The Real Reason Entrepreneurs Can’t Stay Focused with Behavioral Design Expert, Nir Eyal – EP 288

Justin Donald: What's up, Nir? Great to have you on the show.

Nir Eyal: Thanks, Justin. Great to be here with you.

Justin Donald: Well, I'm excited for this conversation. You and I were connected through a mutual friend, Amber Villhauer, who not only is an amazing person and not only someone that I've done work with on my book, I know you have with her on yours, but also, she's a member of the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind. And those are the people that I really spend the most time with these days, and you just came highly, highly recommended for your thought leadership and the content that you create. So, I'm really excited to dive in with you today.

Nir Eyal: Appreciate it. Thank you so much. And thanks to Amber.

Justin Donald: Yeah, for sure. Well, this will be fun because you're a behavioral design expert, which that's an interesting thing. We should touch on that before we dig in. Of course, you're an author, you've written many books, you speak, but really, your focus is on what the intersection of psychology and technology and business. And so, I can't wait to like dive into it, but how would you describe behavioral design, and your expertise in that space?

Nir Eyal: Yeah. So, it's a deeper dive into the psychology, the practical application of what we experience changes our behavior. So, with my first book, I wrote a book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which came out of a class that I taught at Stanford at the Graduate School of Business there. And that was all about how technology can build healthy habits in users' lives. So, it was all about how we can use technology to increase user engagement and retention. Basically, what I did is I stole the secrets of Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat and Amazon and I wanted to democratize the psychology that makes those products so sticky so that every business could potentially use that same psychology to get people hooked for good. And that's exactly what happens.

So, Duolingo uses the hook model to get people hooked to learning a new language. Fitbod uses the hook model to get people hooked to exercise. I've worked with every conceivable industry on ways to increase customer retention and engagement by using these psychological tactics, which ultimately benefit the user. And of course, they benefit the bottom line as well. My second book was about the flip side. So, Hooked was about how do you build good habits with technology. Indistractable was about how do you break bad habits with technology, meaning I don’t know if you feel this. Everybody I know feels this, in that we feel like technology is controlling our brains these days.

And so, what I wanted to do was to take a tech-positive approach. How can we get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us? And I kind of take a little bit of a contrarian view that technology is not the problem, that really it's our psychology, not our technology that's really the problem, that the world is really bifurcating into people who are being suckered in by technology and their time and attention is completely controlled by it. And there are people who stand up and say, "No, I'm indistractable. I control how I use my technology.” And they're the ones who are getting the best out of it. And so, I really want my daughter to be one of those people who are indistractible. And I'm here for those who are along the ride for that journey as well.

And then my third book, that just came out a couple of weeks ago, is called Beyond Belief, and this book tackles how our limiting beliefs hold us back and how we can liberate ourselves from these limiting beliefs. You know, all my books are very science-based, and so I saw a lot of stuff out there that is actively hurting people, manifesting and vision boarding and positive thinking, all very nice, but not science-backed. And so, what I wanted to do, everything I do is I'm not woo-woo, I'm not spiritual in any way. I'm really, really science-backed. And so, everything I do is very well cited, very researched through peer reviewed studies, but yet very practical and very fascinating that the power of the mind to change what we see, what we actually are able to see with our eyes, how we feel, in terms of our psychological wellbeing, our physical wellbeing, how we experience pain and suffering, and ultimately what we do and what we're capable of doing in our lives is all determined by our beliefs.

Justin Donald: Yeah. That is some incredible content, incredible work. I know you're a data guy, right? So, you study the details. You get into the studies. I mean, you dive into the things that a lot of people do not like to read. I'm curious how you are able to find the data from the big tech companies. Like, a lot of this, I know they don't want to release because I know it's a bad look, and it's becoming more and more available, right? So, I'm curious how you were able to get the data to do your research.

Nir Eyal: Right place, right time. I was in Silicon Valley in 2008, no, sorry, 2006 is when I went to Stanford Business School, and these companies were just getting started. And after business school in 2008, when I graduated from Stanford, I started a company immediately, and many of my clients were these companies. So, I had an insider perspective. I had a lot of friends in the business, and so I was looking. The reason I wrote the book, I didn't think I was going to write Hooked, actually. I wanted to start another company. That was my second company that I started. We raised a bunch of capital from Kleiner Perkins and a bunch of other wonderful VCs. I thought I was going to start yet another company, but when I looked out there for, okay, how do you change consumer habits through technology? And all I could find was like loyalty programs.

That's archaic, that we can all see that there's something pretty profound and magical about how an app on your phone keeps you checking time and time again. And so, it's really a paradigm shift if you think about it, because it used to be what we have in psychology is there's a term called mere exposure effect. And so, when you think about why does a company like Coca-Cola spend billions of dollars over its lifetime on all those billboards? You know about Coca-Cola. Why do they keep advertising to you? You know whether you want to drink Coca-Cola or not? It's because of what's called the mere exposure effect that the more times you see a logo, a jingle, a spokesperson, the higher your affinity for that product is. But when was the last time you've…

Justin Donald: Yeah. Top of mind awareness, I've heard it called that at times. Yeah.

