BTB110: Hooked | Nir Eyal

On before the bestseller, we talk with our favorite authors about the books they wrote and the stories behind how those books made it big. I'm your host, Alex Drathi, and it's.

An absolute pleasure to have you here today.

Nir Eyal. I am so excited. This is one of those episodes that you hop on here and you're just giddy with excitement. And I guess for those listening, for those of you that don't know who Nir is, he is the author of how to build habit forming products and Indistractable, how to control your attention and choose your life. He previously has taught as a lecturer in marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design and he's also sold two technology companies. And so I definitely want to talk about the journey from being an entrepreneur to being an author. I want to talk about how he chose the topic to write on. And then Nir has been kind enough to come back on next time, since a lot of the listeners are authors themselves, to dive into how you actually created two extremely well selling books. How many copies have you sold of Hooked and Indistractable so far?

Just about half a million each.

That is. So the fact that, you know, I believe Hooked came out in 2014 and indistractable in 2020.

Was it 2019?

2019. The fact that Indistractable I guess is on track to sell more than. I'm curious to have a discussion about why that might be and go from there. But part one, everyone gets this convers gets this question when they come on is a childhood story that influenced who you are today.

Okay. Yeah. So let's see, how far back do we want to go here? So for me, I think my fascination with behavioral design started from childhood because I was clinically obese, not just overweight, like really big. I remember my, my mom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like a fit, dude.

Thanks. Well, well, I think it's because I became very conscious of how food seemed to control me and what a.

An affirming event it was that I got control over what I was eating at some point in my life. I think that really, I mean, I'm still, I still think about it every day. I have to watch what I eat. I have to make sure that I'm on track with my goals and my values. But I remember definitely at one point feeling like food controlled me and maybe at some point I had a food addiction. I'm not really sure if it was diagnosable, but definitely felt out of control. And I think that.

Really.

Planted the seed of what I do today in terms of figuring out how all sorts of products seem to control us and where we have agency and where we don't. And I think.

It was that process of figuring out how I could gain agency over these things that seem to control me that I think gave me agency in other areas of my life as well.

That makes a lot of sense then. Focusing on habits. I know you're inspired by another favorite book of mine, Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit as well. What did the process you became a successful entrepreneur and then you ended up becoming an author. What did that process look like?

So for me, it was very organic. So I write books not because I know the answer, but because I want to know the answer. So I'm always driven by my curiosity because I think when you read nonfiction books, many you can tell when the author's bored, when they're just filling up space to try and get to their page count. And I hate those kind of books, right? I can't make it through those kind of books. Whereas when you feel like the author is on a journey and you're joining them, that's the kind of books I love to read. And so I only write books for things I want to know about. So, for example, with my first book, Hooked how to Build Habit Forming Products, I had just sold my previous company and I thought I was going to start another company. And I wanted to make sure that whatever it is that I did next had some kind of habit associated with, because I could see the power that products like Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat and Amazon and Google, all these products were so good at changing consumer behavior. And I didn't really understand how they did that. Why did some companies succeed and others failed because they couldn't retain their customers. And so I was looking for where is the book on how to build habit forming products? And I couldn't find that book. And so I just started blogging about what I was learning as I was preparing to start another company. And the more I blogged about it, the bigger the audience grew and they liked the material. And then I got an offer from a former professor of mine at Stanford who said, hey, I really like your content. I love your model. What if we taught a class together? So I jumped on the opportunity, and then that became a teaching gig for many years at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And later I moved over to the design school and that kind of launched this class that then became the book that Then became my talks and my consulting. And so it just kind of became very organic, frankly. Didn't know you could, you could do this for a living. But I, I love it. I think it's the best job in the world because I get paid to do one of my favorite things, which is to learn. And so I, I get to research a topic that no one's really gone deep into. Right. There's no like PhDs out there in how to build habit forming products. I probably know more about it than anyone else in the world. Not because I'm particularly smart, but because I've spent years and years working on the, you know, reading the literature, absorbing what the, the, the scientists and the academics have done and, and then testing it with real world applications. And so that's kind of how I built my expertise. Not because I had it, but because I wanted it. I wanted to learn how to do these things. And so it was very organic for my second book too, where I found that I was getting distracted more than I'd like, partially because I became successful as an author. I started getting more speaking engagements and consulting opportunities and I was pulled away from the thing that made me successful in the first place, which was the research and the writing. And so I wanted to learn how to get back on track with my values. And when I read other authors on, on the topic, which is what I usually do when I have some kind of problem, I talk to my wife about it, I talk to my friends about it, I write about it. And if I still don't have the answer, I'll read every book on the topic that I could find. And if I still don't find the answer, that's when I have to write a book. Which is why I write a book every five, six years. Because most problems, so to speak, that I have in my life, somebody else has already addressed. But with these two topics, how to build habit forming products and then how to become indistractable, I just didn't find anybody that, that, that hit the mark, especially with the second book. There's so many books on distraction and focus, but all of them seemed incredibly impractical. Right. Stop checking email, stop using social media. That's not really useful advice. I wanted something that dove deeper into the psychology of why we get distracted in the first place.

