How to Become an Indistractable Force
Check your impulses. Win at life.
Scroll down for Nir Eyal's 4-part framework to become Indistractable.“Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.”
Our latest guest, Nir Eyal, writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir previously taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
Nir gives it to us straight. Distraction is killing us and stopping us from reaching our full potential. In a world that is constantly conspiring to keep us distracted, Nir provides an alternative: we can take back control. We can regain our agency.
All of these ideas are presented in his book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (co-authored with Julie Li), which is a clear guide to understanding the psychology behind our impulses and is chock-full of great anecdotes and peer-reviewed studies to help you better manage your time, and your life.
We’ve provided Apple/Spotify links and shared the transcript below. You can also watch the full episode on our YouTube.
We’ve also presented a few snippets from his 4-part framework, which you can find below.
As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
How to Be Indistractable
(The below quotes and selected insights are drawn from Nir’s excellent book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (co-authored with Julie Li).
Master Internal Triggers
“Dissatisfaction and discomfort dominate our brain’s default state, but we can use them to motivate us instead of defeat us.”
Understand the root cause of distraction: Often, when we are distracted, we are seeking to avoid some form of pain or discomfort. Yet, rather than acknowledging the root cause, we blame proximate causes like our phones.
Boredom, negativity bias, rumination, and hedonic adaptation can each prompt us to distraction: We hate boredom. We tend to recall negative memories more frequently than positive ones. We are wired to exist in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. Acknowledging these defaults is the first step towards overcoming them.
Reimagine the dreariness: We get it; some tasks are hard and dreary. They don’t have to be. Simple mindset shifts, like finding the novelty or thinking of yourself as a diligent craftsman working on your craft, can be more powerful than you think.
Make Time for Traction
“You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from.”
Distinguish between traction & distraction: Traction is “any action that moves you towards what you really want.” The key difference between traction and distraction is forethought — are you doing the action you intended to be doing?
To-do lists are toast: To-do lists encourage busy work and prioritizing easy tasks over hard ones. They foster a constant sense of having ‘not done enough.’ There is a better alternative…
Timeboxing is king: Allocate time in your calendar for all activities (work, play, exercise, and relationships), and then SHOW UP. What you are doing with that time matters less than whether you are doing what you planned to do. If you allocate an hour for scrolling social media or watching YouTube, that's fine! If you start checking your work emails during that time, that’s a distraction.
Hack Back External Triggers
“Checking email isn’t so much the problem; it’s the habitual rechecking that gets us into trouble.”
“Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?”: Most external triggers (like notifications, messages, and alerts) don’t truly serve us. For each notification, ask, “is this helping me move towards an outcome I want?” If it isn’t, remove it.
Defend your focus: Block time on your calendar. Use Do Not Disturb mode. Let your coworkers know that you’re off the grid.
Hack back group chats and emails: Jason Fried has some words of wisdom: “All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time”. Emails and group chats encourage this kind of thinking. Use them sparingly and at scheduled times.
Prevent Distraction With Pacts
“A pact is a pre-commitment device. And one of the most powerful is an identity pact…when we say to ourselves, that's who I am. I don't answer every ping or ding every 20 seconds. If we're going to have lunch together, we're going to be present both in body and mind. So let's put our phones away. That's who I am. I'm Indistractable.”
Consider an effort pact: Social and other external pressures help keep us on track. We can create those manually. Tools like Pomodoro timers and app blockers block distractions, while accountability partners add a social dimension to sticking to your commitments.
Consider a price pact: Add a measurable cost to getting distracted. If you don’t show up for your writing session, pay your accountability partner $100 (ouch). Or, give $100 to an organization you hate for every day you miss the gym.
Consider an identity pact: Nir puts it perfectly: “Our perception of who we are changes what we do.” Adopt rituals, e.g. morning mantras, that reinforce the identity of the person you want to become.
Transcript
Nir Eyal:
Thank you so much, Jim. Great to be here with you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, it's great to have you on. I loved your books. I love the second one, because it just seems to me that we really are in an attention deficit disorder stage for society as a whole. The amount of distractions that people are letting interfere with doing deeper work, letting kind of almost control their lives. I don't know whether you ever saw it, but there was a great photographic piece published in the New York Times magazine, and it was literally a series of photographs of people staring at their iPhones, but the photographer digitally removed the iPhone. I mean it was really just wild to look at because it kind of made them look kind of zombie-like.
Nir Eyal:
Yeah, what are we all staring at?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
What are we doing? As you look at it, it's just kind of like, wow. But you say that if this century, the 21st century has a superpower, it is the ability to be Indistractable. Talk about that for a bit.
Nir Eyal:
Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny. So I wrote the book right before COVID and it was published right before COVID, and I think it's only become more important. I thought it was important back then, but now I think the world has become more distracting. Right now we're sitting here in late July of 2024, so it's a very uncertain time, what's happening with the elections and the economy. And there's always something, but I think now it's particularly, there's something happening every day between the assassination attempt and Joe Biden dropping out. And I think now I think we find that it's even more difficult to pay attention to what you say you're going to pay attention to rather than what the media wants you to pay attention to. And that's only going to continue. That trend is only going in one direction. As society improves, as we have more options, more choices, more things to do with our time and attention, I think the world is really bifurcating into people who decide what they will do with their time and attention and people whose time and attention is manipulated and controlled by others.
So if you are not Indistractable, if you don't teach your kids how to be Indistractable, you are going to be part of these masses that are just manipulated to pay attention to what other people want you to pay attention to. So what I want to help people do is not necessarily to dictate, oh, social media bad, social media good, do this, do that exercise more. Do what I say you should do. No, no, no. I want to help people do what they say they want to do. Whatever it is that you say with your intention is how you want to spend your time. That's what I want to help you accomplish. That's what being Indistractable is all about.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And there's some character traits or habits maybe, that I think kind of fit in with it. I sort of think of a low agency person being highly distractible, and a high agency person being less distractible. I hate to make everything a dichotomy because nothing is, right? But one of the things, before I even read your book, I had noticed that I was getting distracted. And so I kind of got a little crazy and I said, okay, not going to watch any more TV and I'm going to do that for just a... Because I will occasionally want to watch a movie or something. But I did a three-month period where I just didn't watch any TV at all. I stopped watching television news I think 15 years ago because talk about distractions, right?
And I also do... one other thing that I wanted your opinion on. I got the famous quote: the biggest problem with mankind is we can't sit in a room alone for 20 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever he said. So I started doing that. I started literally sitting for 20 minutes with nothing. No music, no phone, no book, no computer, just nothing. Literally. And that was amazing. At first I was like, fuck! But the more I did it, the more it happened. But you have lots of very practical pointers in the book for; hey, here's what you've got to do. So if you don't mind, take us through some of those.