Nir Eyal: Exactly. Brand affinity. Exactly.

Justin Donald: Yep.

Nir Eyal: All mere exposure effect. But when was the last time you saw an ad for TikTok or Facebook or Google? You see them once in a while. They do spend some money, but if you look at the market cap of these companies, compared to how much money they spend on advertising, it's a drop in the bucket. Compared to a CPG brand, where they have to spend a substantial amount of product to keep you top of mind. Well, these companies don't change your habits through the mere exposure effect. They change your behavior, your habits, because of the product itself. It is designed into the product experience. That's what gets you hooked. And so, that's what I wanted to uncover, and that's what I wanted to democratize for the rest of us.

Justin Donald: Well, that's really interesting stuff, and I want to dig deeper into it. Some of what I love doing is kind of taking concepts that you have in your book or other guests that have in their book and try and kind of position it in a way where I think will be beneficial to our audience and some of the endeavors that they're looking at, whether they're looking to move from employee to becoming an entrepreneur, whether they're looking to be more effective as an entrepreneur, do more investing, that sort of thing. And so, I feel like a lot of your systems, and maybe it doesn't all translate, and certainly we can try, but I feel like a lot of it probably does.

And so, when you're talking about like designing habits that drive something, versus distraction, if we're to take it down the lane of like driving habits for financial growth, like what are a few systems that someone can put into place to make them more effective as an entrepreneur, as an investor, and not get so distracted?

Nir Eyal: So, the through line between my 15 years of research, and I was an entrepreneur as well, I started three companies as well, and I know this to be true. You read a lot of books written by academics, and you can tell they've never run a P&L in their life. And so, that's not me. I've made sales calls, I've knocked on doors, done door-to-door. I know what that lifestyle is like. And I think that the common thread is what we call an internal trigger. We think about that our behavior is driven from external triggers. You take your phone. Why do you check your phone? You think it's because of a ping, ding, or ring on your phone? And would you believe, Justin, that only 10%, studies have found this, that only 10% of the time that you check your phone, is it because of an external tri trigger? 10%, is it because of a ping, ding, or ring?

Turns out that the other 90% of the time that you check your phone, and time studies have validated this, 90% of the time that you check the phone is because of an internal trigger. What is an internal trigger? An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state, boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. Those are the drivers of 90% of our distractions. And so, when you look at how do we design products that are used habitually, we have to find the internal triggers because what a product that is used habitually does is that eventually it no longer relies on spammy advertising and expensive messaging at all, that the user triggers themselves whenever they feel an uncomfortable sensation.

So, that turns out to be the heart of how you build a habit-forming product. You look for the pain in the customer's life. You don't make the pain. That's sadistic. You don't make the pain. You look for the pain that's already there. So, figuring out the internal trigger if you're building a product that you want to be used habitually is super important. If you're trying to stop a bad habit, it's not that you're chasing the high. It's not that you're chasing the pleasure. It's that you have to eliminate that internal trigger as the cause of why you're getting distracted, so figuring out what is it. If you don't know what's causing you to get distracted, if you can't sit with your kids for dinner without checking your phone, if you can't listen to this podcast without itching to check your email, it's not your technology. It's your feelings, right?

It's this internal trigger. I don't care if it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook. If you don't know the root emotion driving that behavior, that's the problem, and you're never going to stop getting distracted unless you know what to do with that discomfort. As an investor, to answer your question, if you don't understand the discomfort that's driving you to make bad decisions, you're going to keep making those decisions again and again. So, this is what Beyond Belief is all about. Beyond Belief is really about separating pain from suffering. You see, right now your brain is absorbing 50, I'm sorry, 11 million bits of information. 11 million bits of information are entering your brain right this second.

To put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. It's a tremendous amount of information. Your conscious mind, what you are consciously aware of can only process 50 bits. That's the equivalent of one sentence per second. So, War and Peace twice versus one sentence per second. So, your brain cannot absorb all that information. So, what does it have to do? It doesn't see reality as it is. It sees reality as it predicts it to be. So, you're seeing reality, what you think is real, you're seeing through this tiny pinhole of attention, and that pinhole of attention is determined based on your beliefs, based on what has happened to you in your past. We call these priors.

So, that fundamental understanding of determining what you will do when you feel part of that 11 million bits of information, those objective feelings, right, those physiological responses, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, those sensations are going to trigger some kind of psychological response if they get through that pinhole of attention. So, how you make good use of them is by deciding your beliefs in advance. This is a big, big aha is that there is no distraction we can't overcome. There's no mistake we won't repeat twice as long as we prepare for it. So, if you wait until the last minute, right, if you're trying to quit smoking and you've got the cigarette in your hand, you're going to smoke it.

