Barbell Shrugged - [Indistractable] How to Choose Your Attention and Choose Your Life w/ Nir Eyal, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #725

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

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 co-founded and sold two tech companies since 2003 and was dubbed by The M.I.T. Technology Review as, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote, “Nir Eyal is the habits guy. Want to understand how to get app users to come back again and again? Then Eyal is your man.”   He is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. His books have resonated with readers worldwide, selling over 1 million copies in over 30 languages.   Indistractable received critical acclaim, winning the Outstanding Works of Literature Award as well as being named one of the Best Business and Leadership Books of the Year by Amazon and one of the Best Personal Development Books of the Year by Audible. The Globe and Mail called Indistractable, “the best business book of 2019.”   In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, Nir’s writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and Psychology Today.   Nir invests in habit-forming products that improve users’ lives. Some of his past investments include Eventbrite (NYSE:EB), Anchor.fm (acquired by Spotify), Kahoot! (KAHOOT-ME.OL), Canva, Homelight, Product Hunt, Marco Polo, Byte Foods, FocusMate, Dynamicare, Wise App, and Sunnyside.   Nir attended The Stanford Graduate School of Business and Emory University.   Free Tools and Resources from Nir Eyal: Indistractable the book: http://geni.us/indistractable Indistractable bonus content is here: http://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/ Indistractable summary article: https://www.nirandfar.com/skill-of-the-future/ Timeboxing article: https://www.nirandfar.com/timeboxing/ Values article: https://www.nirandfar.com/common-values/ Free habit tracker tool: https://www.nirandfar.com/habit-tracker/ Free schedule maker tool: https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/ List of  top articles: https://www.nirandfar.com/best-articles/ Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable, is on the podcast. I'm super excited to talk to him. This is like one of my, when we start to get into the psychology of how humans interact, we love looking at our phones, right? Everybody has one. You're probably listening to this podcast on it right now. It'd actually be almost weird if you weren't listening to this on your phone when you probably

could be in the car with dead silence and I'm in there now with you distracting you, but that's okay. That's totally okay. You should keep doing that as much as possible. But it's a very interesting concept in that our phones are just the new widget from TV and newspaper and books. And we dig into all of the ways that humans have been distracted, what it can tell us about where we are right now. And then he gives a four-step process on kind of like how to recognize where you're getting distracted, the things that it's leading to, how you can get out of it. And really, it's all about overcoming discomfort. Like we love to talk about getting comfortable with the uncomfortable and things like that in the gym,

which I think is always a little played out on the little dramatic when it comes to to working out but um it's a it's a very interesting concept that uh what when do we typically grab our phones it's when we're bored and we don't want to just go sit with the uncomfortableness of the boredom or um when our kids are going crazy and we just don't want to deal with having to deal with the craziness and And what do you do? You kind of like walk away. You grab your phone. You distract yourself. When you could just sit in the discomfort. And that is why Nir wrote this book, Indistractable.

And I think it's a fantastic show, especially when you kind of sit back and just observe how people act. And it's very, very cool. So as always, friends, you can get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galvin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis

that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, near a y'all. I got it right. Perfect. Nailed it.

Nailed it. You are the author of Indistractable, which Doug Larson has read, and he has an entire arsenal of questions ready for you. Indistractable. You're really pumping me up a little bit too much here. I did listen to it on audiobook, though, and I really did enjoy it. You said something pre-show that immediately resonated with me. I actually just to it on audiobook and I really did enjoy it you said something pre-show that immediately resonated with me I actually just wrote it down

how do we do what we say we are going to do first off that is like it's a very similar definition to how I feel people build trust which is doing what you say you are going to do which is kind of like how I talk to my kids about building trust

I'm like well if you never do it then how do i trust you in any aspect of life um which i i love i love that frame for um you know we can we can we can dig into the fitness side of things um but i'd love to know how did uh i was on your wikipedia page it's uh behavioral engineering. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, you framed that perfectly, you know, when it comes to trust with other people. One of the things you never want to be called in life that I would take great offense to is if anyone ever called me a liar, right? Nobody ever wants to be called a liar. Yeah. And yet what I found, the reason I wrote this book is that I, as well as many other people, we hold in very high esteem how

other people think of us. And we want to make sure we uphold our commitments to other people. But somehow when it comes to the promises we make to ourselves, we lie all the time. At least I used to, I would say, oh, today I'm definitely going to go to the gym, but I didn't. Today I'm definitely going to eat right, but I wouldn't. Oh, today I'm definitely going to work on that big project that's been sitting on my desk that I've been procrastinating around. I'm definitely going to eat right, but I wouldn't. Oh, today, I'm definitely going to work on that big project that's been sitting on my desk that I've been procrastinating around. I'm definitely going to do that. And somehow, 20, 30, 45 minutes later, I'm doing everything but the truth. And in fact, Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about this problem 2,500 years ago, 2,500 years before any of these personal technologies that we all use every day and we think is the source of our distraction. People have been complaining about this age-old question, which I think is fascinating, which is why don't we say

