Founder's Story - Focus Unlocked: Nir Eyal's Journey to Mastering Mind and Technology | S2: E23

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Today's episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, whom I LOVE their MAGNESIUM BREAKTHROUGH product that has helped me sleep better, stay focused and feel all around healthier. Check out their products at http://bioptimizers.com/danrobbins use promo code FOUNDERS for 10% off any order. Founder’s Story, Nir Eyal, the mastermind behind the revolutionary books "Hooked" and "Indistructible," shared insights that are transforming the way we engage with technology and manage our attention. Eyal, who embarked on a five-year journey to write "Indistructible," revealed his struggle with distraction and his mission to help others regain control of their time and focus. Diving deep into the psychology of distraction, Eyal debunked common misconceptions blaming technology for our wavering attention. He highlighted that distraction has been a human dilemma for over 2,500 years, proving it's not merely a modern-day tech issue but a fundamental human challenge. Our Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Founders Story, the podcast where trailblazing entrepreneurs share their extraordinary journeys, uncover the passion, grit, and vision that drive the world of business and innovation. Welcome back everyone to another episode of Founders Story. Today we have a very special guest, Nir Eyal. He's an incredible expert and author who's not only cracked the code on habit forming products with booked, but also taught us how to harness our attention with indistractable, something I need. And in this episode, we're going to unravel the four cornerstones of creating habits. We're going to challenge the stigma around ADHD, which a lot of us need to know and hear. And we're going to provide

actionable insights to beat procrastination. I know he's going to touch at burnout. We're going to talk about social media and the impact on society. But Nir, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Great to be here with you. I know I set up a lot there. And so we're going to dive in because Nir, I've heard you speak about a lot of different things on a lot of different topics. I love your new book. So let's dive into something that's surrounding that. And so how does somebody become indistractable?

Because me, I am the worst at it. Yeah, well, you're part of an illustrious club. I am also a member of this club of distractible people. In fact, the book took me five years to write because I kept getting distracted. I wrote the book for me. I mean, look, I'm thrilled that it sold half a million copies and counting, that it won all kinds of awards and that it's helping so many people. But really, at the end of the day, I wrote the book in distractible because I needed it more than anyone. And so what I did was really start from bare bones, really tried to understand what is this

phenomenon of distraction. One of the things I learned was that this is not a new problem that, you know, we tend to blame our devices. We tend to blame the internet, social media, it's our phones, it's all this stuff outside of us. It turns out that this is not a new problem, that people have been struggling with distraction for at least the past 2,500 years. Plato, the Greek philosopher, was quoted as talking about akrasia in the Greek, the tendency to do things against our better interest. So if people have been complaining about distraction for 2,500 years, the source of the problem can't be our devices. And so frankly, I just got sick of these tenured professors telling the rest of us to just stop checking social media, stop using

email, as if everybody can do that. Yeah, if you're a tenured professor, you can afford not to get fired. But the rest of us, if we stop checking email and stop using social media, we're going to get fired, right? We're not going to have a career. And so what I want to do is to really start from bare bones, really from the basics of what is distraction. Why don't we do what we say we're going to do despite knowing it, right? The problem these days is not that we don't know what to do. We all know what to do. If you need to get in shape, you exercise, you eat right. Does anybody really need to buy another exercise, a diet book to tell you that if you want to have a better career, you have to do the work that other people don't want to do. If you want to have a better relationship, you have to be fully

present with the people you love. We know this stuff. And frankly, if you don't know the answer to something, just Google it. We have all the information at our fingertips. What we don't know how to do is how do we stop getting in our own way? How do we stop getting distracted? So that's why I really wanted to focus on the deeper psychology of why we get distracted. And what I discovered was that the reason we get distracted is much bigger and much more empowering than just saying, well, stop using your devices. It's all technology fault. And much more empowering than in fact, we have way more power than most people think to fight distraction and make sure

that we use these technologies as opposed to letting these technologies use us. Well, thank you. I appreciate that because I thought it was just me. I thought I have like some issue because there's so many things happening. And if Plato had the issue, I can only imagine with all these added technologies. You and if plato had the issue i can only imagine with all these yeah you're human that's the issue you're human and in fact if

we think about it you're an incredibly fortunate human because for 200 000 years of human history the only people who got distracted were the people who had time to not worry about their next meal time to worry about whether their kids were gonna to get eaten by a tiger, right? So for the vast majority of human history, most people never had the luxury of being distracted. It's only the fact that we live in such a prosperous age where we have so many good things that we have this high class problem of, oh, I like to use my phone a lot because it's so user-friendly. I like to watch Netflix because it's so entertaining. So the solution can't be blaming it on our technologies. The price of progress, the price of living in a world with so many good things in it is learning how to deal

with these things. The good news is we have way more power than we think if we learn this new skill set of becoming indistractable. So with the ability now that it seems like AI is going to be able to do a lot of things for us, that might give us even more time, the luxury of more time. So how do you see that playing out? So it's a double-edged sword. So I think you're absolutely right. I think AI is going to enable us to have more time. That's what technological progress always does.

