Transcript of Nir Eyal introducing his book/course Indistractable. He uses a personal anecdote about missing a father–daughter moment to motivate his research into distraction, argues distraction predates modern technology (citing Plato’s ‘Acrasia’), and frames the goal: identify the deeper causes of distraction so people can become ‘indistractable.’
Chapters
I wrote the book Indistractable and decided to put together this course because I struggle with distraction in my own life. The reason I came to do this research was that one particular day I found I had to reassess my relationship with distraction. I was sitting with my daughter one afternoon, and we had this beautiful day planned. Just some quality daddy daughter time. And I remember we had this book of activities that dads and daughters could play together. One of the activities was to have a paper airplane contest. Another was to do a bunch of Sudoku puzzles together. And I remember there was one activity that I'll never forget. The activity was to ask each other this question. If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? I remember that question verbatim. But I can't tell you what my daughter said, because in that moment, I thought it was really important that I had to just check this one thing on my phone. And by the time I looked up, my daughter had left the room. She'd gone to go play with some toy outside, and I had completely blown this perfect daddy daughter moment. And if I'm honest with you, it didn't just happen with my daughter. It would happen at work when I'd sit down on my desk and I'd say, oh, yes, I'm really gonna focus on that one important project. Here I go. But let me just check some email for a minute or let me just scroll that Slack channel or check that newsfeed. And 20, 30, 45 minutes later, I still wasn't doing the thing I said I was going to do with my time. It would happen with my physical health, where I would say, oh, yes, I'm definitely going to start eating right. I'm definitely going to start exercising. But I wouldn't, and I didn't. And that's when I decided that if I could have any superpower, I would want the power to be indistractable. Becoming indistractable means you're as honest with yourselves as you are with others. You know, all of us, we know we want to be honest with other people, but we would never want to lie to our family, lie to our friends, lie to our co workers. We would never want to be called liars. And yet, why do we lie to ourselves every single day? We say we're going to do one thing. We're going to exercise, we're going to eat right, we're going to read more books, we're going to be better at work. And yet we keep falling off track. We keep getting in our own way, I delved into the psychology of why we get distracted, why we go off track. And I found a lot of very surprising conclusions, starting with that these things are not the source of the problem. Did you know that 2500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato talked about how distracting the world was in the Greek? He called it Acrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. And if Plato was struggling with distraction 2,500 years before the Internet, this can't be the source of the problem. So what I want to teach you is how we can get to the deeper cause of distraction so that we can finally put it in its place. We can finally live the kind of lives we know we deserve. We can finally become indistractable.