what we're going to do? Plato called it in the Greek, akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. So to me, it's a really fascinating psychological puzzle. If we know what to do, why don't we just do it? And this is what all of us and mankind struggle with. Yeah. Is the doing part really just the hard part? Because it's so much easier not to do anything. This is like, is it Seinfeld's joke about retirement when he was like, I tell people I'm going to do nothing. But as soon as I start thinking about doing nothing means I'm doing something, which immediately makes the idea of me doing nothing impossible. Why is it so hard to follow through? Especially when you're talking to yourself, like you, you're the easiest person to lie to. Right. That's very true. It's very true. And so,

yeah, this is what I've dedicated the past decade of my life to understanding is why is it that despite knowing what to do and knowing that that's the right thing to do and convincing us ourselves that we know exactly what to do and who doesn't these days, you know, that the problem that we have in the modern world is not the same problem that our grandparents had. Like our grandparents could take a step back and say, you know what? I don't know, right? The information is locked up somewhere that I don't have access to. But today, nobody can have that excuse anymore, right? If you want to get in shape, you have to eat right and exercise. Do you really need some secret information? No, you just got to do it. If you want to have better relationships with people, you have to be fully present with it. If you want to do better in your

job, you just have to do the work, especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do. We don't need any special knowledge for this. We just have to do it. And if you don't know something, just Google it. All the information is out there to tell you exactly what to do. The problem that we have today is not that we don't know what to do. It's that we don't know how to get out of our own way.

We don't know how to stop getting distracted. And so that's what my book is all about. Social media hits. This conversation took off. I would imagine the distraction Google trend had a hockey stick when Facebook showed up, unlike any other. But then you say, going all the way back to Play-Doh, this has been going on. What other forms of distraction or why has this been, maybe it's just like ingrained in our DNA that it's okay to say you're going to do something

and then not do it, but why is it so easy as whether there's social media or not, there's, there's always a way to, um, to distract us all through. That's right. And people always have. I mean, I remember my generation, we're all about the same age more or less. Uh, but in my generation before we had social media, before we had the internet, they called us couch potatoes because the TV was melting our brain and distracting everybody. You remember this, right? And before that, it was about heavy metal music was supposed to be melting our brains and distracting us. And before that, it was the radio and all the way back to the written word. Did you

know that Socrates bemoaned this terrible new technology called the written word? And he said that the written word was this technology that would, quote, enfeeble men's minds. And you know what? He's right. He's absolutely right. Because the ancient Greeks could do things that we cannot do in the modern age. They could memorize things. They could store information in a way that we can't today because we've outsourced our brains to functional technologies like the written word. And so he's absolutely right. As Sophocles said, nothing enters the life of mortals without a curse, right? That when you have something as vast of a technology as the internet, there's going to be good sides and bad sides, right? And so, but overall, this is the price

of progress. And so what I'm fighting against, I think, is this general victimization culture that we have today, that everything is happening to me. There's nothing I can do about it. You see this ad nauseum when it comes to technology. Technology is melting my brain. Technology is the reason my kids are crazy. Technology is why they won't pay attention. Technology is all these things that are outside of me. That's the source of the problem, right? Wrong. Wrong. It turns out that these tools are just the latest moral panic. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner

read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep, and then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns, and then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to

rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page.

Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. It turns out that these tools are just the latest moral panic, just the latest iteration of why we're getting distracted. But the root cause of the problem, I think, is much more interesting and much more empowering than what I think most people want to believe. Most people want to be victims. They want the thing that I can't accomplish the things I need, I dream of, because something is keeping me from it, right? There's some kind of conspiratorial plot that's keeping me from having the life I want. But we all really know if we're honest with ourselves, it's because you're not doing what you need to do, right? If you went to the gym, you would have the kind of body you dream about. If you worked on your business, if you focused on your kids, if you were fully present with people, you would get the things

you want. So that to me, and by the way, I'm pointing the finger at myself more than anyone else, right? I wrote this book. There's got to be a personal story in there, right? Absolutely. It took me five years to write this book because I kept getting distracted. I'll tell you actually the inciting incident of why I decided to write this book. So I was with my daughter one afternoon. And this was several years back. Now she's a teenager, but I was with my daughter one afternoon. And we had this perfect day plan, just some daddy daughter time, right. And I remember we had this book of different activities that we could we could do together, just some things to bond together and make a paper airplane throwing contest, do a Sudoku puzzle. And one of the activities in the

book was to ask each other, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? That was the question in this book. And I remember that question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because in that moment, I thought it was a good time. Let me just take out my phone real quick. I just got to do this one thing, honey. And by the time I looked up for my device, she was gone. Because she had gotten a very clear message that I was sending that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And she went to go play with some toy outside. And so that's when I realized I had a problem with distraction. I had to reassess my relationship with distraction. And if I'm honest with you guys, it wasn't just with my daughter,

it was with my physical fitness. It was with my business. It was with many, many aspects of my life where despite knowing what to do, I didn't do it. And so that really was the genesis of why I decided to write this book. And when I read advice about this, but originally I didn't say I was going to write a book. I just wanted to solve this problem for myself. And so I read a bunch of books, every book I can get my hands on around this topic. And most of them basically said the same thing. It's all technology's fault. Stop using technology.