Yeah, there's something you talked about the, that people have a limited amount of will. Right. And you, you dispel that as one of the, you know, the, the fallacies that's, I want to get to indistractable because there's so many questions after that. I want to back up to hook still for a little bit. First of all, I agree with you more. I mean, I can't agree with you more. You know, first of all, that book is 200 page or 200 and the print is like 213 pages. So it is definitely a short, concise book. And I mean the simplicity in it for those that want to see what a book is, that is just really like, you know, you don't have any, you don't feel like the author's bored, you know, that it is just so concise and simple as I, you know, babble my words to find the words to describe concisely.

It's actually a huge compliment. By the way. Sorry to interrupt you, but that to me is the kind of book I like to read. Right. So I'm the, I'm the customer here as much as anybody else I write. I hate to tell you this, but I write books for me and so if I learn so much in the writing process and so I like kind of book that gives you for an entrepreneur who's reading Hooked and is trying to build a habit forming products. You know, every one of my.

Hallmarks is that every chapter ends with a little, a few bullet points and it says, remember this, right? Here's the key points of the chapter and then do this. And a lot of authors don't do that because when you read their chapters, you know, non fiction books, it's kind of like a lot of, it's like, yeah, I kind of already knew that. So I wanted to make sure, even if you don't have time to read the whole chapter, this is what you should take away. And that better be useful advice or it's not worth your time.

Exactly. So for Hooked, first of all, I want to ask you some questions about the framework and especially how it actually applies to books as a product. So first of all, for our listeners, what is the Hooked framework?

Yeah, so the Hooked model is a design pattern that connects the user's problem to your product with enough frequency to form a habit. So it's for products that want to build the kind of user experience that people use because they want to, not because they have to. So what I tried to do was to steal the secrets of Silicon Valley from companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack. What is it about the psychology of how these products are made that gets people hooked? How do they change people's habits? And the idea here is not to benefit the Silicon Valley giants. They know these techniques already. That's where I stole these techniques from. The idea is to democratize these techniques so that anybody building a product or service can get people hooked for good. So companies like fitbod use the hook model to get people hooked to exercise. Duolingo uses the hook model to get people hooked to online learning. So there's all kinds of industries out there that can use the hook model to build these healthy habits in people's lives.

Right? And so once you have, you know, figured that part out, how can you apply it to a book?

So how can you apply to a book, basically?

And I wonder, I mean, part of this is, you know, you have indistractable, right. Which came out next. So how, you know, did you think about product design when you were thinking about how you were going to write Indistractable, like, you know, I guess, and your marketing around it. Right. I mean, obviously, you know, you have the external triggers of your newsletter and, you know, near and far, which is very, very popular. But yeah, how did, did you start to find yourself thinking about your whole author career and, and, you know, the marketing and the writing as partly including the Hooks framework to, to some extent.

So, so most of the products that use the hook model, they are technology products because the Hook model involves a. Is enabled through technology. Right. The fact that we can interact with our customers in a way that generations past couldn't. Right? Generations past said, hey, here's my product, Take it, buy it, take it, and I'm done with you. Now. Products are designed to be engaging over the long term. When Amazon wants you to be a customer for life, Google wants you to form a habit so that you turn to them with little or no conscious thought every time you want a search query. So that's really who the book is targeted to. But I do think that there are some basic psychology principles that you see in good books.

That you can apply many of the lessons from the Hooks framework for.