In the history of humankind, it shortens the work to get a particular result. That's the definition of technological advancement. So we can expect to have even more leisure time. The average American today watches five hours of television on average, and yet we all feel so hurried and so rushed as if we'd never have enough time. Well, what the heck are we doing? We're spending a lot of time wasting our lives away. And so my goal here is to not tell people necessarily what to do. You know, I don't mean to make it sound pejorative. If you want to watch TV all day or play video games or scroll social media, if that's what you want to do with your time and your attention in your life, go for it. It's not up to me or anyone else to tell you what to do. My goal is to help

you live up to your full potential as you see fit. So whatever it is you want to do, what I'm trying to prevent is for you will like i used to not do uh or maybe you're not spending quality time with your family or maybe you're not focused at work all of these problems are in fact solvable it's just a skill set like any other skill set and i think actually it's the most important skill of the century because with the dawn of ai with the revolution in virtual reality and augmented reality and all the crap that's happening in reality reality, the world is becoming a more our kids, there will be a real bifurcation. We are going to have people in the world who allow their time and their attention and their lives to be controlled and manipulated by others. And people who stand up and say, no, I am indistractable. I decide how I will spend my time and attention in my life because I have this skill set. So let's talk about younger generations. Gen Z, I hear a lot of talk about burnout i think the four hour work week is really becoming something that they want where older generations it was like work hard work your

butt off forever and then retire what do you think about this whole company's changing to like a four four day work week less hours i don't know maybe even a three day work week, less hours, I don't know, maybe even a three-day work week, and then people saying these generations are lazy. How do you feel about that? Well, every generation has been called lazy. I mean, literally, the ancient Romans, they're writing about how this generation of Romans is the worst, and they're all lazy, and every generation has this moral panic. When I was a kid, the moral panic was around television, and before that, it was Dungeons and Dragons. And before that, it was rap music. And before that, it was the radio. I mean, literally every generation freaks out about the kids these days. So this is absolutely nothing new. I think when it comes to this phenomenon of burnout, the good news is that we know what... We will return to our show shortly. But first, let's talk about today's sponsor, Magnesium Breakthrough by BioOptimizers.

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And make sure you use the code FOUNDERS, F-O-U-N-D-E-R-S, FOUNDERS, and you get your 10% off. So check out BioOptimizers.com to learn more. And back to the show. you do that's not true it's not what you do it's the environment you do it in namely if you have a work condition where you have high expectations coupled with low control okay high expectations coupled with low control if you have high expectations and high control no problem people rise to the occasion it's when they lack agency it's when they lack control that's when it's psychologically destabilizing that's when people lack agency. It's when they lack control. That's when it's psychologically destabilizing. That's when people tend to have higher rates of anxiety disorder, depression, and eventually burnout. So really it's about setting up a climate, the workplace environment.

It's not about the task you do, right? You can be a very happy mortician and you can be a miserable, I don't know what's the job, a clown or something based on how much time, how much control and agency you have over your role. That's amazing. So let's dive into ADHD. I've heard some ways that you feel about ADHD. And it really reminded me of a psychologist once told me to not let my diagnosis define me. And they said, you can get over it. You don't have to say you are this for the rest of your life. And I don't know if you've called this undiagnosable. I think I may have heard you say that before, but how do you feel about this whole phenomenon around? I know the United States has a significantly higher diagnosis rate of ADHD than let's say Europe.