Well, that's a really easy thing for a tenured professor to say, but thanks, stupid. I can't do that because I get fired. Right. I can't stop using technology. It's like telling someone who's overweight, just stop eating food. Well, thanks, stupid. That's not very helpful, is it?

Right? So I wanted a better way. I wanted to understand why I wasn't doing what I said I was going to do so that I could finally become indistractable. And thankfully, it's changed my life in every conceivable way. I'm 45 years old.

I'm in the best shape of my life. I have a better relationship with my family than I've ever had. I'm more productive in my business than I ever have been before. Not because I have some special genes or gifts. It's that I simply do what I say I'm going to do. I love that.

I love that technology is certainly a requirement of modern life. Like if you want to have any degree of success, you basically have to use technology at some level in all realities. You can't get away from it altogether. But isn't environment management still a good strategy here? Like you can try to increase your willpower and your dedication and all these things kind of on the internal side. But then also environment matters. Like if you walked into your house and there's this big screen TVs everywhere with all your favorite shows on. And there's people hitting world record lifts and there's strippers everywhere. And if you walked into this most insane, high-stimulus environment, it would be hard to write a book in that environment.

You're just in the wrong place for that. As opposed to being in a cabin in the woods. If you're writing Walden in the woods, then you have no distractions whatsoever, no technology, no people around. Then you can sit down and be focused and do deep work, etc. Absolutely. And what you're describing is what we call external triggers, things in our outside environment that can shape our behavior. And it absolutely plays a role, but it's fairly obvious, right? We know that, right? If you're around a bunch of things that can take you off track, right? Like if you're on a diet, you know,

the first thing you need to do is clear your house of all the soda and very fattening food out of your cupboards because those external triggers are going to be very tempting for you. So I wanted to go a little deeper. And what I discovered was that the source of our distraction, the source of our distractions, only 10% of the time, and I didn't make this up, this is validated in several academic studies, that only 10% of the time that we get distracted is it because of what's called an external trigger. These are the things that are outside environment, right? So if you think about our technologies, this would be the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment that tells

us what to do next. Those are called external triggers. But again, they only account for 10% of our distractions. So should we do something about it? Absolutely. But it's only 10% of the problem. What's the other 90%? Turns out, 90% of the time that we get distracted, what academic studies show us is that 90% of the time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of us. It's not the external triggers. But rather, what we find is that 90% of our distractions begin from within. These are called internal triggers. 90% of the time that we go off track, we go off track because of a feeling, an uncomfortable emotional state, boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, stress. Turns out that distraction is nothing more than an unhealthy response to an emotional stimulus. So step one to becoming indistractable and none of the life hacks, none of the tips,

none of the tricks, none of the apps, none of that stuff will help you. If you first and foremost, don't understand and deal with and master the internal triggers or they will become your master. So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you will always find distraction unless you know how to deal with that distraction and use that discomfort, that emotional discomfort. What I discovered in my five years of research writing this book was that high performers, they feel the same internal triggers in every industry, whether it's sports, whether it's the arts, whether it's business, they high performers, people who are top of their game,

they also feel the same internal triggers that the rest of us do. They feel boredom, they feel anxiety, they feel stressed, they feel the same internal triggers. But the difference is that high performers will use that discomfort as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction. Whereas what most people do, people who just complain and moan about this problem, every time they feel bad, every time they feel bored, every time they feel stressed, every time they feel anxious, they look to escape that discomfort with distraction. They take a drink, they click on TV, they scroll social media, they do something to take their mind off the problem. So the first step to becoming indistractable has to be master the internal triggers or

they will master you. Yeah, that's really interesting. I have a good example that I think summarizes that point there where I've noticed that 90% of the time, if I end up on Instagram while I'm working, it's I'm working on a project. I get to a part where I'm not quite sure what to do next or i need to like contact somebody but then i know they're not going to get back to me you know soon enough to really finish the thing that i'm working on or i'm worried about something and then all of a sudden i'm just like on my fucking phone and i'm just like how do i get what am i

doing on here and i close it up close it up put it away it didn't ping me or ding me like there's no notifications i turned all that stuff off a long time ago. But I'm on it and I'm like, what am I doing on here? That's right. And that's completely common and normal. That's exactly right. 90% of the time we check our phones. It's not because of the ping or ding. So how much can we blame Mark Zuckerberg or the tech companies for doing this to us if the call is coming from inside the house?

