Susan Friedmann [00:00:54]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Nir Eyal. Nir specializes in the psychology of technology and business, known for his best-selling books "Hooked" and "Indestructible," which won him the 2019 Outstanding Works of Literature Award. Nir has taught at Stanford and cofounded multiple companies. His work focuses on creating habit-forming products and managing distractions. His insights have been featured in major publications such as Time Magazine, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, and many, many more, All the way from Singapore,
Nir, welcome to the show, and I'm literally just over the moon to have you as this week's guest expert and mentor.
Nir Eyal [00:02:04]:
Well, I am so thrilled and honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Susan Friedmann [00:02:08]:
You and I were discussing just before we went on the air, and the 2 main books that you've written, and I know you've written so many more other things, but the 2 that stand out are Hooked and Indistractable. As I was mentioning, our listeners, primarily nonfiction authors, first time authors, and they're struggling. They're struggling often with marketing. They're struggling with the many distractions that are out there in the marketplace. I'm just gonna throw this net wide and let's see where it goes. But what advice would you give an author in that situation?
Nir Eyal [00:02:55]:
Wow. That's a big question. I know. I was like, okay. Let me Where do we start?
Susan Friedmann [00:03:01]:
I knew you could handle it.
Nir Eyal [00:03:04]:
Well, I would say there's 2 phases in my career, at least. So I'll start with saying that, you know, your mileage might vary. So all advice is autobiographical. So here's kinda my story. I found that my career to date has really been in 2 phases. The first phase was spent in anonymity, that nobody knew who I was or what I was writing about. And in many ways, I enjoyed that anonymity because I didn't have any expectations around my writing. I remember when I first started, I had a few dozen blog subscribers, friends and family, and I was thrilled that they were reading my blog post.
Nir Eyal [00:03:37]:
Then I got a few 100, then a few 1,000, and then I I self published my first book, Hooked. I just put it in as a PDF, and I put it up on Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing, and sold it on Amazon. And then it started getting a few reviews, then it got more reviews, then I got a 100 reviews. And then I got a call from an agent saying, hey. I really like your book. I see it's doing really well on Amazon. Why did you self publish? Let's go sell this for real. So I said, oh, okay.
Nir Eyal [00:04:00]:
Interesting. And so that was really how my author career started. I didn't plan it at all. Actually, the reason I started writing as more than just a a hobby was when I sold my last company, I just needed a break. I was working really hard in this startup and, I had a friend who just said, you know, do what you would do if money was no object. She asked me that classic question. What would you do if money was no object? And I thought for a little bit, I thought, you know, if money was no object, I would read and write. Right? I would just learn for a living.
Nir Eyal [00:04:30]:
Wouldn't that be so fun to just take a topic you really wanna dive into and just get your self-made solo PhD in that topic? I couldn't think of anything better. And so that's what I started doing. I just started blogging about this topic. And in that phase of my career, it was really a joy. I would wake up at 4 in the morning with an idea to write, and I could, you know, go to my kitchen and take out my laptop on on my kitchen table and just write down a few thoughts and then post it immediately to my blog. And I it didn't really matter who read it. I think many times authors are so set on the end destination that they forget about the joy in the process. And so one of my mantras to never lose that spark that sustains me as an author is it's always follow your creativity.
Nir Eyal [00:05:13]:
Right? Follow that creativity. Follow that curiosity that drives you forward. What is the answer to the question you want to know? And specifically speaking to nonfiction authors, you know, my MO has always been to follow the question I want the answer to. And it has to be a problem I'm facing in my own life. So when I have a problem in my life and, frankly, I have endless fodder to write about because there's always a new problem, typically, I'll talk to my wife about the problem, maybe I'll talk to some friends about the problem. And if I can't quite figure out the answer by that point, I'll read books about the topic. And 9 times out of 10, somebody else has already written a book about this problem, and there I have my answer. But every once in a while, every few years, I read all the books I can on a topic and I'm still not satisfied with the answer.
Nir Eyal [00:05:56]:
And so that's when I feel like I have to write a book about it because none of the other books just solve the problem for me. And so that kinda leads me into the second half of my career. The first half of my career was until Hooked was published, until my first book was published. And then it just started doing very, very well. And then I started entering the second phase of my career where because I got busy, because I now I had speaking engagements and I had consulting work and I had investment opportunities, now I got so busy with all these other things that were blessings, were fantastic, but they all took me away from the thing that made me successful in the first place, which was the research and the writing. That's when I entered in the 2nd phase of my career where now I wasn't anonymous anymore. Now I was somebody that people were calling and I was busy. And it, in a way, started to extinguish that joy of following my curiosity and following my creativity.