Nir Eyal:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So let's start with what is distraction, right? I'm kind of a word nerd. Let's define our terms here. So I was fascinated to define what the real origin of the word distraction. And the best way to understand what distraction is to understand what distraction is not. What's the opposite? What's the antonym? Most people will tell you the opposite of distraction is focus. But that's not exactly right. In fact, if you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Of course it's right, they're opposites, traction and dis-traction. They both come from the same Latin root, trahere, which means to pull, and they both end in the same word. They both end in action, right? Traction and dis-traction all end in the word action reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us, it is an action that we ourselves take.
So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things that move you towards your values, things that help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. The opposite of traction, dis-traction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do further away from your goals, further away from your values, further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. So this isn't just semantics, this is really, really important because I would argue as Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So I think the knee-jerk reaction that people have when it comes to distraction is to just cut out what they believe is the source of the distraction, right? Stop using social media, stop watching TV, stop doing this, stop doing that.
And I think that's going... I don't think that really recognizes the source of the problem. And so we're excising things from our life that can actually make our lives more fun. There's nothing wrong with watching TV if that's what you want to do. There's nothing wrong with playing video games. There's nothing wrong with the social media if it's what you plan to do according to your values and your schedule, not someone else's. So I think this chicken little sky is falling type of mentality of oh, all new tech is bad for you. It's melting your brain, it's addicting everybody. It's very short-sighted, it's not scientifically-based. And it's basically spoused by professors who have tenure, telling people Stop using social media, stop checking email. Well, thanks you have tenure. But most people are going to get fired from their jobs if they just disconnect and stop using these technologies.
So it's not very practical advice and it's unnecessary. More so, it's actually a mirage. So I only write books when... I read everyone else's book on a topic and I find that it doesn't solve my problem. So when I found like you that I was getting distracted, I read everybody's book on the topic, I tried what they had to say about this and most of the advice was just disconnect. Just stop using these tools. The tools are evil. So I did that. I got myself a flip phone from Alibaba, the kind we used to use in the 1990s, no internet connection, no apps. I got myself a word processor, all I did was type and then you had to physically connect it with a cable to download. And I thought, okay, well I've got no internet, no apps, I'm not going to get distracted.
I can just focus on what I say I'm going to do. And yet when I would sit down at my desk, I'd say, oh look, there's that book on my shelf I've been meaning to finish, or my desk needs a little tidying up or let me just take out the trash. And I kept getting distracted because the ultimate source of the problem was not the things outside of me, it was what was going on in my own head. So we talked about traction and distraction. Now we need to talk about the triggers. The usual suspect that people think is a source of the problem or what we call the external triggers; the pings, the dings, the rings, all these things in our outside environment, those are called external triggers. But studies find that only 10% of the time that you check your phone is because of an external trigger. Only 10%.
So what's the other 90%? The other 90% of the time that we check our phones, it's because of an internal trigger. What is an internal trigger? An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that we seek to escape. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is a source of 90% of our distractions. And I think this is where I take a very different approach from most advice out there is that I believe that we have to begin with the source of the problem. That whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you are always going to get distracted from one thing or another unless you know the real cause of the problem. That distraction is not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw. You probably don't have any kind of diagnosis or disease that you need. You're not broken in any way.
For the vast majority of people, it's simply that we haven't learned how to deal with discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction, rather than trying to escape with distraction. So step number one... Here's the four-part model. Step number one is master the internal triggers. If you don't master the internal triggers, they will become your master. We have to learn techniques and there's over a dozen in the book that you can use, so that you have that tool in your toolkit ready to go whenever you feel that emotional discomfort. And most people just don't have those tools. They look for external things. Let me drink it away, let me click it away, let me scroll it away, as opposed to dealing with the root cause of the problem. Step two is to make time for traction that you can't say you got distracted unless you know what it distracted you from.
So we talk about some very basic but some incredibly helpful techniques like time-boxing, which it turns out eats the traditional time management technique of to-do lists for breakfast. The to-do list turns out to be one of the worst things you can do for a personal productivity, once we can talk about why that is. And the third step is to hack back the external triggers, not just the pings and dings. But also stupid meetings that we didn't need to attend that are nothing more than distractions, emails that didn't need to be sent and received. We can hack back every single one of those external triggers. And then finally the last step is to prevent distraction with hacks which are this firewall against distraction. And when we do these four strategies in concert, anyone can become Indistractable.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I love my six years of Latin, I did kind of catch that on the traction, the function of action. And I wonder also, like you, I don't concur with a lot of the academics who are saying, "All the new tech is evil, don't use it. Turn off social media." I think actually it can be quite educational and edifying and all those things. I've used social media to meet a huge network of people. Many of the people who work for me, I met literally on social media. So I agree that getting the problem defined right is absolutely critical. What do you think... I was struck by what you said just a moment ago about the to-do list. The to-do list is the classic that everyone... You got to get organized, you got to do your to-do list. Let's talk about why that is not such a great way to try to proceed.
Nir Eyal:
Sure. Sure. Well for me, I really start from first principles and I really wanted to go look at the academic research and I found that there wasn't actually that much good research about why to-do lists are this magical solution for our time management problems. And so let me tell you why. There's a few problems with the to-do list. Now let me be very clear. There's nothing wrong with getting things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper in an app. That's great. But most people stop there. And then they wake up in the morning and they say, "Oh, what should I do with my day? Let me look at my to-do list and my to-do list will tell me what to do." And if that's what you do, you've already lost, right? The war you've waged is lost. It's too late. Because to-do lists have a few fundamental flaws.
Number one, there's no constraint with a to-do list. To-do list can go on and on and on and on and on. There's no bottom, there's no end. And so what happens is we keep adding things to our to-do list so that the result of all that hard work, we come back from a hard day of work, we come home, we look at our to-do list for one last time and we see there's still a million things we haven't done. What does that do to our psyche if day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we look at this list of things that we haven't accomplished? Because there's no constraint to it. So what do we say to ourselves? "Oh, I must not be very good at time management. I must have a short attention span." We start making up all these cockamamie excuses about why somehow we are broken.
It's not that we are broken, it's this stupid time management technique that's broken, right? Because if you're constantly telling yourself, look at all these things I haven't done, you start thinking you're a loser. You start thinking you're bad at this. And that's not true. It's the technique that's broken. So that's the biggest problem is that they don't have constraints. And so that leads to another few second order problems. Another one is that there's no feedback loop. So here's what typically happens with someone who uses a to-do list; they say, "Okay, let me start working on this task." By the way, what do people start working on when they have a to-do list? Do they work on the most important thing? No, they work on the easy thing. They work on the urgent thing. They don't work on the most important thing. So that's another big problem with to-do lists.
But then let's get back to this feedback loop problem. When people work on an item on a to-do list, they'll pick somebody and say, "Okay, I'm going to start working on that. Here I go, I'm working on it. Okay, here I go. But you know what? Let me just check email for a quick minute just to make sure nothing urgent is happening. Or let me just get a quick cup of coffee and oh, Janet's at the water cooler and what's going on? Oh wait, what am I working on again?" Right? So it turns out we have what's called a planning fallacy. The planning fallacy tells us that on average, a task will take you three times longer than you think it will. Because people have no idea how long things take them because they work on them in five-minute sprints and they're constantly distracted by every other thing that they could do, as opposed to a much better technique is called time-boxing.