It's our own emotion that drive us to escape the discomfort with one thing or another. Right. So to, to again, wrap up the point about the, the external triggers and the environment management piece. When I got a new phone about six weeks ago, I left all my social media on my old phone. So now I can consciously go get on social media anytime I want. My phone's in my closet. I can go, I can go get on there, post whatever I want, scroll, whatever, but it's a very conscious choice. I have to go in there and do it. I'm not at any random red light looking on Instagram. But to wrap up that point, so when I'm working and I get to that same point where I don't know what to do next or I have

that concern or whatever it is, instead of being on Instagram now, I'll notice that I'm in my living room and I'm like looking out the window. I start pacing and I'm like, oh, it's the same thing. I just replaced it. It's not Instagram. Now I'm pacing around my house worried. How come I'm not on my computer typing anymore? And I go, oh, fuck. It just means I got to a point where I was uncomfortable. So now recognizing that it's not social and it's the internal state that you're mentioning, I do a much better job. As I start to walk away from my computer, I go, no, no, no, no, no. And I turn my ass back around. I go back to the computer and I just sit there and try to work through the problem.

Yeah. I mean, this is a critical insight of understanding, okay, what is that preceding emotion? And a lot of us aren't comfortable or haven't built that muscle to actually recognize what is that preceding emotion. So verbalizing or even better writing down what is that sensation? Is it boredom? Is it stress? Is it anxiety? That's what creates that space between the stimulus and the response, right? The stimulus is that discomfort. The response is how do we escape that discomfort? The brain is a cognitive miser. The brain always wants to find the path of least resistance to ease that emotional discomfort. So whether it's clicking on something, whether it's taking a drink, whether it's reading the news, whatever it is, we take ourselves out of that emotional state that we don't like to feel. That's why we have emotions in the first place is to tell us, oh, this feels uncomfortable. Do something different. Do something else. And so the brain always wants to find the path of least resistance. So the fact that you've figured out, okay, that is the real

problem is I don't know how to deal with my discomfort in a healthy way that leads me towards traction rather than distraction. The fact that you can identify that is huge. Now, the reason that I keep harping on the fact that it's not the technology that's the problem, because it's exactly as you saw. If you say, you know, I did this to myself. I thought I read all these books out there by gurus who tell you and professors who tell you, Oh, social media is the problem. So I said, okay, I'll believe you. And I got rid of my phone. I got a flip phone. You're like, we used to have a 1990s. Remember one of those? Right. I got one of them. Oh, I don't know.

How long did you last? Well, I lasted for a while because I thought, okay, this would work. But then here's the thing. I had this flip phone that I started using. No apps, no internet. And then when I said, okay, now I'm going to start writing. I'm going to focus. Nothing's going to get in my way.

No distraction. Except there's that book on the shelf that I've been meaning to look at. Or let me just clean up my desk real quick. Or let me just take out the garbage. I would find stuff to take my mind off of the discomfort because that was the real problem. It wasn't the device. It was this emotional discomfort that I didn't know how to deal with. Yeah. Mine was that I just couldn't actually get to any locations without. Also true. I'm totally lost. I would love to dig into the

way people justify it to themselves because it's always interesting to me how people will let themselves off the hook. And there's like the cool saying of like the paralysis by analysis. But a lot of people will use that uncomfortable feeling and then frame it as if I'm smart because now I'm analyzing all of the options of things that I could be doing. And then I'm going to figure out the best way to do it. And then two hours later, they haven't gotten out of the couch. They haven't eaten correct. Is there any benefit to framing it certain ways? Is there like that justification of how people let themselves off the hook in the way that I do it certain ways? Is there like that justification of how people let themselves off the hook in the way that I do it as well?

This is what I call talking protein. Why do I call it talking protein? I love that. You know where I'm going with this, right? Yeah, totally. The two guys in the gym who are in the corner talking about, well, should we use whey protein isolate or pea protein?

And what about this brand? And what about that supplement? And meanwhile, they're not freaking exercising. They're not not freaking exercising. My neighbor came over to me the other day and he goes, what kind of amino acid should I take? And I go, okay, that's your problem, buddy. Your amino acid. Steak. That's the amino acid you should be taking. Just eat the steak and be fine with it. And go work out, like go lift something. But that's exactly right. And we see this a ton in the self-help space. I mean, you can actually, there are reported cases of people actually becoming addicted.

And I don't use that word lightly. Like an addiction is very different from a habit, but actually addicted to self-help. People just read more and more and more self-help. We see this a lot as opposed to actually doing what the self-help says to do, right? They just become, why? Because it's another escape. It's a detour to not feel what I don't want to feel. And so it's actually really important, I think, for all of us to understand the seat of human motivation. Not just why don't we do what we

say we're going to do, but why don't we do anything and everything? Have you ever wondered that? Why do we do things? What is the source of human motivation? Most people will tell you that motivation is about carrots and sticks, right? It's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. We now know that is not true. That is incorrect. That the reason we do anything and everything- Doesn't the Buddha disagree with that? His whole book was on carrots and sticks. The Buddha's brain. The Buddha's brain. That was like the main point of the Buddha's brain, if I remember correctly. Was it about carrots and sticks? Yeah.

That was – This is not a new concept. But that was like one of the beginning – one of the opening frameworks of the whole thing. I mean this has been around for a long time. Jeremy Bentham said this. Sigmund Freud said something like this. This is called the pleasure principle. This has been around for a very, very long time.