If you're trying to diet, but the chocolate cake is on its fork, you're going to eat it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, you're going to pick it up first thing in the morning before you even say hello to your loved one. It's too late. You've already lost, and you always will lose unless you decide in advance. So, the antidote, this is probably the biggest takeaway, that I've learned over writing my second book, was that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. So, making a bad business decision, a bad investment decision, picking up your phone, taking that drink, doing that thing that you know you're going to later regret, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.

Justin Donald: You know, it's interesting, Nir, because when you think about, like for me, one of my favorite places to live inside of the business day is in a flow state, and I can go. It's awesome, like the world disappears. I mean, I can go for hours on end if it's something that I'm really excited about. The temptation then doesn't even exist. The thought doesn't even come into my mind to check my phone. And by the way, I live with my phone on silent, so it's not. Someone once told me, eliminate your distractions. And so, I do really work hard to do that. But you find when you're not in flow state, and you need that dopamine hit, it's like, "Oh, let's check the phone. Let's see what's going on.”

Or it's like procrastination, “I don't really want to do this right now. What else can I do?” Some of that is like a habit that you've already formed because you've done it so long. But some of it is what you're talking about. It's that in the internal triggers, not the external triggers. I hate the ding, so I don't live in that world. I don't need the external triggers because I feel like I've got enough internal triggers that I've got to win, you know, I've got to beat.

Nir Eyal: So, the flow is awesome. I'm a big fan of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the guy who wrote the book, Flow, and his research. The problem is that, and even Csikszentmihalyi will say this, what he studied when he said Flow, and flow has kind of become like habit these days. I think we've reached peak flow and peak habit because when people say they want flow, what they want is things to be effortless. When they say, “I want a habit, I want that hard thing that I hate doing. I want to not hate it anymore. I just want it to happen, right? Like, I want to get into an exercise habit because I hate exercise. I want to have exercised. I don't like writing, but I want to get into a writing habit, so all of a sudden I'll write without it being hard.”

So, flow is awesome, awesome for things you like, right? So, Csikszentmihalyi would study athletes. He'd study artists. He'd study people who are doing things they love. And he talked about how, when you were in this flow state, it was amazing. It's an amazing thing to get into, and sometimes you can tap into it. The problem is flow doesn't work for hard work. Nobody gets into flow doing their taxes. Not entrepreneurs. If you're an accountant, yeah, maybe your accountant gets into flow. Maybe they love it. No entrepreneur loves doing their taxes. You don't get into flow. So, that's where we get distracted. It's not because we're looking for a dopamine hit. With all due respect, I'm in this field a lot, so I'm not blaming you.

I hate that term, dopamine hit, because it seems to imply that we want to feel good. That's not what the brain is running on. The brain is not running on feeling good. You see, motivation doesn't work the way most people think it does. Motivation is not about pursuit of pleasure. It's not about carrots and sticks. Justin, the most important thing I can teach you is that the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick. Wanting to feel good is itself psychologically destabilizing. Craving, lusting desire, wanting hurts. So, what that means, if you think about it, is that all motivation is about one thing and one thing only, the desire to escape discomfort. You say, “But yeah, but I want to feel good. I like being with my friends. I like eating good food. I like experiencing things that feel good.”

Yes. But what drives you to go get those things is feeling bad, right? There's a reason we say love hurts. It's exactly true. In the brain, the way the brain spurs us to do things is not because they feel good, but because we have a memory of them feeling good in the past. And so, we want that again. So, the brain gets us to go get it by making us feel bad, which means if all motivation is about a desire to escape discomfort, what that therefore means is that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It's all pain management.

So, pursuing flow, pursuing feeling good, pursuing these things work some of the time, but not for the hard stuff. For the hard stuff, we need a completely different technique. It's about managing discomfort. It's about changing how we see those 11 million bits of information that are coming into our brain. The pain signals, sorry, my camera's a little bit freaking out here. How we interpret those 11 million bits of information, how do we see them differently? Not expecting things to feel good because some things will never feel good. That's okay. It's about thinking about it differently so they don't have to feel as bad, so that we can sustain our motivation over the long term and accomplish our long-term goals.

Justin Donald: So, that's a bit of a paradigm shift, I would say, for most. For me, most certainly. And I'm curious then what about for people that have become proficient at like just living a life with contentment? So, I'm imagining that probably eliminates some of this need for distraction, but in your research, I'm sure you looked at different types of people, different types of the way that people live, the polls on different people. So, what does that look like inside of someone who's really content? Are they going to deal with this less? Are their triggers going to be maybe, for lack of a better description, like less potent?

Nir Eyal: Yeah, it's a terrific question, and I'll give you a politically incorrect answer that I think looking for contentment and happiness is counterproductive. There's a reason that very few Buddhists have won the Nobel Prize other than the Peace Prize. There's something here.

Justin Donald: That's interesting.