And this uses a psychological term called setting an implementation intention, which is a fancy way of saying planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. So another big problem with to-do lists is that the goal is dumb. The goal of a to-do list is to check boxes. That's the goal of a to-do list. And by the way, I used to do this myself. I used to finish a task and say, "Oh shoot, I forgot to write that on my to-do list," after I had done it. So I would write it on my to-do list just for the joy of checking it, right? How stupid is that? But that's what a to-do list incentivizes. Checking off cute boxes, as opposed to the right way to get things done is by using a time box calendar and no longer measuring yourself by what you finished.
What? That's really weird. I have to finish things. Why would I stop measuring myself by how much I finished? No. The right metric of success with a time box calendar, which is what I teach in Indistractable, is not how much did I finish? How many cute boxes did I check off? Because we know what people do. They'll do the easy stuff, they'll do the urgent stuff. Rather, the metric of success is; did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? That's it. It's not about finishing. It's about did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? Why is that such a better metric? Because when you say to yourself, "I'm only going to measure myself based on was I able to just focus on that one task?" Now we have a feedback loop.
We can say, "Okay, I'm going to work on this presentation, it's going to be 30 slides long and I worked on it for 30 minutes and I got through three slides. Okay, terrific. Well that means I need nine more time boxes to finish that entire task." Now I have a feedback loop. Now this planning fallacy goes away, because I can be able to understand how long things take me, and I can plan accordingly. As opposed to a to-do list. You're never done. There's always more to do. So because a time box calendar gives you a constraint of 24 hours in a day, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. Because you have that constraint, it forces you to make trade-offs. And that's something a to-do list can never do. A time box calendar forces you to say what is more important? Spending time with my kids or doing work? Watching TV or going to the gym? Whatever it might be, whatever choice or trade-off you make is fine. I don't care.
But it has to be according to what you say is important to you. Whereas a to-do list, there's never a constraint. So those are some of the main reasons why to-do lists are far, far worse than a time box calendar. Now it's fine by the way, to put down those tasks on a piece of paper and then have them in a box of time on your calendar. For example, I have time in my calendar for what I call admin tasks. That's fine, right? All these little two-minute tasks that I just got to get through real quick. That's fine. What you don't want is to guide your day by your to-do list. You've got to put those tasks into your calendar in order to know what is traction, the thing you said you were going to do and everything else is distraction.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I loved that distinction in the book, because on the one hand, as you've just said quite eloquently, the to-do list, it is giving you feedback. It's just giving you really bad feedback. In other words, you just keep looking and the list keeps growing. And as you say, you're like, God, I can't do anything. I can't finish anything. And that just becomes that self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas the time box situation is the opposite. You are feeding with good feedback. Yeah, I did that task for the hour that I assigned to it, did I get it done? No, but I did it. And so it gives you the win.
Nir Eyal:
That's exactly right. And I think so few people, Jim, have actually experienced what real leisure feels like because part of the problem with the to-do list is what I call the tyranny of a to-do list, that even when we get home from work and we just want to spend time with our kids, we just want to watch something on Netflix, we just want to relax. We're always thinking about all those things we still haven't done on our to-do list. So even the leisure time you do have, you don't really enjoy because your head is somewhere else. Whereas someone who keeps a time box calendar, when you say to yourself, "This is exactly what I want to do and everything else is a distraction, I want to watch the big game on TV and I put it in my calendar, I want to spend time with my kids, that's exactly what I should be doing." Everything else now becomes a distraction.
And so that is something that very few people have experienced that joy of, "Hey, I did this. I worked on this task. Doesn't actually matter if I finished it, but I worked on that task and did nothing else but focus on that task so that tomorrow I can make an appropriate calendar based on the knowledge of how far I can get in a given unit of time."
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
When was the last time you were distracted?
Nir Eyal:
I still get distracted from time to time. Becoming Indistractable doesn't mean you never get distracted. It means that you know why you got distracted so you can do something about it. So Paulo Coelho has a wonderful quote. He said, "A mistake repeated more than once is a decision." Such a good quote. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Love that.
Nir Eyal:
So a distractible person keeps getting distracted by the same things. How many times are we going to complain about Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok and the news and all this stuff? How many times do we complain about this before we say enough I'm going to do something about it? So an Indistractable person says, ah, okay, I see what you did there, distraction. You distracted me once. That's okay, but I'm not going to let it happen again. Because every distraction only has one of three causes.
Either it's an internal trigger, an external trigger, or a planning problem. That's it. And so what an Indistractable person does is say, "Okay, a circumstance changed, something happened, something unpredictable. All right, no problem." I'm going to get back to my time box calendar and then I'm going to look back and say, okay, why did I go off track? And how do I make sure that my calendar for the next day is easier to follow? That's the goal. The goal is not to be a drill sergeant saying, "Oh, I have to do this, I have to do that." No, the goal is to be a scientist. The job of a scientist is to make a hypothesis, run an experiment, look at the results, and then run future experiments based on those results.
So I'm constantly refining my calendar to make it easier to follow. So if I say, "Oh, you know what? I want to write in the morning, but sometimes I find that's not as fun for me, maybe I'll move that. Maybe I'll move this meeting here or move that there." That's fine. But never in the day. Once you set your time box calendar, that's it. It's loaded. You can't change it. But you can absolutely change the calendar for the next day, the next week, the next month. That's fine. You just can't change it in the day.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
When you started doing this, how often did you do that iteration? And what surprised you when you started the process, noted, "Okay, that distracted me. Why did that distract me?" You made your notes to change the time box. What were the things that surprised you the most?
Nir Eyal:
Yeah, so one of the things that surprised me is that it's not as difficult as it sounds. I think a lot of people, when you tell them about the science of setting implementations, of time boxing, it sounds scary to a lot of people. "Oh, how can I plan my day? What if something happens that sounds so rigid, that's impossible for me. I'm in the client services business. I have employees. People need to contact me. What's going to happen?" And what this all boils down to is not reality. It's a perception of reality. It's a subjective opinion about reality. Getting us back to the root cause of distraction. It's the internal triggers. It's not the external triggers. Everybody worries about the external triggers. What if my kids need me? What if my boss needs me? What if my employees need me? What if my clients need me?
They think about the external triggers. But what's really driving them to distraction is the fear that these people might need them. Not that they actually do, it's the fear they might. But that's not an external trigger, that's an internal trigger. So it's really about managing those internal triggers, managing that discomfort, that fear, that discomfort. And it turns out that that fear is a killer, right? Fear is such an enemy of being the kind of people we want to be because in the fear that someone might need me. I never make the time to do the important things in my life. How ironic is that? And so I think that was a big surprise, and I think that's where I come to this from a very different angle. Encouraging people to have tools in their toolkit. You don't need to go see a psychiatrist for this type of stuff.