Basically, I think that the most important part is the concept of a variable reward. And this comes from the work of B.F. skinner back in the 1950s. And he's very famous for doing these experiments where he took pigeons, he put them in a little box. Today we call this a Skinner box. And, and he found that when he gave food pellets, these little treats to the pigeons on a variable schedule of reinforcement, meaning sometimes they would get the reward, sometimes they wouldn't, the rate of response increased. The pigeon became more engaged. When there was variability around the Reward. And so when you look at great works of literature, when you look at movies that are interesting, when you look at why we watch spectator sports, when you think about why do people gamble on a slot machine, why do we scroll on our phones on a social media company, the answer is that it's variability. We are just like those pigeons. We love mystery. And so I think it's critical for, for an author when writing a book is to always have this element of mystery. There always should be some kind of factor of the unknown. I think the, the books that say, you know, this is, this is what ha, this is this and this is that and don't forget this and remember this, those are textbooks, right? Nobody reads textbooks for fun. Very few people. Whereas I think great works of, of, of fiction and nonfiction, if, you know, think about the books that really stick with people, it's where there's some kind of mystery, there's uncertainty around. Well, what's the answer to this question?

What would you say was the mystery for indistractable or hooked?

Yeah, so the, the. Both my books are how tos, right? So hooked is how to build habit forming products. Indistractable is how to control your attention and choose your life. And so there's inherent mystery in like. Okay, well tell me how to, how do you do that? Right? How, how is that? There's a formula for that. How. And what I try to do with each and every chapter is to have some kind of central mystery is to lead with some kind of story, some kind of uncertainty around. Here was this person who had this problem. Here's a psychology that explains how they worked that problem. And now here's the answer to how they solve that problem. And this is very Gladwellian, right? You can say whatever you want about Malcolm Gladwell. You know, he's kind of a controversial figure among academics, but readers love him because that New Yorker style article slash book is really mystery driven. Right? It doesn't, you don't start with the answer, you start with a question and that's what takes the reader through the entire chapter.

Yeah, well, I do have to commend you and because I've listened to you talk a little bit about self help and you have somewhat of the same, you know, the frustration that I have. And also, you know, with the, especially now with KDP and self publishing, you know, anyone could put out a book, right? You no longer have to go through a filter. You know, you have a huge, you know, I believe it was what you meant, 30 pages of citations in the Back of, you know, hooked or indistractable or one of them. You know, you're, you're very research focused. How do you, you know, as an author, you know, for, for those that are listening and like, okay, well, you know, I want to solve this problem I have, but I'm not an academic. Right. How do they go about the compiling of that research or making sure to avoid some of the, you know, the issues you run into, like, you know, different biases you might have of. Okay, well, you're trying to fulfill, you know, the belief you already have. I forget what the, you know, you might know that off top of. Yeah, that's, that's confirmation bias. Right. So, you know, how do you put together, you know, a good piece of research and make sure that it is, you know, you're presenting into the world something that is science backed? Because this is something I personally have a lot of issues with, with self help where you know, it's like, just be happy, just be better. Right. And it's like, you know, the, there's not actually anything practical. And then also it doesn't take into consideration that people really do have like, you know, mental ailments where it's like, no, you need professional help, you need medication, you need. Instead it's like just cure yourself with a book and it leaves them feeling worse. So I commend you for taking that approach when it comes to self help. But yeah, how, how do you then sit down and make sure that you're putting out something that is a bit more research focused?

Yeah. So I, I appreciate, I mean you really get to the heart of the matter. I mean, this is, this is why I have a job, I think, because.

I think it's.

There, There are two kind of styles of, of self help out there.

One is the very research driven, which nobody reads. Right. Which is very academically backed. When you read the books that are written by academics because they have this curse of knowledge, they get into the weeds of.

What academics do, which is to temper.

Their hypotheses. Right. That like, well, this is what I think this is what this study might suggest. But of course there's contradictory evidence and the study has flaws in the methodological design, which is great, like for an academic. That's exactly what an academic should do.

Right.