How do you feel about all this around ADHD? Yeah. So, um, indistractable was not written specifically for people with ADHD, but many ADHD coaches and therapists use indistractable, uh, to help people overcome this disorder. Now I will say, I think ADHD is real, uh, which is, which is somewhat controversial. There are people who don't believe it's real. I'm not one of those people. I do believe it is real, but I think ADHD is real, which is somewhat controversial. There are people who don't believe it's real. I'm not one of those people. I do believe it is real, but I think it is way overdiagnosed and way overmedicated. And part of why that happens is because when you walk into a clinician and you list a certain number of your ailments or symptoms, is the word I'm looking for, you list your symptoms,

there's a 99% chance you're going to walk out of that clinician's office with a diagnosis. There's really no check and balance for you not to get a diagnosis because these things, you can't take an x-ray for ADHD. There's no blood test for ADHD. It's how you do on a battery of questions. And so if you have those symptoms, you're probably going to get a diagnosis. Now, that's all fine and dandy. There's no harm there, except when we talk about the fact that schools since about 2008, 2009, many schools have an economic incentive to diagnose children. Because, you know, in many states where teachers are compensated based on their students' performance, children who have a diagnosis are excluded from those metrics. So it's much easier to say Johnny has a problem than, you know what, we need to give Johnny more attention.

And so my advice here is very simple, very simple mantra. Skills before pills. Skills before pills skills before pills before you take the medication okay which all medication has side effects before you put medication into your children's bodies for God's sakes teach them the skills first now if teaching them the skills doesn't work okay let's go to step two which may include medication but you know because we have such a shortage in quality practitioners, they're so hard-pressed that they just diagnose and medicate as opposed to first stopping and saying, okay, wait a minute, what are some fundamental skills that anyone can learn, ADHD or not, right?

How do we identify internal triggers, the emotions that drive us towards distraction? That is the number one cause of distraction. It's not the pings, stings, and rings. It's the fact that we don't know how to deal with discomfort, boredom, loneliness, fatigue, anxiety. That is a skill because distraction is always an emotion regulation problem. So how do we expect kids? How do we expect ourselves? I never took a course on how to manage boredom or loneliness or indecisiveness or stress or anxiety. We're just expected to know. No, whether you have ADHD or not, you need to learn this skill because almost all distraction, 90% of distraction begins from within. It's a

response to an internal trigger. So that's step number one. Step number two, make time for traction. You have no right, none of us do, including myself, has a right to say you got distracted unless you know what it distracted you from. How can you get distracted from something if you don't know what you got distracted from? So what does that mean? It means we need to make time for traction. We need to plan our day. If you can't look at your calendar and say, what is traction? What did I want to do with my time? You can't say you got distracted because what the hell did you get distracted from? You've got to plan your time. Step number three, hack back the external triggers. This is where

we remove all the pings, dings, and rings in our environment. It takes a few minutes. Most people don't do it. And so then they complain about getting distracted. Remember what Pueblo Coelho said? He said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So if you constantly get distracted by the same things, oh, how many times are we going to blame email and Facebook and the news and Twitter and our kids? How many times do we blame these things before we say enough? I'm going to do something about it today so I don't get distracted about it from it tomorrow. And then finally, the fourth and final step, prevent distraction with pacts, which is where we erect a firewall

against distraction. And I'm telling you, ADHD or not, by following these four basic strategies, anyone can become indistractable. So if you were in charge of, let's say, the high school system in the U.S. or the colleges, and they came to you and said, look, we want to know one or two things that we should teach every student. What would you say is so important right now that every high school student to college student needs to know? Yeah, I mean, this is the skill of the century. Look, you cannot

absorb information that these schools are trying to pump into our kids heads you can't absorb knowledge and turn it into wisdom without the ability to focus you don't have much of a life you're just guided by what other people want from you all day long as opposed to what really is important to you so teaching kids how to become indistractable and there's a whole section in the book i think it's the a whole section in the book. I think it's the most important section of the book. I have a teenage daughter. And this is the scale of the century.

The kids who will turn into adults that lead us into the future, they will be indistractable people. And everybody else is just going to be led along because they're going to be beholden to whatever the media pumps out and tells them to do. I hope that people learn about this. I hope that people read the book because it is a problem and I can even see it just becoming worse. I know technology is not the reason, but if we're wearing glasses, I can only imagine we got these glasses on. And as I'm talking to you, my glasses are telling me all these things, showing me emails, showing me texts, maybe even telling me the weather. And I'm trying to pay attention to you my glasses are telling me all these things showing me emails show me texts maybe even telling me the the weather and i'm trying to pay attention to you do you see this becoming a thing with all

these vr glasses i know you're talking that technology is not the cause or reason for everything but how do you see this playing out with you know with how with everything becoming more of like a wearable well have you ever been into a cockpit in an airplane? Yes, a lot of buttons. I've heard that recently, one of the best skills that people can have is dealing with these triggers dealing with these things going forward in the future. Before a few years ago, I don't even remember people using the word trigger. Now, I feel like the word trigger is used like 10 times a day. How do you feel that? Or what do you feel has changed since the pandemic? And since it's seen, you know, everyone went through basically like a PTSD type moment. And I think