Nir Eyal: Because if you think about it, think about all the books that are written about happiness. Isn't that what we all want? We all want to be happy, right? Every self-help book is about how to be happy. But let's think about this for a minute. If there was this magical state, this perfect human who is happy, and that was part of what we are meant to be, let's say evolution somehow messed up, and what we're really supposed to be is happy. Let's imagine our ancestors were on the Serengeti, and they came across this lost tribe of homo sapiens who were all contented. They were all happy. They were all satisfied. Tell me, Justin, what would our ancestors, the people we descended from, what would they do to that tribe of people who were perfectly contented and happy?

I'll tell you exactly what they would do. They would kill them, and then they would eat them because what evolution has gifted us is discontent. Happiness is meant to be fleeting. Satisfaction could be different. A lack of suffering is something else. But what gets us to overturn tyrants, what gets us to create life changing medicine, what the people who are your clients and colleagues do every day by changing the world, by increasing living standards, by what we do in business, that comes from wanting, from craving, from desiring. And that's not a bad thing. That's what produces progress.

Now, what's interesting is that for long-term sustainable growth, like if you look at who is successful in life and who's not, okay, I studied this quite a bit. If you look at who accomplishes their goals, in all kinds of fields, business, the arts, sports, it's not necessarily resources. A lot of people who start from nothing accomplish amazing things. A lot of people who have a silver spoon in their mouth, do nothing. So, it's not resources per se. It's not intelligence. Intelligence helps, but that's not the defining trait that professors are super smart. They don't necessarily succeed that much other than getting tenure. They're not the most successful businesspeople.

it's not wisdom. It's not information. I mean, today, there's no secrets. You want to learn something, go buy a book. Go ask ChatGPT, ask Google. You'll get the answers. There's no secrets anymore. It's all out there. All the information is available at your fingertips. So, what is it? It is one thing. It's persistence that the most successful people I know, and like you, I know people who are worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. They're not that smart. They're smart, but they're not dummies, but they're not the most smart. I know plenty of professors who are way smarter than the billionaires I know.

Justin Donald: Sure.

Nir Eyal: What they are is that they are tenacious. They're, in a way, I call them losers, because when you talk to successful people, they lose more, right? They can tell you all their failures. People who don't succeed, they try once and they quit. Right?

Justin Donald: Such a good distinction. Yeah.

Nir Eyal: So, if we know that, if we know that the defining trait of whether you will succeed at a goal, who succeeds and who fails is persistence, then we need to understand what gives us the motivation to persist. So, can I tell you one of my favorite studies that I uncovered in the research for my book?

Justin Donald: Please. Yeah.

Nir Eyal: So, this study blew my mind. So, in the 1950s, there was a biologist by the name of Curt Richter. And Richter had a very simple question. He wanted to determine how long a wild rat could swim. Okay. Pretty simple question. Back in the 1950s, you could do these kind of experiments. You can't do them anymore. But here's what he did. It’s kind of unethical, but I'll share anyway because it's a long time ago, so we should learn from it. He took these wild rats, and he put them in a cylinder of water. And he stood there with a stopwatch, and he timed how long the wild rat could swim for. Turns out a wild rat can swim for about 15 minutes before it gives up and dies. 15 minutes.

Justin Donald: Wow. That's more than I would've thought.

Nir Eyal: Okay. Well, here's the amazing part. Now, he wanted to figure out could he extend how long the rat swam for. So, he does another experiment. He takes a new group of wild rats, and he puts them in the same cylinder of water. He stands there with a stopwatch, and at about 15 minutes, he sees the rats are starting to struggle. So, what does he do? He pulls the rat out of the cylinder, he dries off the rat, lets the rat catch its breath, and then plunks back into the cylinder it goes. Now, Justin, I want you to guess. With this intervention, Richter did this a few times, the rats started out swimming for 15 minutes. After this intervention, after Richter showed the rat that if he persisted, if the rat kept swimming, salvation might be possible. The hand might reach in and save it. How much longer could he get the rat to swim for, from 15 minutes to what? What do you guess?

Justin Donald: Well, what I want to say is, maybe you could get another 15 minutes, but I’m guessing the answer is actually much longer.

Nir Eyal: Okay, 15 minutes is a pretty good guess. So, that would be 100% more persistent. It’s more than that. Take another guess.

Justin Donald: Let’s go 200%.

Nir Eyal: 200%. Okay, so let’s say it did three or four times longer. Maybe it went from 15 minutes to an hour. That would be insane. Think about that. If I could make you four times more persistent, you could run a marathon four marathons as opposed to just one marathon, you could make the four times the sales calls, you would keep working on your business four times longer to do the hard thing that you’re struggling to do. You don’t quit after just one. You quit four times longer. Wouldn’t that be amazing? That would be mind blowing.

Justin Donald: That would be.