Then the other extreme is hey, I'm just some Joe Schmo and here's my ideas for how you should live your life better. And a lot of times it's very woo woo, it's very chakras and it's quantum fields and it's all kinds of bullshit that has no kind of scientific backing. But it sounds sciency, right. And both of those extremes drive me crazy. What I want is techniques that work that are actually practical, that, that the author themselves try for me before I read the book. Right. So they know they work, but then are not n of 1. I want to see the study that shows some kind of. Maybe it's a randomized control trial, maybe it's some kind of peer reviewed study where it was good study design that showed that this should not only, not only is a fluke that worked for the author, it should work for everyone. So I don't really want to know your, your you know, bullshit, grayscale, my phone, you know, to do list, hack, whatever. Like I want to see the study. And it turns out that a lot of the stuff that I thought was productivity gospel turns out to have to have very little scientific basis, for example, to do lists. Right. There's very few studies that show that to do lists work. However, there are tons of studies around time boxing. It's called, in the psychology literature, it's called setting an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. So when I saw that disparity of wow, everybody is telling me to do lists are the way to get things done. And yet there are very little, very few studies that show that that methodology works. And yet here there are tons of studies around why timeboxing works. And yet the average person doesn't use that technique. Well, that's an opportunity. There's a gap there for someone like me to explain through stories, through examples, to show people. Yeah, you know what people who are top of their game, they don't do to do lists. They use timeboxing. That was just one example of a story that I could, I could share with folks. I didn't invent timeboxing. It's been around for decades and decades. But, but I could illustrate how, you know, why that technique is better and it's based on really good research. And maybe that's not for everyone. Right. A lot of people do like the chakras and the quantum bullshit because that's, that's the kind of reader they are. I think that's, that's not really nonfiction. That's, that's fiction.

My girlfriend very much into the astrology stuff and so I have to remind her time to time, like that stuff's for entertainment. Right. She's like, oh, partly entertainment. Okay.

Yeah. Which is interesting, actually, because my next book is about beliefs. And I'm. I'm. You know, there's. I'm. I'm allergic to gluten, I'm allergic to dairy, and I'm allergic to.

Yeah.

And so it's a really hard book for me to write because.

You know, for me, it's always been about, well, if it's not scientifically true. Yeah.

You're.

You're being fooled. Right. But now I'm starting to change my mind that there's a lot of things, as Derek Sivers says, that are useful but not true.

Okay.

And so that's what I'm exploring next. That there's a lot of things, like, for example, you know, prayer. Is there really? Some people believe it, but I don't believe that there's some guy in a cloud who's listening to everybody's prayers. And if you don't pray hard enough and you don't pray in the right way, well, then you don't get your wish. Like Santa Claus. Come on. That could be true.

It's really bad for the OCD community, especially when they're Catholic. They got the. And they're.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Makes sense. So to me, like, that's, that's. I just, I just can't believe in that. And yet, and yet we should all be praying. Okay. Because it works. Prayer is incredibly useful and, and efficacious and the literature backs this up. So. So it, you know, in many ways I'm trying and just to. Just to finish this point. On the flip side, there are many beliefs, and you just said one, so I hope I don't offend you.

Yep.

But there are many beliefs that don't serve us. For example, the most prominent is this mental health myth.

Okay. Yeah.

That we, many of us have broken brains and we need prescriptions and we should medicate. You know.

Oh, my God.

One in four us children, us boys, one in four has adhd, is diagnosed with adhd. That's crazy. That.

That is.

That's impossible. It makes no sense. Because the fact of the. Is if you have a rambunctious six or seven year old and you take them into a clinic, you're going to walk out with a diagnosis.

There is a great. I don't know if you're a fan of South Park. There's a great south park episode on that. It doesn't seem like you are, but anyway, that. I don't know if you like south park at all, but sometimes I hit on they, they strategically do break down some different topics and that's one that they hilariously encounter. But no, it's absolutely, it's like there's not that many people who really need that help.

Right, right. Or, or how about we cure it with non pharmaceutical interventions that have no side effects a la indistractable.

Right.

Because pills don't teach skills. Yeah. And so because it's, it's, it's easy, we slap on these labels. And so it's, it's both sides. Like, I think all of us, myself included, all of us, we have these beliefs that sometimes serve us and then sometimes really hurt us. And so I think that's, that's a, that's a fascinating line of inquiry.

This is a good segue into talking about Indistractable, actually, because as I was listening to you on a podcast before this sort of talking about, okay, what are some of the key takeaways and things you can actually do different? And it's funny, you actually talked, I think you were on Lewis Howe's School of Greatness and I was listening to the conversation. And you're both talking about the effort to write your book. And when you sit down to write, you're creating something new. And so there's so much pain in that. And so you really do want to do like, I will go fold laundry or I'll go, you know, water my plants, you know, if I just don't have to actually sit here and pay attention to actual writing. And so you give, you know, you give some really good advice. So, you know, for those we'll, we'll sort of, you know, throw out, you know, for those that you can see the books behind me. I have both Hooked and Indistractable is actually my next next read. I was talking to a near before this, for those listening that I was actually, you know, the whole plan of this interview was to interview him about Hooked. And then I started listening to some episodes where he's actually talking about Distracted. I'm like, oh boy, I got to read that one too. So I'm excited to jump into that one. You can tease me a little bit with, with what I'm find out what are some of the practical things that we can do or ways that we can unpack distraction and how to fight against it to actually make meaningful progress.