We now know because we can actually look inside the brain as the brain is doing various things and how it's processing information based on blood flow through fMRI studies. We now know that the brain is not motivated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but from a neurological perspective, everything we do, we do only for one reason, one thing. The only reason that we have any sense of motivation is the desire to escape discomfort. That's it. That's it. It's only one thing, that the carrot is the stick. Think about that. The carrot is the stick. It's the wanting, the lusting, the craving, the hunger, the desire to feel good that is itself psychologically destabilizing. So once you realize that fact,

that everything we do is about the pursuit of not pleasure, but the desire to escape discomfort, what you realize therefore is that time management is pain management. I'm going to say that again. Time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management because all human behavior is about the desire to escape discomfort. So this should be a huge light ball moment for people because most of us have not thought about this properly. We're always thinking about, well, how can I incentivize myself to do something? How do I make the reward more rewarding, right? How do I make the rewards pay off? And that sometimes can lead to these short-term rewards, but it doesn't tend to lead to long-term

change. It's only when we figure out how to reframe that discomfort as something that we look forward to, that's where we start seeing long-term behavior change. It's called re-imagining the trigger. So there's a dozen different techniques that I talk about just in step one. There's four key steps, but just in step one of mastering internal triggers, one of those key steps is to re-imagine how you perceive that discomfort in the first place. Yeah. I kind of want to make sure I'm understanding that when you say the pleasure is avoiding the discomfort, it's almost like the, if you were on vacation forever, at some point you hate vacation. You have to leave the beach because it's just so annoying

that there's no problems in your life to go solve metaphor is actually the modern world right there if you actually take a step back like if you talk to your grandparents certainly your great-grandparents about the kind of life we live that most of us listen to this but not everybody in the world right like let's not be naive here some people still live you know like people lived in the stone age but for the vast majority of people in the Western industrialized world, we are living in fantasy land. Our ancestors could not imagine a world where we don't have parasites in our bodies and that we have sufficient food to eat. And then we have these devices. I don't know, I'm in Chicago. I don't know where you are. We're talking with these magical video screens right now for free. It would blow people's

minds. But the price of all that progress, right? The fact that we have all these amazing tools and we can't stop moaning and complaining about them. And we say that they're so bad for us. The price of progress is learning how to use these tools appropriately. Yeah. It's interesting because I would say one of the like utopian worlds that I think about all the time is to go back in time where it's like, I want to be a farmer. I'll leave the suburbs. I'm going to get a big plot of land. We'll farm. We'll have like animals.

When it's like, no, you're at the vacation. You have a Publix right next to your house. You could literally walk there. The best food in the world is right there. And all you want to do is go dig holes and plant seeds. That's not that smart. You're leaving the vacation. You're already here. You already made it. Right. Right. That's exactly right.

Yeah. I'd like to hear some examples. So if you, if you feel that discomfort, you normally have your, your response of going to Instagram or whatever. Um, the discomfort you can't, you can't avoid discomfort. It's going back. Those emotions are just going to show up for you. Um, what kind of strategies do you have for managing the discomfort or accepting the discomfort or whatever? Um, you know, whatever, whatever path you have, like I'd love to hear some examples of how you deal with that. Sure, absolutely.

Just to reframe this, there's four key strategies. We're still on step one, mastering internal triggers. There's about a dozen different things that you can do that I talk about in the book just for step number one. I'll give you one technique that I use almost every single day. You're absolutely right, Doug. I think most people think, and I think

a lot of self-help people in this space try and promote is finding ways to avoid the discomfort, that the goal should be happiness, right? How many books do we see today with happy in the title that everything we somehow, if we're not happy all the time, that somehow we're broken, that we're deficient, that we need to go see a counselor. I just want to tell everybody that is bullshit, right? But if you think about it from an evolutionary basis, you are not designed or evolved, whichever way you want to look at it, to be happy all the time. That makes no sense. Think about it on an evolutionary perspective. Let's say we go back 200,000 years to the dawn of our species. And on

the Serengeti, we see a tribe of people who don't have the gene that we do for dissatisfaction. This tribe of people, they're always happy. They're always satisfied. They're always contented. And they live in perfect harmony, right? They're zenned out all the time. Let's say those people exist. And then our tribe, our ancestors, meet these people.

Okay? What happens next? I'll tell you exactly what happens next. Our ancestors, the ones that have persistent disquietude, the ones that are always anxious, the ones who want more, the ones that just like us never feel fully satisfied and happy. You know what would happen? Our ancestors would have killed them and eaten them. We would out-survive them. You want a species to always want more. So we need to stop looking at the pursuit of happiness as the ultimate goal, right?

