pen and paper and think plan time for that reflective work time, you will have such a leg up over everyone else in your industry. Because most people out there don't want to spend time thinking.

Right, because that's more ambiguous as well. It's like thinking time. You don't really get to check it off a list. And I know you're not a huge fan of the to do list either. What about work that feels ambiguous? So let's say you've launched your book into the world, you've launched indistractable, and now there is a reactive process of trying to gain traction for the book because big media opportunities are coming your way. So how do you prioritize when you have more good things than you could say yes to? And knowing that even all that's reactive, it's not you setting thinking time aside and creating something new. But in the context of trying to gain momentum, how do you decide what reactive work to prioritize?

So most people's day will be spent doing reactive work, right? Unless you're an engineer, where all your time is spent doing reflective work. Most people's day has some balance, some combination of reactive as well as reflective work. The problem is most people sit in reactive work all day long and they make no time for reflective work. That's what I'm rallying against. That's a big mistake. Everyone needs to make time for that reflective work time. And part of that reflective work time needs to include planning out traction, right? The way you do this is you turn your values into time. You have to make time for traction. Because if you don't plan your day, someone's going to plan it for you. So when you look at all these opportunities, all these things that are vying for your attention, all the things you could be doing with your time, the only way to know if you are doing the right thing is to decide in advance. Decide in advance by turning your values into time. And you do that by sitting down the day before and making what's called a time boxed calendar. A time boxed calendar is when you look at the 24 hours you have in a day and you decide, how do I spend that time in accordance with my values? What are values? Values are defined as the attributes of the person you want to become. So you have to ask yourself, with these three life domains, starting with you, how would the person I want to become spend time taking care of myself? You are the center of your three life domains. If you can't take care of yourself, can't take care of others, can't make the world a better place. So that would include time for physical fitness, if that's important to you. If the person you want to become spends time taking care of their body, do you have that scheduled sleep? We all know, we've heard all the podcasts and read all the books about how important sleep is. But do you have a bedtime? Your kid probably has a bedtime. But do you have a bedtime? It's important to have a bedtime. Do you have it on your schedule? Time for reading or learning or whatever it is that you want to do for yourself. Playing video games, watching Netflix. Awesome. Do it, but have it on your schedule. Then the next life domain is your relationships. Part of the reason that we are going through this loneliness epidemic is that we don't make time for our most important relationships. You have got to plan that time. Don't make people the residual benefactor. Don't give people whatever scraps of time are left over. If it's your spouse, if it's your kids, if it's your brothers and sisters, if it's your friends, make time for them in your calendar in advance. Finally, the last domain is your work domain. This is what takes up most of our time during the day. And so this is where we have to sit down and ask ourselves for the day ahead, for the week ahead. Whatever unit of time you have transparency into. Most people it's a week ahead. Sometimes I meet people who say, you know what day to day? I don't know what's going to happen for those people. They do that as soon as they get to work, they sit down and they make their schedule for the rest of the day by using a time box calendar that fits in our most important values. Our values for work, our values for relationships, and our values for our self domain.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I just love how you put that. Turn your values into time and turn time into traction. So good. Okay, that'll be homework to make a time boxed calendar. Do people ask you if you're working on another book and are you working on another book?

They do and I am. Yeah.

Okay. Because I know as soon as my books come out, I think people mean well and then I think they're genuinely excited. Like they can't wait for the next one. But they're always, it's like no matter how hard you've worked on the current book, they'll say, so what's next? And so how do you decide when it's time to go all in on a really deep dive project like a book in your business?