Nir Eyal [00:06:46]:
That actually became the opportunity for my second book because there was this moment in my life where I remember I was with my daughter one afternoon, and we had some daddy daughter time, some time to just be together. And we had this book of activities that dads and daughters could do together. And one of the activities in this book was to answer this question, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because in that moment, for whatever reason, I just thought I'd look at my phone for one quick sec. Let me just do this one thing on my device. And by the time I looked up for my phone, my daughter was gone because I was sending her a very clear message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was, and she left the room to play with some toy outside. It was because I got busy that I got distracted from the thing that made me successful in the first place, which is why I wrote my second book, Indistractable. One of my mentors, Gretchen Rubin, who's also a fantastic author, she's wonderful, she told me research is me search.
Nir Eyal [00:07:43]:
And so that's been very much what drives me as an author is researching my own problems. And I think in many ways, that is an underutilized hack that if you base your self worth, if you're trying to judge yourself on commercial success as a nonfiction author, you're just bad at math. Right? You just don't understand the odds are way stacked against you. What is it? 95% of nonfiction books never sell over 5,000 copies? 250 copies. Would 95% never sell more than 250 copies? Is that right? I mean, it's staggering. It's abysmal. Right? So you just have to be really, really bad at math. So saying to yourself, oh, I wanna be a bestseller.
I wanna sell a 1000000 copies. I mean, that that's getting struck by lightning. It's just so, so rare. So that cannot be the right reason to write a nonfiction book. The right reason to write a nonfiction book is that you are so entranced by this topic, you are so pulled by the unending desire to answer the damn question you can't get out of your head. That's the right reason to write a nonfiction book. Because even if it fails commercially, even if nobody buys it, you will have written the book for one very important person, and that is you. That I wanted the answer to my question.
Nir Eyal [00:08:57]:
In both my books, the subtitles are how to's, how to build habit forming products. That was the driving question. How to control your attention and choose your life. That's how to become indestructible. And that answer is what led me to keep following my curiosity. That's what drove me. And so even if nobody else bought the book, it didn't matter because it's frankly, I was writing for me.
Susan Friedmann [00:09:17]:
Woah. Amazing. I mean, just that alone, listeners, you've gotta listen to it again because there were some nuggets of wisdom there. You're looking at many different aspects here, and I think there was sort of the 2 books, the habits and the psychology that's involved here, especially in the Indestructible. Talk to us about the idea. You talk about mastering internal triggers. Things like boredom that really take us away and distract us from what we need to do. Sometimes I think, how can I do this? I'm looking for some excitement somewhere else, but not in what I'm doing.
Nir Eyal [00:10:06]:
Yeah. So let me back up just a bit to talk about what distraction really is. So, and this is a problem that I don't know an author who doesn't struggle with distraction. It is part of the job description is that we always feel like we're not putting out enough, you know, new content. We always feel like we could be doing more. Somehow we know what we need to do. We need to just sit down and write, and yet somehow we're doing everything but that thing. This is a problem I faced.
Nir Eyal [00:10:29]:
You know, I I faced it with my family. I faced it in my profession. I faced it, when I would say I was going to exercise or eat right, but I didn't and I wouldn't. And despite knowing what to do, I didn't do it. And so to me, that was a fascinating question. And by the way, it's not a new question. In fact, Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. If Plato was talking about this 25 100 years before the Internet, this can't be a problem caused by our technology.
Nir Eyal [00:10:56]:
This is a very old problem. It's part of the human condition is that despite knowing what to do, we don't do it. I want to answer for myself why. Why is that? And I very quickly realized that it's not the technology. It's not Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat. Those are just the tools. Those are the symptoms. They're not the cause, the root cause of the problem.
Nir Eyal [00:11:15]:
So let's talk about the root cause of the problem. Let's start with what is distraction. If you ask most people, what is the opposite of distraction, they'll tell you it's focus. Right? I don't wanna be distracted. I wanna be focused. But that's not actually true. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction.
Nir Eyal [00:11:37]:
Of course, it is. It's opposites, traction and distraction. Both words come from the same Latin root, trihare, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letter word, a c t I o n, that spells action, reminding us that traction is an action that you take that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Any act of traction is anything that you said you were going to do. That is an act of traction. Conversely, distraction is any action that you take that pulls you towards something that you did not say you were going to do. Right? Moves you further away from your values, further away from your goals, further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. Now you can think of kind of a number line on the left and the right.
Nir Eyal [00:12:20]:
You've got traction and you've got distraction. Now I want you to imagine a horizontal line, 2 arrows pointing, bisecting that, horizontal line, 2 vertical arrows pointing inside, and this represents external triggers and internal triggers. External triggers, these are the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all the things in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction. Now, that's what people tend to blame. Right? They tend to blame their phone. They tend to blame the news. They tend to blame Twitter. They blame their kids.
They blame their boss. They blame all these things outside of themselves. Now that is a source of distraction, but studies find it only accounts for 10% of your distractions. Did you know that? 10% of the time you check your phone, is it because of a ping, ding, or ring. What's the other 90%? The other 90% of the time that you check your phone, that you get distracted, 90% of the time, it's not because of what's happening outside of us. It's because of what's happening inside of us. This is called an internal trigger. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape.