we're still trying to process what's even happened the last four years. What do you think has changed since then? Well, definitely a lot has changed since the pandemic. I mean, I think one thing that is not helpful is that we are medicalizing a lot of stuff, right? When I use the word trigger, I'm not using in the sense of trigger warnings. I mean, I don't believe in trigger warnings. In fact, it turns out that they're actively harmful to give people trigger warnings. What I'm saying is that the onus is not on the person giving the information to say, oh, this might make you feel bad. The onus is on you on how you interpret that information, right? So what's the Buddha saying? Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. And so it's really about understanding the difference

between an emotion. An emotion is a physiological response, right? The confluence of, you know, feeling a pit in your stomach or feeling your heartbeat increase. But a feeling is our psychological interpretation of those physiological responses. So the same thing that makes somebody feel excited, right? A racing heart and that pit in your stomach, butterflies. The same thing that might feel someone that might, one person, a high performer might feel, oh my gosh, this is good. This is telling my body that it's preparing to perform. Someone else can interpret it as, oh, this is anxiety disorder. There's something wrong with me. I shouldn't be feeling this way. So it's really about reshaping, re-imagining our triggers so that they serve us as opposed to us serving them.

That reminds me of most entrepreneurs and business owners. You know, you could say that most people that are, in my opinion, entrepreneurs have, they got to be a little bit crazy, right? Giving up the comfortable life, paycheck, you know, to basically maybe make nothing and work 10 times more. So knowing all this stuff, if somebody is like, you know what, I'm going to go, I'm going to quit my nine to five corporate job. I want to be a business owner. What would you tell them that they should expect or they should know before diving in when it relates to the things that we're talking about today?

Absolutely. And look, this is my third company now. I'm on my third career, so to speak. I sold two companies before I became a professional author and speaker. And so I will give you the best advice I could possibly give, which is don't do it for the money. If you want to become an entrepreneur to get rich and go public and list your company, you're just bad at math. You're just not looking at the odds appropriately. The right reason to start a company is not to get rich. The right reason to start a company

is because you can't do anything else. Because you have this burning desire, this fire in your belly, that you have an idea for a product or service that needs to exist in the world, that you want to create. Because frankly, you know, and I'm talking, I realize I'm talking to the privileged here, right? I'm talking about the people who

could get a job many people, most people on the face of the earth are still just happy to have any kind of job to pay the bills and feed their families, right. But if you're the kind of person who's college educated, and you have the opportunity to even consider being an entrepreneur versus getting a job, don't do it just for the money. Because frankly, getting a job is a better way to make a living and feed your family. It's if you have a desire to see something in the world that doesn't exist, that you want to create for yourself,

you believe this type of service or product needs to exist in the world, that's when you should create, that's when you should become an entrepreneur. Because if that's your true motivation is to build something you want to see in the world, you can't fail. You can't fail. Because even if your business doesn't succeed financially, even if you don't go public, you built something that you yourself want. And this is one of the best life hacks in business is to build something that you know at least somebody wants. The reason that most new business ideas fail is because they didn't find product market fit nobody wanted what they made or not enough people wanted what they made but

if you build a product for yourself you are looking to build something that you know somebody wants somebody like you and there's probably other people out there like you so if you look at the profile the people who started you know Zuckerberg at Facebook if you look at the. So if you look at the profile, the people who started, you know, Zuckerberg at Facebook, if you look at the Twitter guys, if you look at the Google guys, if you look at Apple, if you look at all these world changing products, Amazon, they were all started by founders who wanted to build something for themselves first and foremost, and then it became a business. I love that. Solving a problem, having a mission, product market fit. These have been all incredible near. So if people want to get in touch with you they want to buy your book they want to find out more information

how can they do so sure thanks so my website is called near and far.com near and far but near is spelled my first name so n-i-r and far.com and my most recent book is called indistractable how to control your attention and choose your life well Well, I hope everyone, I know you sold over half a million books. I hope you get to like 10 million books. So 10 million people can be less distracted, can be more focused, can get more done. I mean, create more in this world, more better things in this world that the world needs and solve many more problems. But Nir, it's been really amazing having you here. We have a connection going back to Altamont Springs. I know we were joking about it before, which is hilarious. The fact that you've been there and lived there and I did too, it's quite funny. But thank you so much for being here today on Founders Story.

We have a mission to impact 100 million people in our lifetime. And so thank you for being here and adding to that. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for tuning in to Founders Story. Keep exploring, keep dreaming, and join us next time for more inspiring entrepreneurial journeys.