The happiness isn't the goal. It's the pursuit of it that matters. It's that wanting more. You never actually reach that state of happiness. It's about being comfortable with the fact that the discomfort of wanting better is always what has made our species persist, right? This is what helped us get to the moon. It's what helps us develop new medicines. It's what helped us overturn despots. It's that disquietude, it's that perpetual wanting for better and more

that keeps us dissatisfied enough to work at making things better. So the first step is to realize that that discomfort that you have is a gift. It's a blessing. It's an ancestral inheritance that you have in your DNA. So let's not start looking at, oh, I don't feel good, or I don't want to do something, or I'm not motivated, or I'm not in the mood. That's how you're supposed to be, right? That is perfectly normal. That is steady state, right? So that's the first is to reframe that internal trigger. Now, let me give you some very practical steps, okay? So one technique that comes to us from acceptance and commitment therapy, this is called the 10-minute rule. And

the 10-minute rule says that, it acknowledges that you can pretty much delay anything for about 10 minutes, okay? Unless anybody, Unless there's some real underlying disorder, we can delay gratification for about 10 minutes. So here's how the 10-minute works for me. So I found that one of the most difficult things that I do in my profession is to write. And that sucks because I'm a professional author. I've been writing for well over a decade. It never becomes easy.

It never becomes a habit. It is always hard freaking work. When I'm writing all i want to do is check the news or scroll twitter or do some quote-unquote research to take my mind off of how hard it is to write instead here's what i do i when i feel that urge to get distracted i take out my phone and i i i tell her you who I'm talking about, on the phone. I'm not going to say her name because it's going to start on my phone. I say, set a timer for 10 minutes, and I put down my phone. And now I have a choice to make. For those 10 minutes, I can either get

back to the task at hand, so get back to writing, or I can do what's called surf the urge. Surfing the urge acknowledges that our emotion, that these internal triggers are like waves. They crest and then they subside. But that is not how most people think of emotions. When you feel a certain emotion, you think it's going to be there forever. If you're in an argument with your significant other and you're angry, you feel like you're always going to be angry. If you're bored, you feel like you're always going to be angry. If you're bored, you feel like you're always going to be bored. If you're lonely, you feel like you're always going to be lonely. But that isn't the truth. The truth is that emotions crest and they subside just like a wave. So your job is to surf that urge like a surfer on a surfboard. So what I'll do is for those 10 minutes, many times I'll

just close my eyes. I'll take a deep breath and I'll repeat a personal mantra. And my personal mantra, you can steal this, you can make up your own, doesn't matter. Have some kind of saying that you can use to remind yourself that feeling this way is not only normal, it's encouraged. Why? Because when I feel that discomfort that makes me want to get distracted from the task at hand, I tell myself, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. And just repeating that to myself just a few times allows me to get back at the task at hand. And sometimes I don't. Sometimes for 10 minutes, all I do is breathe and repeat that mantra. And then I let myself check email or social media or whatever. But what I'm doing is over time, that 10 minute rule becomes the 12 minute rule, becomes the 15 minute rule, becomes the 20 minute rule. And you are proving to yourself that lo and behold, you do have agency. You do have personal self-efficacy. You can do what you say you're going to do because, yeah, I can wait just 10 minutes to check email.

Can't I? Of course I can. And so over time, you're building that strength. You're building that muscle to prove to yourself that you're able to resist that immediate gratification. Yeah. I feel like I've talked about Seinfeld twice today now, but one of the things that I always liked about what his, his like method was, you have to go write a joke every day. You have to publish, like, it's so hard to hit the publish button to say, this is, I did this today. And just sitting there, like I still do not as much, but I used to write a ton and it can, you can sit there and just stare at a blank page for hours.

And you know, that's what professionals do. That's the difference between, this is what Steven Pressfield talks about a lot. The difference between a professional and amateur is that the amateur only works when they feel like it, right? When they feel inspired. The pro puts their butt in the seat and does the freaking work, whether they want to or not. It doesn't depend on feeling like it.

Because at the end of the day, again, all behavior is about a desire to escape discomfort. So that just means it's a feeling. That's all it is. Just a feeling. How do you not come across as a jerk when you sit down to somebody and say, look, I know you have feelings, but it's time that you get over them and just go do the work. We have an entire culture of people that are obsessed with the way that they feel, which

is going to really be the determining of, are they going to proceed? I feel like that's like all that it like, I'm special because I feel this way. When the truth is no one cares, you should have to go create some value before your opinion, before you earn your opinion. Right? No, there's, there's a lot to that. And I think even more, there's an entire industry of people who will give you a reason why you can't do something, right? An entire industry of people who will say because of this condition or that condition or this specification or this whatever, that's why you're not capable. That's why you can't. And of course, people eat it up because then they don't have to do the work. So I don't think it's necessarily our job to

change anyone. I didn't write the book for anyone except myself because I needed to change myself. So unless you're, you know, if you're a coach, if you're, if you're hired to do this different story, but I don't think it's your job necessarily. Like the best thing you can do, honestly, as an individual is to lead by example, right. I see this with parents all the time. There's a whole section in Indistractable about how to raise indistractable kids. I think if you have kids, it's the most important section in the book. Because if you think the world is distracting now, wait a few years. It's only going to become more distracting.