Yeah. So I think the biggest takeaway for me doing the research for indistractable and it took me five years to write Indistractable because I kept getting distracted. I needed these Techniques more than anyone. I wrote the book for me. The biggest takeaway for me was that it's not the technology itself. I think we're a lot of times told, oh, technology is there to get you addicted and you know, you're a puppet on a string and there's nothing you can do about it. And that's kind of how I went into it, thinking like what I learned from Hooked. And I know all their techniques, right? I know exactly how these companies get you hooked. I wrote the book Hooked, so I know all these techniques. And what I found was that there's actually something much deeper going on, that the overuse of technology is the symptom, not the cause.

Okay.

That, you know, we think that we can fix our problems if we stop using social media, but actually to stop using social media, we have to fix our problems. And you can substitute social media for alcohol, for too much news, for, you know, too many, too much drugs, too much sports, too much whatever that distracts you from the life you want.

That, that's actually my biggest takeaway. So there's four big steps to becoming indistractable. And so I distilled down, you know, years of research and, and as much literature as I could find from peer reviewed studies on distraction and focus. And it, I really boiled it down to these four big steps. And the first and most important one is to master internal triggers. So we think about the external triggers, the pings, the dings, the rings, that that's going to somehow solve the problem. And it turns out that studies have found that only 10% of the time that we get distracted, 10%. Is it because of an external trigger? 10%. The other 90% of the time that we get distracted, it's because of an internal trigger. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states, boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the source of 90% of our distractions. So if you don't understand the root cause of the problem, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you are always going to get distracted from something unless you understand that it is an emotion regulation problem. Okay, it's not a technology problem. It's that you don't know how to deal with discomfort. If you can't sit with your family without checking your phone every five seconds. If you at work find yourself going from email to Slack messages to this, to that to that, that is not a technology problem. It's because we don't know how to deal with these feelings because we've never Been taught. Right. We never took a class on emotion regulation. So it's not a moral failing. It's not that your brain is broken, it's just that you haven't learned this skill set like any other skill set of how do I manage emotions to try and lead towards traction rather than distraction, of trying to escape. And so what high performers do in every industry, whether it's the arts, whether it's sports, whether it's business, what you find is that high performers, they feel the same way the rest of us do. They also feel bored and lonely and indecisive and uncertain. They feel the same internal triggers, but they use that discomfort as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction rather than distraction.

How do they do that?

Yeah, so that's what the book is about.

I want to dive into one, at least that you mentioned is just to leave listeners with something really tangible. Talk about the ten minute rule. Right, so tell us about the ten minute rule.

Yeah. So there's dozens of different techniques you can use. And the idea here is that there isn't a one size fits all solution. Not only that, not only will every technique not work for every person, it won't even work for the same person all the time. So the idea here is that you want a toolkit strategy rather than a magic bullet strategy. What you want is a toolkit that you can open up just like a real toolkit, that if you have a certain job to do, you use the hammer, but if it's a different job, you use a wrench or whatever. So the idea here is that you had this toolkit. One of the tools in the toolkit that I use almost every single day is called the 10 minute rule. And this comes from acceptance and commitment therapy. I didn't make it up. This has been around for a while.

That's a very real thing. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, that's been around for a while. And that's where I like to source my stuff from. Right. Like again, I want to see that somebody has validated this through some kind of peer reviewed study. So the 10 minute rule finds that the idea here is that you can do anything you want to do. Any distraction, anything that takes you away from what you said you were going to do, you can do that thing. Okay. But not right now. You can do it in 10 minutes. And the reason this is so powerful is that it, it disarms what's called psychological reactance. Psychological reactance is this innate.