Not there's anything wrong with that. But there are dozens of different techniques that any of us can use so that when we feel this discomfort, which everyone does, we did surveys of high performers, and it turns out that people who are at the top of their game in business like yourself or people who are in the arts or athletics or whatever the case, they feel the exact same internal triggers the rest of us do. They also feel indecisive and uncertain and bored and lonely. They feel the exact same internal triggers.
The difference between high performers and low performers is that the low performers, every time they feel that discomfort, they need to check email, they need to check the news, they need to check television, they need to have a drink, they need to escape the discomfort. Whereas high performers, they feel the exact same emotions, but instead of trying to escape the emotion, they lean into the emotion. They use it as rocket fuel to propel them forward. When they feel discouraged, when they feel disadvantaged, when they feel anxious, they use that as rocket fuel. It motivates them even more to get the job done. And so that's a skill that any of us can learn.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I could not agree more. And I also would underline for our listeners and viewers, that is a skill that can be learned. It is not something... Because I was talking to... It's actually the source of my next question, but another person I was chatting about pre our recording and I was telling them about the time box theory and your other work, and the first person was, "Well, I think you're kind of just built that way." And I said, "No, you are not built that way. You can actually learn these habits." And then another person that I was talking to said, "Well ask them about spontaneity because it seems to me that that sounds like he's saying spontaneity is bad." And I said, "I don't think he is, but I will ask him."
Nir Eyal:
Yes. Okay, so let's deal with these two. I love these. These are great, great questions. And I've heard them many, many times.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I'm sure you have. Yeah.
Nir Eyal:
So let's deal with them one a time. So the first one around, I'm built this way. So there's a chapter in the book about how important it is to reimagine your temperament. The temperament is defined as these traits that we're inborn with or part of who we are. And I really challenge that notion, and I challenge it from a perspective that might be familiar to a few folks. A few years ago in the psychology community, we had this concept called ego depletion. Ego depletion says that willpower is a deplorable resource, that many of us, and I used to believe this as well, thought that we run out of willpower. That when you get home from a hard day of work, that's it. I can't make any more good decisions. Give me that pint of Ben and Jerry's. I'm going to sit in front of the TV and watch the big game and eat my ice cream.
There's no willpower left. And many people believe this intuitively, but there was some research that one psychologist did, and kind of coined this term ego depletion, showing that, "Oh, look at these studies that find that you run out of willpower just like you would run out of charge in a battery or gas in a gas tank." Well, the media loved this. It reinforced a lot of people's beliefs that they're just out of willpower. How could you possibly make any more good decisions? I'm out of it. I'm spent. And then what we do in the social sciences, when something sounds fishy or sounds too good to be true, we try and replicate the studies. And it turns out that as far as we know, this concept of ego depletion that we run out of willpower like gas in a gas tank isn't true. We couldn't replicate the studies.
It sounds like it wasn't real all along. Except in one group of people. Carol Dweck at Stanford did this study where she found that there is in fact one group of people who really do experience ego depletion. They really do run out of willpower. Who are those people? It is people who believe that willpower is a limited resource. So if you believe that you are spent, you can't make any more good decisions, all your willpower is gone, guess what? You act in accordance with that belief. And so this I think is a wonderful insight into how dangerous it is to have labels. Now, labels can serve us. The reason I titled my book Indistractable, Indistractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It's meant to be a label. And we could talk about how you can use labels and identity to help you, but I think many times people use these labels in a very harmful way When someone says, "Oh, I have a short attention span, or I'm no good at time management, or I'm not born that way. I'm not built that way," as the person said to you.
Or, I'm a Sagittarius, right? These labels are actively harmful. I think for a lot of people, this ADHD diagnosis, particularly among adults, is very harmful. I'm not debating about... We don't need to get into what's real, what's not, and the incentives around... That's a whole nother debate. But just carrying around this label that this is who I am, it's a fixed trait, is very, very harmful. And so we need to rid ourselves of those harmful labels. As Henry Ford said, "Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right."
So we need to be very, very careful of these labels that we adopt, particularly the one around; well, some people are just born that way. Another label, by the way that we see very prominently kind of discussed in the mainstream press is this idea that technology is addictive. That it's hijacking our brains. As a fellow word nerd, addiction comes from the Latin, adictio, which means slave. So we are perpetuating this myth that you are enslaved by your technology. So what does that mean? If you constantly tell people there's nothing you can do about the problem, you're powerless, you're a slave. What do people do? Nothing. Right? It's called learned helplessness. If you're constantly told there's nothing you can do about the problem, you don't do anything about it. Whereas it turns out it's not that hard. I just gave you the four strategies. It's not that difficult.
So that's number one. Be very, very careful of these labels, because if you believe you can't, you're right. The second part around spontaneity, let's talk about that. That's a really good one. So some people really do resist time-box counters because they want to be spontaneous. Well, there's a few things around this. Number one, it turns out when it comes to creatives, I hear this argument sometimes from creatives. I need to be available whenever the muse decides to visit me. I don't know when I can be creative, so I need to be available all the time. Well, as Steven Pressfield says, I love his book, the War of Art, that the more time you spend in the seat in the chair to do the work, the more the muse visits. And so the difference between an amateur and a professional is the professional puts their butt in the seat and is ready to do the work, whether they feel inspired or not.
And by doing so, they get inspired by planning the time to do the work. So it turns out, if you want to do your best work, if you want to finish that novel, if you want to start that business, whatever it is that you want to get done, that planning the time is essential. It's not just going to show up, right? It's through consistent forward momentum, right? Consistently writing another page in your book, consistently going to the gym, consistently investing in that relationship, consistently building that business. This stuff doesn't happen through intensity. It happens through consistency. And so it has to be planned for in your day. Now, what about spontaneity? What about having fun? First of all, I want you to plan anything you desire. If you want time in your day to play video games, put it in your calendar. If you want time for prayer, meditation, exercise, rest, staring at the wall, it doesn't matter.
You can put all that in your calendar, including time for spontaneity. Now, this sounds like an oxymoron. How do you plan spontaneity? I'll tell you exactly how. So I have a 15-year-old, and every weekend since she was very little, we have time for what we call planned spontaneity. We have this big swath of time, four hours every weekend that we have time to be together. Now, I don't know what we're going to do with that time. Maybe we'll go to the park, maybe we'll go surfing. Maybe we'll go get some ice cream. I don't know what we're going to do with that time. That's going to be spontaneous. So why do I plan it? Why do I have to plan for spontaneity?
Because if I don't plan for it won't happen. I need to block out that time so I know what I will not be doing. I will not be on social media. I will not be watching TV. I will not be on a work call. I will be with someone I love very much. So you can absolutely plan for that spontaneity. And I encourage you to do that. The idea here is that if you don't plan for the things that are super important, those aren't going to happen. And so you have to reserve time for them as well.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I couldn't agree more with your idea about labels. They can have a positive effect, yes, because Indistractable, indestructible, which is a great title by the way, but one of the things that has bothered me a great deal, I've talked about it a lot, et cetera, is the label thinking. And you are your own worst enemy in this regard. And I mentored lots of people, younger people, and that seems to be the number one thing. They're living with all of these labels that they've placed on themselves, and/or accepted to be placed on them by another. And yeah, no, I just can't do that. That isn't natural to me.