Nir Eyal: Here’s the thing, Justin, right? That would be amazing. The rats didn’t swim for 60 minutes. They went from 15 minutes, not to 60 minutes, not to an hour. They went from 15 minutes to 60 hours of swimming, 15 minutes to 60 hours. They became 240 times more persistent. Now, why? Why did that happen? Their bodies hadn’t changed. They didn’t become super rats, same rat bodies, so that didn’t change. The environment didn’t change as much as we talk about, oh, I can’t keep going because this stuff is happening in the world, in my environment, nothing in these rats’ environment changed. Same cylinders, same exact experiment. The only variable left, we can’t ask the rats, obviously, but the only variable left was that something had changed in their minds.

Justin Donald: Yes, mindset.

Nir Eyal: Exactly. Something had changed. Now, what had changed? Well, what’s interesting about this is that it was always there within them. They always had the 60 hours, right? They were giving up at 15 minutes and dying and giving up and sinking under the water. So, the 60 hours was always there, but somehow, that experience, that salvation might be possible if I persist, unlocked something that was always there and kept them going. And so, this is the difference between what we call a limiting belief and a liberating belief. And it turns out that we can learn these liberating beliefs, increase our motivation, keep us trying, keep us sustaining long enough for us to meet our long-term goals.

Justin Donald: That’s fascinating. That is a really, really interesting study. It tells you a whole lot. I mean, even in marathoners, and let’s even go ultra marathoners, they’ll all tell you it’s mindset that the body wants to give up, the body breaks down, but the people that do it, they’re just so mentally fit. They are resolute in the fact that they are going to do it, they’re going to will their body to continue.

Nir Eyal: Yeah. We have in fact what’s called a central governor. This is the theory that the brain, what happens is, so there is actually a physical limit. Okay? It’s not like we’re limitless. We definitely have a limit, just like those rats after 60 hours. That was it. They couldn’t go any minute, any further. But we have what’s called a central governor, so it keeps us in order to like not burn out, to not physically damage ourselves. The brain tells us to stop way, way, way too soon in various areas, not just physical exertion, mental exertion, relationships that are difficult, a hard project, whatever it might be.

So, something that’s special about entrepreneurs is that they have a different set point. They keep trying, they keep going because they have that belief. We talk about Steve Jobs in the autobiography that Walter Isaacson did of him. He talks about how Jobs used to have a reality distortion field. And every successful entrepreneur I’ve ever met has this. They have this ability to see reality differently. Jobs just saw something that everybody else thought he was crazy, and yet somehow, he would will it to be.

Well, we used to think this was just kind of quirky. It turns out it is scientific fact now. It’s called entrepreneurial alertness that entrepreneurs literally see things differently, not figuratively, literally see things differently. Let me tell you another experiment that blew my mind. They did a study where they asked people to do a very simple task. All they had to do was open up this newspaper that the scientists gave these test subjects, and all they had to do was count the number of images in the newspaper. That’s it. One, two, three, how many images in the newspaper?

Now, one group of people were people who believed they were unlucky people. Not a fact. They just believed. They asked self-declared, unlucky people. Unlucky people, to finish this task, took two and a half minutes. Lucky people, people who believed, whether it was factual or not, they just believed they were lucky, they took 11 seconds. Why the difference? Two and a half minutes versus 11 seconds? Why the difference?

Because on page two of this task was one of those images that they were supposed to count, had in big, bold letters. There are 43 images in this newspaper. Collect your reward. The unlucky people didn’t even see it. It didn’t enter that 11 million bits of information. It didn’t enter the 50 bits of consciousness. They didn’t even see it. The people who believe they were lucky, they saw that image, they read it. Eleven seconds later, they were out the door.

So, this is why, based on your beliefs, it literally affects what you are able to see. The information was there right in front of them, right? So, how many of our employees, you say why don’t you just see what I see? They can’t. They cannot see what you as an entrepreneur can see because you see things differently based on your beliefs.

Justin Donald: That’s incredible. And it actually supports something that I’ve said for a long time in the different mindset between entrepreneurs and investors. And it’ll be interesting to get your take on this, but I love telling people that entrepreneurs often make the worst investors because their mindset is such that they are going to find a way, they will be persistent, they will try many times over, they will hire a bunch of people, they’ll pivot their idea, they’ll do whatever they need to do. Most entrepreneurs are the eternal optimists, and that allows them to go, go, go, go, go, whereas as an investor, if you operate from that lens and you think you’re just going to make a bad deal, a good deal, you’re in for some pain and suffering, per your statement earlier, right?

So, we have to retrain these entrepreneurs to say, hey, when you come into a deal, you don’t look at it as a good deal. Let me see if there’s any reason it’s not a good deal, right? That’s what you do as an entrepreneur. You go in and you’re like, here’s an opportunity. Let me see all the distractions, but I’m going to overcome it. You got to completely flip it around, right? So, you got to go into a deal and say, this is a horrible deal unless I can prove otherwise. And so, I don’t know if there’s any data to support it, but I don’t have clinical trials or studies, but I’ve seen it with enough entrepreneurs that really, there’s an education gap that I believe also is a mindset shift gap that needs to happen.