But I see this all the time with parents. And I've worked with hundreds, if not thousands at this point, who will tell me, you know, my kid is always on Fortnite or they're always on TikTok. And meanwhile, while the parent is telling me this, guess what they're doing? They've got their phone in their hand, they're checking email, or they're on Facebook as they're telling me this. Well, you can't do that. You can't be a hypocrite, right? The best thing you can do if you want indistractable kids, if you want to lead an indistractable organization, right? If you're in charge and you have people who work for you and you want them to be indistractable is to be indistractable yourself,

to lead by example. But if you are a coach, let's say you're in the fitness space and you coach others. Well, let me do the heavy lifting, right? You don't want to come off as a jerk and say, hey, I know what you need right now. That's why I wrote this book in large part is so that you have a reference. You can say, hey, look, this guy did over a decade of research on this topic. And there's 30 pages of citations to peer reviewed studies. This isn't just my personal methodology. This is research that has been done over decades. And so, you know, give them a copy.

That's going to make your life a lot easier. I love that. stare at a blank page or I got distracted and I didn't go to the gym and now I punish myself with something. Do those play into actually getting things done? Yeah. So step number one is about mastering the internal triggers. Your question dovetails very well into step two, which is making time for traction. So you notice that traction and distraction are opposites, right? Traction, distraction. Distraction is the opposite of traction. Both words end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, which reminds us that distraction is not something that happens to us, but it is an action that we ourselves take. Okay. So you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.

Okay. I'll say it again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a big empty calendar with nothing on it, right, you can't say you got distracted because what did you get distracted from? So part of the mentality we need to change is to go away from this very antiquated non-research based technique that we call to-do lists, right? How many of us use to-do lists? I used to use to-do lists and it turns out they're

terrible for your productivity. Did you know that? To-do lists are horrible for your personal productivity. Why? Because it's this mentality of being ruled by, well, I didn't finish these tasks. But here's the problem. When it comes to complex tasks, for easy tasks, maybe it doesn't apply as much, but for complex tasks, things that require consistent effort, you can't put that kind of stuff on a to-do list. Write a book. That doesn't go on a to-do list. Write a book is about consistent. Start a business. Get in shape. How many people have we't go on a to-do list. Write a book is about consistent. Start a business. Get in shape. How many people have we seen put on their to-do list, get in shape? So the problem is, there's many problems with to-do lists. But part of the problem is that there's too many exogenous factors when it comes to do something like make a presentation

or get in shape or write a book. There's too many steps to that to just put it on a to-do list. What you have to do, which is much better, is called timeboxing. Timeboxing is when we decide in advance what we're going to do and when we're going to do it. I mean down to the minute. Unless you're a child or retired, if you struggle with distraction, if you know you're capable of more, you have to start timeboxing your day. And the way you do this is by turning your values. Values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. You turn your values into time.

So on my schedule, it says time for exercise, time to be with my family, time to go on social media. It's in my schedule because now I know what is traction. Traction is anything that I planned in advance. Anything that's not that is distraction. So it's not about, did I finish the task? Did I check off a bunch of cute little boxes? Turns out that people who measure themselves, not by how many cute little boxes they checked off, but rather by this metric, which is, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? That is the only metric. It's not, did I finish? Okay. It's not, did I finish? It's, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction?

Why is that so important? Because when you have a complex task, right, work on your business, do sales calls, write a blog post, whatever it is, when you have a complex task, when you make it something that's just on your to-do list, and you have all those exogenous factors that you don't understand how long something is going to take you, it turns out that on average, a task will take you three times longer than you expect. That's the average, three times longer than you expect. Why? Because when you have something on your to-do list, you work on it for five minutes. You say, oh, I don't feel like doing that. Let me go check some email. Or you get a tap on the shoulder from one of your kids or your colleagues. And then you start doing that for five more minutes. And then you start doing a different task. And oh, yeah, what was it that I was working on? So you have no idea how long actually something takes you to do. Whereas when you say, okay, I've got a big presentation coming up. I'm going to spend 30 minutes, no more, no less working on that task. That's it. 30 minutes. I'm going to work

on that presentation. Now, when you measure yourself by that metric of, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? At the end of those 30 minutes, you say, okay, I worked for 30 minutes. 100% attention was focused. Now, how far did I get? I got through three slides out of 30. Terrific. That means I need 10 more time boxes to finish the entire task. So that's why this time box technique eats to-do lists for breakfast.

It's so much better. So you're kind of running, running your day like you're like a day of high school. Like you got one hour for social studies, you got one hour for math, but you're an entrepreneur or whoever you are. You're doing one hour for marketing, one hour for finance, one hour for working out that, that type of model. And when you look at Bill Gates, when you look at Elon Musk, when you look at, what's his name? Horowitz, Andreessen, Mark Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, all these guys, they use time boxing. They sit down in advance and they decide what they're going to do and when they're going to do it. Now, it's not, again, it's not about, did I finish the task? I get this question. I've heard, by the way, I've heard every single excuse in the book.