And no, I can't ever do that. And I'm just like, oh my God. Do you understand that you are programming yourself to have that exact outcome if you continuously label yourself. And then I try to get into... How about inverting? Let's look at Charlie Munger here. Let's say let's try some good labels. What are you really good at? Start thinking about it that way.
Nir Eyal:
I think it's almost a conspiracy in a way because there's so many interests out there that want you to label yourself as one thing or another, because it's very comforting. When I have a label to explain the way I am. I don't have to try anymore. I'm a Sagittarius, therefore, that's just the way I am. I don't have to make an effort or I have some diagnosis. The ones around a ADHD kill me because not that everybody does this, but a lot of people, they get some kind of diagnosis, or even worse, they don't have a diagnosis, but somehow they self-diagnose because somebody on TikTok told them so that now they're making up all kinds of disorders. I have high-functioning anxiety. There is no such thing. It doesn't exist. And yet you hear people making up these diagnoses because they're incredibly comforting.
There's this warm blanket of I don't have to do anything, but that's hogwash. It's ridiculous. You are punching yourself in the face. And there's nothing that says that even if you have a diagnosis, you can't cure it. For example, if you have a cold and now you don't feel the symptoms anymore, do you have the cold? No, the virus has left your body. You don't feel the symptoms, you don't have the cold. But somehow with ADHD, oh, I'm going to have this forever. But if I can teach you a system that eliminates the symptoms. If you don't suffer from it anymore, if now you can manage your time, well guess what? You've cured yourself. And that's fantastic. We can do that. As opposed to, I think what many, whether it's in the pharmaceutical industry, whether it's in the media, whether it's promoted amongst people who have these disorders, they almost want that disorder to be what defines them.
And that's incredibly dangerous because it blocks you off from actually making the effort to do some very simple things. How about before you start popping pills, or even worse, giving your kid pills, how about we plan our time? How about we make a calendar? Not that hard. We can do these simple actions, but most of all, first and foremost, don't label yourself with a label that doesn't serve you. Maybe it's actually a good time. If you don't mind to talk about how we can label ourselves in a helpful way because this is fascinating. So this is one of the steps in the fourth step, the hook of the Indistractable model around how we can make a pact. And a pact is a pre-commitment device. And one of the pacts, there are many different kinds of pacts, price pact, effort pact we can talk about. But one of the most powerful is an identity pact.
And this comes out of the psychology of religion that we know that when someone has a label that they define themselves by when they become a noun rather than a verb, it's very, very powerful. There was an interesting study done by Knutson that found that the most effective intervention ever recorded for how to get people to go vote was very simple. They called people up and they asked them one of two questions. They said, "Are you a voter or are you planning to vote?" Okay, the verb versus the noun. Are you a voter or are you planning to vote? And then they actually check the voting logs to see who actually showed up and went to vote. And it turns out that people who define themselves as a voter; am I a voter? The noun form rather than the verb, we're much more likely to go vote because it's about that identity.
And so when you think about the psychology of religion, a devout Muslim doesn't say, "Oh, am I going to have a bacon sandwich for breakfast." Right? Because devout Muslims don't eat bacon, right? Same with vegetarians or vegans. They don't contemplate, "Ooh, am I going to do this thing that breaks my identity because it's who I am." So we can do the exact same thing with becoming Indistractable. When we say to ourselves, that's who I am. I don't answer every ping or ding every 20 seconds. If we're going to have lunch together, we're going to be present both in body and mind. So let's put our phones away. That's who I am. I'm Indistractable. Is it that different from someone who calls themselves a nonsmoker or someone who wears religious garb? It's not so different. So we can use that psychology of identity to help us live out the kind of lives we want.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And that's the one exception where labels are actually quite empowering as opposed to the other way around. I think that the other, as you were talking about ADHD and some of the other things that people either self-diagnose themselves with or the industry diagnoses them with. It does seem to me that we are in sort of a slope where we're trying to medicalize everything. And here is the cure. And at least in America, the cure is always; take this pill and then you'll be fine. Or, this is the easy solution. Generally speaking, only mask symptoms doesn't actually address the real problem. What are your thoughts about that trend and how... Is it adjacent to one of the reasons why people are so distractible these days?
Nir Eyal:
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. One, it's a great business. When you can get people to keep taking a drug in perpetuity, that's an amazing business model. When the profits are huge per unit and you can get someone to take it for the rest of their lives, there's a lot of incentives behind that. And it's not some sinister plot. I think I talked to a lot of therapists, a lot of people who work with folks who have ADHD use my book. And what they tell me is that they're spread incredibly thin. That when a parent comes to you and says, "My kid is acting crazy, their teachers can't deal with them, please help." And they're desperate.
They're looking for solutions. And so it's very difficult to tell a parent, "Hey, look, this is what a five-year-old boy acts like. It's normal. It's okay. They don't have to sit down and pay attention to some teacher for hours on end. That's not the way we evolved. Children historically, up until the last, what, 150 years of institutionalized education, they ran around all day, and that's what they did for the early years. They didn't sit there and listen to a teacher.". But that bucks the system. And so you can't tell a parent that, "Look, this is part of being a parent, and actually the school system is not helping you here because the school system is also incentivized to diagnose as much as possible. It makes teachers' lives easier. Schools get more resources, the more kids are diagnosed with one thing or another.".
And so it's in everybody's interest except the kids many times. And it's not to say that there aren't extreme cases where a diagnosis could be helpful and that pharmaceuticals could be helpful, but my contention is it's always skills before pills. Skills before pills. In all regards, when it comes to disorders, psychiatric ailments, where there is the possibility to teach a new skill, and that's not always possible when it comes to schizophrenia, there's disorders clearly that require different types of treatment. But when it comes to ADHD, anxiety, insomnia, these types of things, it turns out that there are skills that we can learn before we start popping pills into our body. Because the pills don't teach you any new skills.
Whereas if we can, as the first line of defense say, okay, what are the tactics? What are the skills that I can try and adopt in my own life? And again, there are many easy tactics that if we try can yield amazing results. Then if we've exhausted all those skills, then we'll try some kind of pharmaceutical intervention as opposed to, I think what many people do is, "Okay, I want the quick fix. Give me some kind of pill. It's going to make me feel better." Which, one, has all kinds of side effects and two, doesn't actually solve the root cause of the problem.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And as we're talking about kids, how can you help your kids? How can you get them on the right path towards being Indistractable?
Nir Eyal:
So this is a super important topic because if you think the world is distracting now, just wait a few years. Between virtual reality and augmented reality and everything that's happening in reality, reality, the world is only becoming a more distracting place. And so we have got to teach our kids how to become Indistractable. So let me give you a few tips. Number one, the most important thing you can do is to lead by example. I can't tell you how many parents complain to me about how distracted their kids are. Their kids are always playing on their devices and the TikToks and whatever, and meanwhile, they're on their phone checking email or whatever as they're telling me this. So we have to stop being hypocrites as parents. We have to lead by example, which can include telling your kids that it's a struggle for you.