So I only write books for problems that I can't otherwise solve. What do I mean by that? I love the fact that I've sold over a million copies of my books. It makes me incredibly happy when I hear people telling me how it's changed their life for the better. It's an unbelievable feeling to know that something you wrote reaches a person you've never met and changes their life in innumerable ways. It's wonderful. But I'll tell you a secret. I don't write my books for my readers. I write my books for myself. Because what drives me is this curiosity that I have to fix my own problems. And I've got lots of problems, so I'll never run out of book topic. So when I needed to find a book on how do I build habit forming products, I couldn't find such a book. When I had this problem around distraction, I read every book on the topic and I tried. I did what they told me to do, right? I got rid of my phone, I got rid of social media, and I still got distracted because what I started doing, kind of funny, I followed this book's advice and said, oh, it's all the tech fault. I'll stop using technology. And these books have been written for years and years. There's always some moral panic about the latest technology. And so I read these books and they basically said, technology is evil, stop using this technology. So I said, okay, fine, I'll buy it. So I went out, I got rid of my smartphone and instead I bought a flip phone, right? Like one of these from the 1990s with no apps, no search functionality, just, you know, makes calls in sms. And I also got, I found on ebay this library was selling an old word processor with no Internet connection. I said, okay, this will finally cure my distraction. I'll be able to write like crazy. And here's what I did. Even though I had none of this scary new technology that people say is stealing your focus and, you know, hijacking your brain, I would sit down at my desk and I would say, oh, you know what, there's that book on the shelf that I've been meaning to do some research into or let me just take out the trash real quick or man, my desk is really A mess. I should really tidy this up. And I kept getting distracted. So what I do in my own life, my writing process, is first I try and solve the problem myself. I write about the problem. That always gets me a lot of traction by simply thinking about the problem. If I still can't solve it, maybe I'll talk to my wife about it. Maybe I'll talk to my good friends about it. If I still haven't solved it, I'll read every book on the topic to try and solve it. And if I still can't solve it, and this is literally like one in a hundred problems, then I decide to do my own research. I decide to go to first principles and start from the ground up and really dive into the research. It takes me about five years to write a book. One, because I kept getting distracted. That was a big reason why it took me so long. But it wasn't until I learned these techniques and applied them to my life that being indistractable has touched every facet of my life. From my physical health, my mental health. I'm more productive than ever. I'm more present with my family. And so it's for me, it's really about finding that problem that I want to fix for myself and following this rule of chasing your curiosity.

So can you give us any clues about the new one?

Not yet. I'm going to have to keep you in suspense. I appreciate it so much. You'll be among the first to know. But right now it's still new because I'm still in that book reading phase where I'm reading everybody else's approach to it. And so hopefully I won't have to write the book because I'll find the answer I'm looking for.

Well, see, that in itself is interesting. Okay, this is fascinating to me because I think there are a lot of people who want to write a book or even who have written a book who listen to this show and there is a fine line. You're trying to solve your own problem. I always have this dance of there's nothing out there, or okay, maybe this person kind of said it, or am I qualified to write this book? And it is very vulnerable in the early stage. So it's not like, oh, you have a book under contract and you just turned in the first draft. You're before that stage, but you're feeling that a book might be taking shape. Shape, yes.

There's a topic that I've been thinking about for years and years and have been circling around and think that there's a book There one thing that you said that I want to address, which is the fear of not being qualified should not be one of your fears. Everyone out there is qualified. You're all qualified because there are so many topics out there that nobody's really studied. Right. Like there wasn't a book about how to build habit forming products, believe it or not. Like I looked around and I couldn't find a book about this topic. So what did I do? I read, read, read and I wrote, wrote, wrote and I did a ton of research and it turns out if you think about a topic for five, six years, you kind of become the world expert on that topic. So there are so many topics out there. Right. There's no PhD on my books, there's nobody in academia who studies what I do. I had to look at a bunch of different cross disciplinary research which today it's all out there. The Internet and ChatGPT, all the research is now available. It's just up to the few of us who have the time and interest and focus to actually work through this literature and try and make sense of it and make it practical.

And by the way, some of the PhDs, their books are kind of boring. So sometimes the world needs a book that isn't written by a PhD super expert. I call it being a qualified curator. I did a solo episode, I'll put it in the show notes. But I'm so happy you just gave us this permission of not being qualified shouldn't stop you because it's true. And it becomes this virtuous cycle that you set your mind to a book and a topic and then it takes shape and you spend years researching and then you spend years writing, and then you spend years, maybe even on a speaking circuit where all of a sudden you're getting more and more data as every audience member asks a question, people come up to you in line and all of a sudden you are the expert because you have become a magnet for this very topic that I have found after the book launches, I sort of my expertise doubles or triples by the mere fact that I'm a beacon now for this particular topic at this moment in time.