Nir Eyal: That’s a beautiful point. I hadn’t heard that before, but it makes a lot of sense and I know a lot of entrepreneurs that it’s true, as investors, that kind of lose their shirt because they’re almost too optimistic, right?

Justin Donald: That’s right. That’s right.

Nir Eyal: Because that’s what they had to be, to be successful as entrepreneurs, right? if you’re an entrepreneur, you have to have this reality distortion field because basically, you’re saying, I see $100 bills all over the floor and the rest of you idiots don’t. You have to have that mindset to succeed as an entrepreneur, whereas you’re right, as an investor, you’ll go broke that way.

Justin Donald: That’s right. So, it’s interesting. I was going to ask you a little bit, you talk about being indestructible, and when I think about investing or I think about entrepreneurship, running a business, that’s what you want. You want to be indestructible. But it also sounds like a supporting role in that or maybe the primary leading role is persistence, right? And maybe there’s something there, but I think most people lose focus in a busy world. I think a lot of people, even when they’re persistent, maybe they’re persistent over the long haul, but they’re short, like sputter steps in the middle, where maybe they are distracted out of their persistence.

And so, I’m curious, like from your standpoint, from your studies that you’ve done, how can someone structure their day or their environment to stay focused on the high leverage activities rather than the low level that are easy to do? Because you can cross it off the list or check a box and you’re done. It’s almost like you got a list of 10 things. Three of them are really hard. Well, let’s work on the seven that we can do real quick to feel good about ourselves even though they don’t produce very much revenue and someone else that’s making way less than you could have actually done them.

Nir Eyal: That’s a great point. I mean, I think this is the defining factor these days when an age where there’s so many distractions, I think this has become one of those pillars of success is who can just do what they say they’re going to do. So, to answer this question, we have to understand what is distraction. What is distraction? And the best way to understand what is distraction is to understand what is the opposite of distraction.

Most people, if you say, what’s the opposite of distraction, they’ll say it’s focus. I don’t want to be distracted, I want to be focused. But that’s not the right answer. But the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction, that if you look at both words, they both come from the same Latin root trahere, which means to pull. And both words, traction and distraction end in the same six letter word, A-C-T-I-O-N that spells action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. Distraction is an action that we ourselves take. Okay?

So, traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, pulls you towards your values, help you, so you become the kind of person you want to become. That’s an act of traction. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do further away from your values, further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of distraction.

Now, the important thing is what separates traction from distraction is one word, and that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So, there’s nothing wrong with going on social media or watching a YouTube video or playing a video game or doing whatever it is you want to do with your time and attention. You can do whatever you want. You’re a grownup. If you want to do those things, great. Like, why is watching golf on TV somehow okay, but playing a video game is morally inferior? No. Whatever you want to do with your time and attention is fine. As long as you’ve decided what you want to do in advance, then it becomes traction.

Conversely, just because something is a work-related task doesn’t mean it’s not a distraction. Let me demonstrate. For years, before I wrote indestructible, I would sit down at my desk and I would say, “Okay, I’ve got my to-do list.” By the way, we can talk about why to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity.

Justin Donald: Let’s, for sure, talk about that.

Nir Eyal: I’d love to talk about that.

Justin Donald: That’ll gain a lot of traction.

Nir Eyal: Let’s definitely talk about– so, I would look at my to-do list and I would say, “Okay, I’ve got that big project, I’ve got that sales presentation. I’ve got to create that sales deck” or whatever the case might be. “I really have to do that. That’s going to be the most important thing I’m going to do. So, here I go. I’m not going to get distracted, nothing’s going to get in my way. I’m just going to pay attention and just make sure I concentrate. Here I go. I’m going to get started, but first, let me check some email.” Does that sound familiar? Let me just scroll that.

Justin Donald: Oh, I’m guilty of this. I’m so guilty of this.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, let me just scroll that Slack channel. Let me just check what’s going on in the Wall Street Journal or, like, what’s going on in the news, because I have to do that. I have to check email. That’s part of my job. I have to check email. That’s what I have to do as a professional. It’s part of my work.

Here’s the thing. If it’s not what you said you were going to do, even if it’s a work-related task, it’s still a distraction. In fact, that’s the most pernicious form of distraction because you don’t even realize you’re distracted. If you’re putzing around on Instagram during office hours, well, you know you’re not supposed to be doing that unless you’re a social media manager, right? You know that’s not part of your job.

But if you’re checking email, oh, I’m being productive. No, no, you are distracted because it’s not what you said you were going to do ahead of time. That is the biggest distraction at work. It’s not video games and social media and YouTube. It’s stupid emails that you’re checking as opposed to doing the real work of moving your life and career forward. So, you have to differentiate between traction and distraction.