That's okay. Many parents are allergic to being vulnerable. And that's one of the best things you can do, is to tell your kids, "Look, I struggle with this as well. This is hard for me. Let's do this together." When it comes to how do we raise Indistractable kids? And there's a whole section in the book on how to do this. The four steps are exactly the same. Master internal triggers make time for traction, hack back, external triggers, prevent distraction with pacts. It's the same four steps, but there's some special things we need to understand, starting with their internal triggers. We have to understand why kids overuse technology. It's a very surface level understanding. It's a very naive understanding to say; oh, it's Fortnite. Oh, it's TikTok. Oh, it's YouTube. It's a very surface level understanding. We need to go deeper into why kids overuse and abuse technology.
Because we know, and this is across the board, three hours or less of extracurricular screen time has no deleterious effects. There hasn't been even one study that shows that age-appropriate screen time of three hours or less has any deleterious effects. The problems start to happen when kids are using for five, six, seven hours a day. Look, any form of media that a kid is using for that many hours a day is going to be a problem. Even if they're reading Harry Potter books for seven hours a day, that's a problem. Okay, there's something else going on. So it's about the overuse, the abuse. That's what we need to figure out what's going on. So why are kids overusing technology? So here's where it gets deeper, and I think more interesting. We have to understand what's called the needs displacement hypothesis. The needs displacement hypothesis says that when we are not getting what we need psychologically offline, we look for it online.
And so what are kids missing? What are they not getting offline? So if we look back to the most widely held, most widely researched theory on human motivation and flourishing, it's called self-determination theory. It's about a 50-year-old theory. Pretty much every psychologist on the face of the Earth knows this theory very, very well. Self-determination theory says that every human brain needs three things for psychological wellbeing. Three things. We need competency, autonomy, and relatedness.
So let's look at those three things. Let's look at what's happened to kids over the past generation. Let's look at competency. One of the things that's happened around the same time that everybody got smartphones was this teaching towards the test, at least in the United States, the No Child Left Behind Act, which regulated and started compensating teachers based on how well kids are doing on standardized tests. So there is a segment of kids who start getting tested multiple times per year, starting in first grade, who are told again and again and again, "You are not competent.".
And so what do you do if you don't feel competent in the real world? You start looking for that competency, that feeling of competency, which every single one of us needs. You start looking for it online in Roblox or Minecraft or any one of these games, I feel competent. I'm building something. I'm creating something. It feels good to feel competent. Now, let's look at autonomy. This is a big one. Every human brain needs a sense of autonomy. And so we know that this is the most regulated generation in history. If you look at the work of Peter Gray's fascinating work. He talks about how the amount of time that kids spend playing today is at a record low. And what that has caused is that that sense of autonomy has disappeared. If you think about it, there are only two places in society where you can tell a human being what to do, what to think how to dress, who to be friends with, where to go. And that's school and prison.
And so is it any surprise when our kids get home from school, they just want to be free. They just want to be autonomous. They just want to do what they want to do. And that's where this myth of the rebellious teenager comes from. You hear this all the time; oh, the teenage brains and the hormones, it's complete rubbish. If you look at pre-industrialized society, there is no such thing as teenage rebelliousness. It's only an industrialized society where we force kids to be in cages that they behave like animals. And so is it any surprise when we tell people what to do all day, they want to rebel? They're so desperate for autonomy. And where do they get that autonomy? They go online. The tech companies are happy to give them a sense of autonomy. They feel free online.
And then finally, relatedness. And this is the most important of the three. We know that the time that kids spend interacting with other kids doing what's called free play. Free play is when you get to be with your friends without the gaze of teachers and coaches and parents, and just have time to be a kid. That time is at a record low. The neighborhoods of America used to sing with the song of kids playing every afternoon. You don't hear that anymore. The media has scared the crap out of parents to the point where they don't let their kids outside because of stranger danger, even though it's completely overblown. This is the safest time in American history to be a kid. Or now parents are so over-scheduling their kids because they're so concerned about getting them into the right school. So they've got ballet and then they've got Mandarin lessons and swimming practice. They have no time to play.
If you want your kid to be psychologically healthy, the best thing you can do is to let them play with other kids in the real world. Let them hang out, right? That's what we used to do the time as kids, but we don't let our kids do that. We shut them behind closed doors and what do we expect them to do? Read the encyclopedia? No, they're going to go online because that's where they feel relatedness. That's where they connect with other people. Social media is about social interaction. If you've ever played Fortnite with your kid, it's not a video game, it's a way to hang out with your friends, disguised as a video game. And so with those three psychological nutrients. If you don't understand the deeper reason why kids are overusing technology, you're never going to solve the source of the problem. I guarantee you this is a symptom, not the cause.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And that just resonates so strongly with me. That's one of my soap boxes about locking kids away in schools and requiring them to follow the rules. And you must memorize this. And all of these things are just absolutely the wrong way to do it. I love your combination with schools and prison. Those are the two.
Nir Eyal:
And the bells, right? Even the schedule, it is designed for a certain type of economy, which makes sense at the time when... We always think of whatever technology existed before we were born as the way things have always been. Schools are a new technology, right? Stuffing 30 kids the room and making them pay attention to some boring person talking for an hour is a new technology. It's only about 150 years old. How did kids used to learn? They did apprentice work. They helped the grownups do their work, and that's how they learned to trade. And we need to bring that back, I think.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I completely agree, and I think that we did that, as you say, we did it to serve the industrial economy of the time. The industrialists were like, "Okay, here's what we need. We need to train these people to be robots to do repetitive activities without complaining for eight to 10 hours a day. Can you hook us up?" And we got the school system that we still are inflicting on children today. And now essentially we are doing everything wrong for the way the economy runs now.
When I get going on this one, I really get onto STEM winders, but I can see that we agree. And the autonomy part, again, I completely concur when we were raising our kids... All of my children are adults. I have six grandchildren. But we let them, "Where are you?" "Well, I'm doing this, this, and this." "Great. Go have fun." "Well, do I have to be home by a certain..." "Well, yeah, you have to be home by 10 o'clock..." Or depending on their age. But we didn't try. And I was at a party once and it was with a bunch of boomers.
And listen, when I was a kid, the things we got up to, I mean, oh my God, and I was one of those kids who rode off on the bike, didn't get home until it was dinnertime. My mom and dad said, "You have fun." That was it. No interrogation, none of that. But at this party, everyone is saying, "Well, do you have the spyware on your kid's phones?" And I'm like, what am I hearing? How could you be such a hypocrite? Do you remember how many drugs we took when we were kids? Remember all the shit we got up to? And now you're putting spy devices on your... You can't do that and raise an autonomous healthy adult.