Nothing has stumped me yet on why you can't do this. You absolutely can. The most important thing is you don't change it in the day. Once you plan out your day, you don't change it, right? If you go off track, you just look at your calendar. What did I say I'm going to do? And you get back to that task, whether that's being with your kids, whether that's working on a big project, whether that's playing video games, it doesn't matter what you put on your schedule,

but it's scheduling time for what you say you're going to do according to your values. Do you find it works best to do this one day at a time or is this like a weekly rhythm? Yeah, great question. So you want to do it with as much time that you have foresight into how you will spend that time, meaning most people, about 80% of the people I've worked with over the years, myself included, we can plan out one work week ahead, one work week ahead, Monday through Friday. So every Sunday night, I sit down 8pm. That's my time on Sunday night. And I look at the week that just passed. And then I look at the week to come and I make small adjustments. Oh, I've got that

meeting coming in here. So that means I have to move something around. Okay. Now I've got my full five day work week for the week ahead. So it's something that takes me maybe 10, 15 minutes a week. And I've got my work week planned out for the week ahead. Some people, like for example, I work with some people in the healthcare field where they don't know what's on their agenda until they get to work that morning. No problem. They take 10 minutes. They plan out the day ahead as soon as they start their day. Some people it's the night before, right? It's as you want to plan out as much time as you have visibility into where you will likely spend your time. Now that doesn't mean you will always do everything on your schedule. There's still times from time to time

where I go off track. No problem. The idea here is that you're not a drill sergeant. You're a scientist. What is a scientist? What's the job of a scientist? A scientist makes a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and then makes changes in order to run the next experiment to discover something else. So what you're going to do is you're going to make that hypothesis of what would my ideal week look like? How much time would I spend with my family? How much time would I spend with my friends? How much time would I spend on doing focused work versus shallow work, right? Having all that time in your schedule planned for, and then looking at it and saying, where did I go off track? And then realizing that there's only

three reasons why you went off track. Every distraction only has one of three reasons. Either it was an internal trigger, right? Which we talked about earlier. So you need to have new tools in place to make sure that when you feel that discomfort, you know what to do with it. It could be an external trigger, something in your outside environment or a planning problem. Only three reasons for any and all distractions. So then you can look at the week ahead and say, okay, how can I make small adjustments, small tweaks to make myself more likely to do what I say I'm going to do? What are the other two that we're not going to have a time to get to because you got to go all the way back to Singapore? No problem. So we talked step number

one. We need more hours. We're not distracted. We only time blocked an hour. That was a problem. We're cutting it off at the end of the hour, no matter what. We're following his advice right now. We can do a follow-up episode. So strategy number one, just to repeat, master the internal triggers. That's the most important step. If you cannot master these internal triggers, none of the other tips and tricks will work. Okay? That's step number one. Number two is make time for traction.

This is where time boxing is so important, turning your values into time. Step number three is what Doug talked about earlier, hacking back the external triggers. Even though they only make about 10% of the cause of distraction, there's some very simple things we can do on our devices, on our computers. That's easy. That's kindergarten stuff. The much more sophisticated and much more impactful external triggers have to do with stupid meetings that we didn't need to attend. How many of us go to meetings that didn't need to be called? How many emails do we get every day that didn't need to be sent or replied to? What about our kids? We love our kids to death, but they can be a huge source of distraction. So what do we get every day that didn't need to be sent or replied to? What about our kids? We love our kids to death, but they can be a huge source of distraction.

So what do we do about all these external triggers? And then finally, the fourth step is to prevent distraction with pacts. A pact is a safeguard. It's a firewall against distraction. And it's the last step to becoming indistractable. So when you use these four strategies in concert, master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers and prevent distraction with packs. When you use those four steps in concert, anyone can become indistractable. Fantastic, man. This has been awesome. Where can people find you find all the books? Really enjoyed this.

Absolutely. Yeah, we're just having the tip of the iceberg here. And there's a lot more on my website near and far near is spelled like my first name and I are and far.com. Yeah. We're just tapping the tip of the iceberg here and there's a lot more on my website near and far. Near is spelled like my first name. N-I-R and far dot com. And if you go to indistractable dot com, there's actually a workbook there that you can get free. It's completely complimentary. We couldn't fit it to the final edition of the book, so we decided to give it out for free. And

that's at indistractable I-N the word distract A-B-L-E indistractable dot com. There it is. Doug Larson. Right on. I'm on Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. Nir, dude, I really enjoyed this. Like I said at the very beginning of the episode,

I enjoyed the book and I was excited to talk to you. And then I know you have another book called Hooked that I also want to read, which is more on the business side of things with making products and whatnot, which you're totally welcome to talk for 30 seconds about that if you'd like. But that is next on my list for sure. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And yeah, happy to talk

more about that next time as well. I love that. Human behavior is one of my all time favorite deep dives because we are some strange creatures. We sure are. There's a whole lot of us out here and we're all different. I enjoy now going out in public or like traveling is one of my it's not the greatest but when i'm stuck in the airport you just sit i feel like i'm at the zoo just watching people watching and they're all doing everything you just talked about it's like my one of my one of my weird little things when i'm stuck by myself around all the people to just sit there and observe. So endlessly fascinating how weird we are, right?

Exactly. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are barbell shrugged to barbell underscore shrugged and make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside rapid health optimization will receive. You can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.