Let’s talk about to-do lists. To-do lists and the stupid two-minute rule, I hate that fricking rule. We’ve heard about this, oh, if it takes less than two minutes, go ahead and do it. Well, listen buddy, everything today takes less than two minutes. Checking an email takes less than two minutes. And if you do, if you follow the two-minute rule and just do email all day, your entire day will be spent doing email as opposed to thinking, right, as opposed to actually doing real work. So, that doesn’t work.

Here’s why to-do lists don’t work. To-do lists have no constraints. No constraints. So, to-do lists are registers of output. They have nothing to do with input. So, let’s say, my daughter has a birthday party, okay? And I want to get a bunch of cupcakes for her birthday. Well, I’m going to go to the baker and say, “Hey, I need about a dozen cupcakes.” So, the baker’s going to think for a minute, and they’re going to say, “Okay, I need flour, I need sugar, I need butter. I need all these inputs in order to make the output of the cupcakes.” So, the to-do list is the output. Where’s the input? What is the input? For knowledge workers, what is the input? There’s only two things in knowledge work. We’re not baking with flour and butter. Only two things that we need to create knowledge work output, time and attention. That’s it.

Where are we accounting for it? Nowhere. That’s why to-do lists are stupid and it turns out the studies back this up. There’s no good evidence. There are no good research studies that show that to-do lists work. What does work? Is what I call making time for traction. Making time for traction, which is where we use a technique that has been validated in thousands. Thousands, Justin, of peer reviewed studies show that setting an implementation intention, which is a fancy way of saying, planning what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. This is called time boxing.

Well, you’re going to take whatever it is that you plan on doing and you’re going to put a time on your calendar to do it. So, putting things out of your brain and onto a piece of paper, great. That’s a good idea. Use an app, use a to-do list, fine. But if you’re running your life based on a to-do list, you’re doing it wrong because here’s what you do. You do the easy thing, you do the fun thing, you do the urgent thing. I’m embarrassed to admit it, I used to write things down on my to-do list after I did them, just so I could get the joy of crossing it off. How stupid is that, right? Because I would measure my life by how many cute little boxes I checked off. Isn’t that adorable? It’s dumb.

Justin Donald: Oh, that’s funny.

Nir Eyal: Right? Instead, what you want to do is to say, this is what I’m going to do. Now, here’s where it’s really going to mess with people’s minds. The goal of time boxing is not to finish anything. What? The goal of time boxing is not to finish anything. What do I mean by that? That’s a to-do list mindset, which is terrible because if you get home at the end of the day and you’ve been working like crazy and now you have a full to-do list of things you still haven’t done, okay? What does that do to your mind? What does that do to your psyche? If day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you come home from work every day and you have this big long to-do list of things you still haven’t accomplished. Loser. That’s what you start telling yourself. Well, I’m no good at time management. I must have ADHD. There must be something wrong with me.

There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s this stupid time management technique of to-do list that you’ve been using. Rather, what you’re going to do is not measure yourself by cute little boxes. Rather, you’re going to measure yourself by one thing only, which is, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? Notice I didn’t say finish. I said do what it is I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction. Now, why is this so much better? Why does this eat to-do lists for breakfast? Because it is only with a time box calendar that you can understand how long things take.

Did you know, Justin, that the average knowledge worker takes three times longer to finish a task than they estimate? Three times longer. Why? Because when you use a to-do list, if you sit down and say, okay, I’m going to work on this big presentation, I work on it for five minutes, and then I got to go check that email, and then I got to go get a cup of coffee, and then, oh, there’s Janet at the water cooler. Hey, Janet, how’s it going? Wait, what was I working on again? Oh, I forgot. Oh, yeah, yeah, the presentation, let me get back to that.

Whereas someone who uses a time box calendar and says, I’m just going to work on that presentation for 30 minutes. That’s it. No less, no more. I’m only going to work on the presentation for 30 minutes. Now I can say, okay, I worked on the presentation for 30 minutes. How far did I get? Well, I did three slides of a 30-slide presentation. That means I need nine more time boxes to finish the whole thing. Now I have a feedback loop, which is something that helps me plan my time better. It’s the only way. It’s the only way.

So, I’m on a mission here in terms of like, how do you decide how to prioritize? How do you decide how to spend your time without getting distracted? Here’s the most important thing. You can’t say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I’ll say it again. You can’t say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. If I’m looking at your calendar and there’s a bunch of white space, maybe a meeting or two, you can’t say you got distracted because you didn’t plan what you wanted to do. You have to turn your values, your business values, your personal values into time. If you want to show me what someone’s values are, what’s important to you and your company, let me see how you spend your money and how you spend your time.