Nir Eyal:
I mean, the message you're sending, by constantly... We call them snowplow parents. They have to remove all the obstacles from their kid's way. You are essentially telling your kids constantly, "You are not capable. You can't do this on your own." And so are we surprised that we have this generation of kids who believes what their parents have been telling, "I can't do anything. I'm constantly anxious. I must have a disorder. There must be something wrong with me because my parents won't let me be free and be a human being." And that is, I think a really critical mistake that we've made with this generation is we have to let them make their own mistakes. There's that wonderful book called The Lesson of this Kid in Me. When a kid makes a mistake, they learn from that as opposed to when we try and protect them from every little thing or trying to medicalize every little thing as some kind of disorder that requires special treatment.
A lot of these things preclude kids from learning their own lessons, which is so, so important. Now, that isn't to say that we can't get the best of both worlds, because one of the things that people often forget to mention when they think about, okay, look, we have this rise in teen suicide and mental health issues, and they blame that on technology, which I think is spurious, but we can get back to that in a minute. What they failed to realize is that in that same time that we have seen an increase in mental health issues, all the things that used to harm kids, all the things that we struggled with as teenagers that used to hurt us, all those things are at record lows.
Teen pregnancy, record lows, drunk driving, record lows, teen incarceration, record lows, truancy, record lows. All these things that used to make teenage life very dangerous are at record lows. Still, despite the rise in teen suicide among girls, not among boys, but among girls, seems to be mitigated in some way by technology as well. Because at the end of the day, if you wanted to keep kids safe at home and off the streets, well maybe there's some virtues to having such a device too.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. It's the constant refrain and pearl-clutching that drives me nuts. And it also, if you know history, and I know you do know history, but every new technology, it was like, oh, symphony orchestras, for example, when record players came out, Victorolas, right? They took full page ads in newspapers saying, "That is not the way you listen to music. That isn't music. The only way to listen to music is to hear it live with a symphony." And when radio came out, well, what showed up in newspapers? Pictures of a bunch of dead birds right next to a radio tower. It's very dangerous.
Nir Eyal:
Absolutely. These moral panics.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, moral panics. And then you sort of back up the truck and getting back to the studies. The replication crisis is still kind of like a very serious deal. I love reading a lot of the social science papers and all of that. And sometimes I'll just be going, okay, I wonder if this replicates. And then when you start looking like, no, but what does the media love? They love the easy sell. The easy solution.
Nir Eyal:
Whatever gets them riled up.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Exactly.
Nir Eyal:
Did you see this study... they Did this amazing study where they took folks non-academics, just laypeople, and they showed them a list of studies and they said, "Which one of these do you think doesn't replicate? Or which one of these are you suspicious of?" And it was an amazingly high degree of if people thought that study was too good to be true, it always was. Whenever you read that study that said, "Chocolate is good for you, and wine is good for you," and you're like, whatever, nine times out of 10, that study can't replicate.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And that's the other part. We continually denigrate. People have a lot of common sense. And I love that looking at the thing, okay, yeah, this one that says. Wine is the best thing for me in the world? I don't think that one's going to really prove to be true. And yet, I wonder though, why do certain type academics, why are they drawn towards those types of studies?
Nir Eyal:
Because it makes a name for you, right? One, there's incredible pressure in the academic community to publish a lot, right? Publish or perish is kind of the motto. And a lot of these things, it's almost... Especially in the social sciences, unfortunately, we're seeing it in all the sciences now that not only this replication crisis, but outright fraud and fields that we didn't expect. We expected it in social sciences because it's so easy. There's been all kinds of controversies now at Harvard and several other places around studies that just don't replicate.
That's almost one level of dishonesty. The statistical fraud of what we call the bottom drawer problem. I'm not going to publish this study that didn't do so well. I'm only going to study the one that did. Or P-hacking, right? Where we run a study a thousand times, we see this a lot in the social media debate around studies that aren't pre-registered. So I'll run a study on a gazillion different factors and then I'll point the few that says, "Oh, here's the correlation between mental health and such and such," but I didn't show you how big of an effect that might have or whether that was a statistical fluke.
So there's a lot, when we say the confidence interval for something to be statistically significant, that still allows for 5%, for 5/100 trials will just be statistical flukes. And so many times people publish that statistical fluke rather than what's actually true in the field. And so there's a lot of room for interpretation of these studies that the average person doesn't know when they read a newspaper that says, "Oh, social media does this or that." They kind of take it as face value because it serves a convenient narrative. My kid is acting crazy, and so I need an excuse that says that it's not my parenting or a school system I don't want to escape. There must be something else. Oh, it's Mark Zuckerberg's fault. Somebody else is doing this to me. That's a narrative we want to consume. And of course the media is happy to publish.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And it goes deeply on the part of you want to get published. So who's going to present a grant proposal or request where they say the hypothesis, we fully expect it to be an null set, right?
Nir Eyal:
Yeah, exactly.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Not many as a matter of fact.
Nir Eyal:
Or even to replicate. I mean, this is something that I think is quite fixable. You should be able to get a Ph.D. simply by replicating a study, which you can't do today. It has to be novel. It has to be new. So they're constantly looking for novelty at the expense of academic rigor. And I think that's a real shame.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Absolutely. And I passionately agree with you. If you could get a Ph.D. simply running the test to replicate, that's a real amazing value to the public and to everyone else. One of the things... We invest in a lot of various AI companies, and one of the things that we're thinking of doing with the stack that we're putting in here at OSB is we're thinking of having an AI just generate null hypothesis tests. Since very few people do it. We lose the ability to learn via negativia, right? And so let's have the AI just run endless hypotheses and we'll have them auto-published to a database that's open to all scholars. I think that we forget there are agendas, there are all of these things, and sometimes they're pretty complicated. The point you made, it's like the parent, I couldn't possibly be a bad parent. So it's that Mark Zuckerberg guy.
Nir Eyal:
Yeah, that's right. I would love for you to do this AI project. By the way, I think the inconvenient truth is that I don't know how many academics will give you their data sets. That might be the problem. "Oh, I can't find it," or, "Oh, it's inconvenient, or I don't have time for that." That's I think part of the problem. Now, we have seen... I have to give academia credit, at least in the fields that I look at, there has been a serious push now to pre-register studies. That's going to fix a lot of the problem there is to say; in advance, before you run the data set, you have to tell us what you expect to find. That right there is going to solve a lot of this P-hacking problem. But yeah, if you could get the data, but it's amazing how many times when people want to replicate a study, "Oh, I lost the data, or It's too old, or it needs to be scrubbed, or, I'm sorry, I can't get that to you right now," but if you can figure out a way around that, that would be amazing.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, I had an experience when I was in college where I participated as a volunteer in a study, and the hypothesis was well-stated. And when all of the results came in, it proved that the hypothesis wasn't right. And so anyway, I was waiting to read the pre-print, the write-up of it. He didn't write it up. And I literally went to his office and I'm like, "Professor, I thought... I was one..." He was like, "Who are you?" Well, there were a lot of volunteers. And I moved on to other things, and I was really struck by that. And I'm like, "Wow, no, that's not right." And do you think that goes on a lot these days?