Instinct that we all have that when we are told what to do, we rebel. So when you tell yourself not to do something, it makes you want it more. So this whole strategy of just say no. Remember in the 1980s that Nancy Reagan was telling us all just say no? It actually, if the trigger is present around you, the way food or technology might be constantly around you, the thinking of, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Okay, fine, I'll do it. That's actually something that we find leads us towards distraction. So you don't want to tell yourself no, you want to tell yourself not yet. And pretty much anyone can resist doing pretty much anything for just 10 minutes. And if that's too long, make it five minutes, make it two minutes, it doesn't matter. The idea is that when you tell yourself, I can give into that distraction, I can smoke that cigarette, I can have that piece of chocolate cake, I can check email, I can look at social media, I can watch YouTube, whatever it is that distracts you, I can give into it. In 10 minutes. In 10 minutes. So what you're going to do is set a timer for 10 minutes, and now you've got a choice to make. You can get back to the task at hand. So for me, it's writing, right? I've been writing for well over a decade now. It's really hard work. I always want to get distracted while I'm writing, right? Because I'm thinking about, is this any good? Where is this going? Is anybody going to read it? Am I going to get something wrong? I'm always kind of thinking about these internal triggers, and all I want to do is check email for a minute or check the news or look at stock prices or sports scores, right? Do something else other than the hard work of writing. Or my favorite, Let me just do some research, right? Like, that can be a total rabbit hole. So instead of doing that, what you want to do is either get back to the task at hand, get back to the writing, in my case, or you do what's called surf the urge. Surfing the urge acknowledges that these uncomfortable sensations, these internal triggers, they crest and then they subside, right? But that's not how we feel them in the moment. In the moment, we think they're always going to be there. But that's not true, right? You're not. When you feel angry, you're not angry forever. When you're bored, you're not bored forever. When you're lonely, you don't feel lonely forever. These are feelings like waves. So the idea here is to just ride that wave like a surfer on a surfboard. And if you can do that for just, you know, the few minutes that you've set aside, what you will find is nine times out of 10, before those 10 minutes are up, you're back at the task at hand. But just giving yourself a bit of space and then there's all kinds of other tools you can use that I, that I share as well. Giving yourself that bit of space to say, okay, I'm just going to wait to give into that distraction for 10 minutes. What you're doing is you're proving your own self efficacy. You're showing yourself. Wait a minute. Yeah, I waited for 10 minutes and nothing that bad happened. And now the 10 minute rule becomes the 12 minute rule, becomes the 15 minute rule, becomes the 20 minute rule and you're proving to yourself, wait a minute, I can actually prevent myself from getting distracted because I am in control over these uncomfortable emotions. So that's one tool of dozens.

I appreciate you sharing that. I can't wait to learn about the other tools and I do love how in Hooked, you know, you wrote and you had a good quote about this somewhere about or you were quoting someone else who said, you know, when you create the ship, you create the shipwreck at the same time, you know, hook hooked being the ship. And then for anyone who's using hooked in the wrong way to, you know, their, you know, peddler or they're, you know, using attracting people in the wrong way to get addicted to products, then you wrote indistractable for them and also the rest of us. So I just want to say thank you for some fantastic books and I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate this lively chat where we got to know a little bit more about you and you know, I guess we'll end with a quick question and then appreciate those that want to listen to Near's just journey as an author and how he's nailed his marketing, which I'm sure there's, I mean based on this conversation going to be fantastic insights about that. Appreciate nir being willing to come back on again. Really, really appreciative of that. What is something that a piece of advice you'd give to your fellow authors out there.

So I think the best piece of advice is to follow your curiosity. That's kind of my. Whenever I get stuck or whenever I get so called writer's block, I don't like to call it that, but whenever I feel a little stuck, I always remember, okay, what am I curious about? What question am I answering for myself? Because I think if you kind of overanalyze, you can get into this analysis paralysis of, well, what's the market size and what do people want and are they going to buy it and how am I going to make the New York Times, blah, blah, blah, as opposed to following your curiosity, what do I want to know about? For me, that's what's always worked best.

Well, I'm excited about this book on beliefs you're going to be tackling some tough ones.

Yeah, tell me about it.

We'd love to have you back on when that comes out. You let us know and we'll definitely thank you for our schedule to make it happen. So appreciate it and we'll see you next time.

Sounds great. Thanks so much, Alex.

Thank you for listening. I know there's many other things you could have been doing during this time and I hope you found this episode incredibly useful for you and your journey. And if you did, or if you have any feedback, I would love to hear that in a review on Apple. That would be fantastic or anywhere else that you are listening to this show. So thank you. And if you're the type of listener that is also an author or looking to be an author soon, feel free to email me at alex advanced Amazon ads.com that's Alex advanced amazonads.com and I'll add you to our weekly newsletter where I send out all of the best marketing tips I've ever heard from authors that I've had on this show and many of the authors that we work with. So I look forward to hearing from you if that's something you'd find useful. And either way, I look forward to having you back for our next episode.