Justin Donald: Well, I love this concept and we’ve got to wrap here real soon, but I feel like I can’t not touch on something really important that you just covered because what I see in entrepreneurs is that they book their schedules so tight with meetings and things that they’re living totally on default without the time and space, the white space, as you call it or the premeditated plan of what they’re doing here and there to focus on the top 20% of activities that generate 80% of the results, right? Pareto’s principle. But if you’re meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting and not scheduling you time, not scheduling think time, not scheduling the priority time, you’re in a real trap. And that is the trap I see most entrepreneurs…

Nir Eyal: So true. Yeah. I like to separate it. So, I talk about these three life domains. You’ve got you. You’re at the center. If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of other people. So, people say, what are your values? Show me your calendar. Your calendar will tell me your values. So, people say health. Health is so important to me. You can’t skimp on health, everything for your health.

Do you have time to exercise? It’s not on your calendar. It’s not one of your values. I want to see it on your calendar. Time to relax, time to take a walk, time to read a book. Oh, education, you got to be smart. You got to, well, do you have time to read a book? Is it in your calendar? Then your relationships. Do you have time for the people you love? Do you make time to call your parents, to be with your spouse, to be with your kids? Or does it just happen? Are you ships in the night? If you’re not playing that time, it’s not a priority. It’s not one of your values.

And then finally, the work domain. And there are two kinds of work. We have what we call reflective work and reactive work. Reactive work is reacting to stuff, right, reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to meetings, reacting to taps on the shoulder from a colleague. That’s reactive work. Most people spend most of their day, if not their entire day, doing reactive work.

Justin Donald: Yes, totally.

Nir Eyal: And that’s part of everybody’s day. It’s, I understand, but you can plan for that time as well. Planning time for important emails, planning time for important meetings. We have to have that time. The problem is if you are not planning time for reflective work, not white space. White space is doing nothing. Reflective work, having it on your calendar. Time to think. If you want a leg up on everybody in your industry, think because nobody else is doing it. Plan time in your calendar. If you’re not planning time to think and protecting that time, right, imagine if somebody super famous said, your favorite investor said, I really want to have lunch with you, are you going to cancel? No. You’re going to make that time for the most important person in your life. Yourself as well, you have to put that time in your calendar because if you’re not planning time for reflective work, time to think, to strategize, to plan, I promise you, you’re running real fast in the wrong direction.

Justin Donald: I love that point. And that was one of the biggest game changers for me is actually, like, if I pulled up my calendar right now, you will see in there blocks of time for different things. But one of the most important things is think time, two hours every single week, undistracted. It just happens and often, it happens out in nature on a walk, phone on silent or totally off. Just truly think time, like trying to get more of that theta like you get in the shower or something, right? I read a book and I…

Nir Eyal: And I bet you this is why you’re so successful because so few people in your industry, in all industries, make time to think. They’re checking their phones, they’re doing this, they’re da, da, da, da. They’re meetings, meeting, meeting, meetings all day long. All we’re doing is meeting. You’ve got to plan time to think.

Justin Donald: For sure. I met Keith Cunningham, who wrote a book, The Road Less Stupid, and I also spent some time with him when he used to help out with Business Mastery. And so, he hit this home so hard. Now, it’s like this makes so much sense. It was at a time I had zero think time and I was just back to back to back. My whole world, my whole business life was reactive, but I really like the lens. I’ve always called it proactive. You need the proactive time, but you’ve got reflexive time that really is nice.

Nir, this has been awesome. I appreciate your content, your wisdom, your thought leadership, like this is– I mean, a lot of this is counterintuitive, but I love how back, this is with data and studies and the time and energy you’ve put in even with interviewing people, but where can people learn more about you, more about what you’re doing, more about your newest book here? I want people to know, obviously, that Beyond Belief is your newest book. So, tell us where we can learn more.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, absolutely. So, my blog is called Nir and Far, and Nir is spelled like my first name. So, it’s N-I-R A-N-D F-A-R. So, Nir and Far, but Nir spelled like my first name. And yeah, the first book is called Hooked. That’s still available. And second book is called Indistractable. And the one that just came out that I’m most excited about, the most life changing for me in terms of what I learned writing the book is called Beyond Belief.

Justin Donald: Well, this session was beyond belief for me.

Nir Eyal: Thank you.

Justin Donald: So, I really want to thank you for it, and I love ending every episode we do with a question for our audience. I think you’ll actually appreciate this question because it’s going to tie in some of the things that we talked about today, but this is what I do every single week. So, if you’re watching this, listening to this, what is one step you can take today to move towards financial freedom and really move towards living the life that you desire on your terms. So, again, not by default, but by design, not by reactive nature or reactive work, but by reflexive work. I’m going to start using that too. That’s really good, Nir.

So, answer that question for yourself. Pick one thing that you learn from Nir today. Implement it immediately, and definitely reach out to him. Get his book. I’ve had the pleasure of going through it and just think the world of Nir and everything we’ve covered today. So, thank you, Nir.

Nir Eyal: Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Great to see you again.

Justin Donald: Love it. We’ll catch everyone else next week.