Nir Eyal:
I don't just think it goes on. I know it goes on. And I'll tell you what many professors... I'm not saying that I don't know who this was, but many professors would've just rerun that study a few more times until they got the results they want.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Right? Yeah, this was back in the '70s. They probably hadn't thought of that yet.
Nir Eyal:
Science works. I mean, look, when people say believe the science. Believe the good science. And part of the scientific process is fundamentally, you don't have to have faith. Nobody's asking you to have faith in a scientist. But in order for the scientific process to perpetuate and for us to believe in science, we have to have access to transparency to how the study was done. We need to have access to the data sets. We need to have access to the preregistered hypothesis. These type of things are going to make science better and better and better. So it's not that I'm down on the scientific process. I'm down on the current way. It's been done over the past 20, 30, 50 years now. Unfortunately, I think a lot of studies are done very poorly.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
As am I. And the scientific method is kind of pure punk rock anarchy, right? It's like take nobody's word for it. Here's the data, here's what I expect. You can have everything. You should be able to replicate it. And if I'm wrong, we should learn something from that and then iterate. You know what I mean? The scientific method... The people who drive me nuts are, Nope, the science is settled. Science is never settled.
Nir Eyal:
It's never settled. Or science says, or science proves-
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
No, that's the one that just... I hate that. I see those headlines. It's just like, oh my God.
Nir Eyal:
You don't understand what science does, right? It's not like you could say, "God says," right? You can't say, "Science says." That's not how it works.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I absolutely love that. Well, I've had so much fun talking about just your one book. And I was ready to try to maybe talk about your second book. But I hope you'll be able to come back on so we can talk about the book.
Nir Eyal:
I'd be happy to.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Because that was a great book too, and I have a lot of questions about that. But in the interest of time, this has been fantastic. I think that our listeners and viewers are going to love this. I'm sure I'll get some of the follow on. "Yeah, but it's just so hard, Jim."
Nir Eyal:
That's true. You know what? You are going to hear that. And maybe it's worth addressing it real quick before we part.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Sure.
Nir Eyal:
If you look at everything good in life, I get this excuse sometimes, but it's so difficult. How can we expect people to do this? How can we expect people to become Indistractable? All these steps they have to take. And my rebuttal is what in life worth having is easy? Everything requires some effort. If you want to have things that other people don't have, you have to do things that other people don't do. And so the masses will watch their Boob tube and scroll on their devices and waste their life away. But that doesn't have to be you. If you want to meet your full potential, if you want to live the kind of life you're capable of living and contribute to the world in the way you know are capable of, you have to do some things a little different.
You have to buck the trends, which means you have to learn some new skills. But the good news is it's right here on a silver platter. I've done the five years of research on how to do it. And there are 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies that this isn't just stuff that works for me, so it's going to work for you. No, no, no. This is stuff that has been in multiple peer reviewed journals and studies that I actually look through and use these techniques in my own life as well. So it's right here on the silver platter. We just have to do it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And it replicates. Well, at the end of all of our shows, we ask our guests, we're going to wave a wand and make you the emperor of the world. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, because our mutual feelings about schools and prisons. You can't execute anyone. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can make two statements and everyone in the world, whenever their tomorrow is going to wake up and the two statements that you make, they're going to think they thought of themselves. And unlike what we were just talking about; oh, it's too hard, they're going to say, "You know what? I'm actually going to start acting on both of these things today and I'm going to see them through to the end." What are you going to incept to the world?
Nir Eyal:
I can only think of one at the moment, but let me see if I can think of the other. So I would say I would love to incept this mantra that if you were to summarize my work, Indistractable is this: that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That fundamentally distraction is not a moral failing. It's not a character flaw. It's simply the fact that we don't know how to control our impulses. But that is a skill like any other. And that's all it is. It's just impulse control. So what is the antidote to impulsiveness? The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.
That if you wait till the last minute, if you're on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork, you're going to eat it. It's too late. If you're trying to quit smoking, but the cigarettes in your hand, it's too late, you're going to smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night and it's the first thing you see in the morning and pick up and start checking your phone before you say hello to your loved one, it's too late. You lost. But if we plan ahead, if we take steps today, there's no distraction we can't overcome tomorrow. So the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. We have to plan ahead, and if we do, there's no distraction we can't overcome.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I love that one. You got one more?
Nir Eyal:
One more. I have to think about this one. That's my best one because that's what I've researched the most.
Let's see. I think another one would be to... And this one I have to steal from Jeff Bezos who talks about the regret minimization framework. I think that's a wonderful way to think about life, is to ask yourself; what would I regret not doing, not trying? What would I look back on and say, "Oh, I should have given that a shot." And I think for most of us, I don't think many people regret trying and failing. They regret not trying. They regret not following through. And so if I could accept that model of, look, you have so little time on earth, it passes by so quickly. And the improbability of you even being here statistically, is so infinitesimal that it is our duty to try and minimize regret, to make the very most of what we can with the limited time we have here on Earth.
So don't squander that time. That we're so focused on saving money. People click coupons and they split lunches and they look for sales and deals, but when it comes to time, we just give it away to whoever wants it, right? Whatever stupid thing is happening in the media, yeah, sure, take my time. You can have my attention all you want. But when it comes to our money, we try and hoard it and save it. We put it in banks and vaults, and we keep it so nobody can get to it. But it should be the exact opposite. Because we can always make more money. You cannot make more time. I don't care if you're Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you make more time. So we should be cheap with our time and generous with our money. Not the other way around.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Oh, those are two great ones. We are so simpatico because that's one of my little things is like, don't you realize that by just being here, you've won the cosmic lottery? Do you know what the odds against are?
Nir Eyal:
So true. So true.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
They're so astronomical.
Nir Eyal:
Every time I'm a little stressed, this is my de-stress technique. Whenever I'm stressed about some little thing in life, I always think back to what's the probability that one sperm entered that one egg at that exact moment, and that before that there was whatever amount of generations for 200,000 years and 2 million years of evolution and 3.5 billion years of the planet's life in this tiny speck of dust in this vast universe? I mean, it blows your mind and you realize how insignificant a lot of our little problems are in the cosmic scale.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Totally. And then you just got to say, "Oh my God, I literally won the cosmic lottery that is the most hard to win of any lottery in the world. Why am I worried about this?".
Nir Eyal:
That's exactly right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I started right on home plate, not even on third base.
Nir Eyal:
That's so true. And then I go hug my daughter.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for agreeing to come back on because I've got an equal number of questions for you on your other book, because a lot of our people will also be very interested in that.
Nir Eyal:
My pleasure.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, it was just wonderful covering this book. I highly recommend it, people listening. You can buy it anywhere. Do it today. Nir, thank you very much.
Nir Eyal:
My pleasure. Great to be with you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Great to be with you. Cheers.
 | A guest post by
|
Such a helpful and insightful read! Will recommend this like the bible for adhd people haha, thanks a lot for writing this!
Well said. It was so gradual a couple of decades ago and has now accelerated this decade to become a full-scale, but as yet undeclared "Distraction Epidemic".