Absolutely. You know, I want to encourage people if they are interested in writing about a topic. You don't have to write a book per se. Right. It's so easy these days between medium and substack, you can just start writing about what you're interested in. And the education you get by writing about a topic is incredible. I mean, I write because that's how I think better, right? That is my tool. That is my vehicle. That is the bicycle for the mind. As Steve Jobs said, for me, it's writing through my ideas. Because so many times I think I have a great idea and I start writing about it, I say, wow, that's total crap. That doesn't make any sense anymore as I start writing about it. So it's a great tool. You don't have to write a full volume to do that. Also, caution a bit that you should not write a book because you want to make money, just like you should not start a business because you want to get rich. Because if that's your motivation, you're just bad at math, right, that, that, you know, most businesses fail most books. I read a stat recently. I might be a little bit off, but something like 95% of books never sell more than 5,000 copies. So your odds of success, of getting on, you know, some big list and selling millions of copies, I mean, it's very, very, very low on a per hour basis. There are lots of jobs that pay way more than being an author or starting a business, for that matter. So the right reason, I think, to write a book or to start a business is because you want to scratch your own itch, right? That if you write a book or start a business because you want this product to exist in the world, you want these answers to be out there solving something that you need, then you can't fail, right? Your book might not be a bestseller, your company might go public, but it doesn't matter because you made something that you yourself wanted in the world. And so you have to succeed.

By definition, that's so true. And you can then confidently say, I did the research. This didn't exist. I wrote what I wish I could have read. And that has always given me a lot of confidence. Just as you said, when I know I've scratched my own itch, I know that the only reason I had to do that was I couldn't find what I needed. And therefore you have found somebody, a previous guest, I forget who. Put it as your code patch for the universe. We all get to make our little code patch that we contribute to the broader base of knowledge.

Yeah, that's really satisfying. And sometimes, if you're really lucky and things work out for you, it turns out a lot of other people have the same problem you have, in which case that's gravy. But the real incentive should be to write it for yourself.

And this goes back to Tim Urban saying he writes for a stadium of Tim's of the blog. Wait, but why? Actually, it's so wild that the most resonant things are when you create it for yourself based on your true need, not what you think the market wants. And then, boom. That is the stuff that takes off.

I love the imagery of a Stadium of Tim's. I know Tim. Yes, he's a hilarious guy. And I love that imagery as well. Stadium of Tim's. I want to go to that too.

Stadium of Nears. Yeah, seriously, that'd be a fascinating stadium. Well, you have been so generous with your time. We're keeping you up way past your bedtime over in Singapore. So let's just close with one final question. If you could leave fellow business owners with a permission slip to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I would give them the permission slip to live out their values without regret. What I want to give them is a permission slip to escape regret. That's kind of how I live my life is I picked this up from Jeff Bezos around the regret minimization framework that having the kind of life you want requires forethought. One of my mantras that I repeat to myself every day is that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. I'll say that again. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought that when we think about why we go off track, why do we get distracted, why do we do things that we later regret? It's because of these impulsive instincts that we oftentimes have. But there is nothing that you can't overcome. There is no distraction that you can't overcome if you plan ahead. So the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. If we plan today what we want for the future, right? How we want to spend our time, not the outputs. By the way, you can't always guarantee that you'll get what you want at the end. But what you do, control is two things. Your time and your attention. Those we do have control over. So if you have a plan in place, if you say, here is how I want to spend my time according to my values, which may include do doing nothing but working all day, it might be doing nothing, no work for the day. That's all fine. But what I want people to do is to free themselves from regret by planning in advance how they want to spend their time. That's how we become indistractable.

Beautifully said. Thank you so much. Nir. Where can people find you if they want to learn more and keep in touch.

Thanks so much Jenny. I blog@nearandfar.com, nir is spelled like my first name, N I R. So that's nirandfar.com and my books are how to build Habit Forming products and my second book is how to Control youl Attention and choose youe Life and they're available wherever books are sold.

I love it. And the third is a glimmer in your eye. Work in progress. Oh, I can't wait to have you back on for that one for the big reveal of whatever it wants to become. This was so fun. Thank you again for spending some of your precious time with us. I really, really appreciate it.

Thank you Jenny.

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