Nir Eyal [00:13:27]:
Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, anxiety, uncertainty, these uncomfortable emotional sensations that we look to escape with some kind of distraction, to take our mind off of that feeling. Whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, we will always find a way to take our mind off that problem, off that uncomfortable emotional state, unless we get to the root cause of the issue. That's what the first step to becoming indestructible is all about. It's about mastering those internal triggers, or they will become your master.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:00]:
Have you got any tips on that?
Nir Eyal [00:14:02]:
Absolutely. Yeah. So there's dozens, actually. This is what the book Indistractable is all about. It's basically around putting strategies in place for these four points of the compass. Right? So we talk about traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers. Step number 1 is master internal triggers. Have tools in your toolkit ready to go so that when you feel that discomfort, you know what to do with it.
Nir Eyal [00:14:22]:
And I'll get back to that in just a second. The next step is to make time for attraction. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say it again. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a blank, white, empty calendar with nothing on it, And that's always the days that, you know, as an author before I wrote this book, I said, oh, I've got nothing planned today. I'm gonna write all day. I'm gonna be so productive.
Nir Eyal [00:14:48]:
I'm gonna finish that chapter. It's gonna be fantastic. And, of course, those are my least productive days. Right? Because the worst thing you can look at is a blank page and a blank calendar. We need constraints. In order to do our best work, we need constraints Starting with, how are you going to spend your time? So if you don't have something in your calendar that is traction, you cannot say you got distracted, but you can't have distraction without traction. The 3rd step is to hack back the external trigger. So this is where we take care of all the pings, dings, and rings, not only on our devices.
Nir Eyal [00:15:17]:
What about stupid emails that we didn't need to send or read, meetings we didn't need to attend? Those are the kind of distractions that we don't think about. We think of them as work related tasks, but they can be just as much, if not more of a distraction because we don't even realize that we're being taken off track. Right? Because they trick us into prioritizing the urgent and the easy work at the expense of the hard and important work we have to do to move our lives and careers forward. So how do we hack back those external triggers? And then finally, the last step is to prevent distraction with PACT. A PACT is what we call a pre commitment device. It's when we decide in advance what we will do when distraction rears its ugly head. So it's the last line of defense. It's the firewall against distraction.
Nir Eyal [00:16:00]:
And if you do one thing in these four strategies, just one small act, and I give dozens throughout the book, anybody can become indistractable. So let's dive into step one. Let me give you some very practical tips. And there are over a dozen different things you can do just in this first step of mastering these internal triggers, but I'll give you just one I use almost every single day. And this is called the 10 minute rule. I didn't invent it. It's been around for decades from what's called acceptance and commitment therapy. The 10 minute rule acknowledges that our sensations, our emotions, our feelings, these are fleeting.
Nir Eyal [00:16:33]:
But, of course, that's not what we think in the moment. When we experience boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, when we feel these uncomfortable sensations, our brain tricks us into distraction because we think we're always gonna feel that way. This writing isn't going very well. I must have writer's block. Let me just go do some quote unquote research for a minute. I'm guessing everybody listening right now is guilty of this. I know I certainly am or used to be. What do you do when your brain is trying to trick you into doing something that is not what you said you were going to do? So, what acceptance of commitment therapy acknowledges is that these sensations are fleeting, and you don't control your emotions.
Nir Eyal [00:17:12]:
You should know that you don't control your emotions any more than you might control the urge to sneeze? If you feel the urge to sneeze, you've already felt it. You can't control the urge to sneeze. All you can control is how you will respond to that urge, hence the term responsibility. So when you feel the urge to sneeze, do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick? No. You take out a tissue and you cover your face because that's a responsible thing to do. The same goes for these internal triggers. There's no rule that says you have to act on everything you feel. Right? If you feel bored, if you feel lonely, if you feel anxious, so what? That's just a signal.
Nir Eyal [00:17:50]:
It's just an emotion. The feeling is the psychological interpretation of that physiological response. There's a big difference between an emotion and a feeling. An emotion is physiological, a feeling is psychological, and you can interpret that emotion any way you choose. Rather than saying, I'm bored. This is hard. This is lonely. Whatever the case might be, we have to train ourselves to have tools in our toolkit so that when we feel that emotional discomfort, we don't look to escape it with distraction, but rather what high performers in every industry, especially when it comes to the arts, high performers relish those internal triggers.
Nir Eyal [00:18:28]:
They learn to welcome that discomfort, and they use it as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction rather than what most people do is try and escape it with distraction. So, okay, enough. How do we do this? What do we do? Give me a tip. The tip is to use what's called the 10 minute rule because, again, these emotions are fleeting. But when I'm writing, and this happens every day, listen, I sold over a 1000000 copies, I've published thousands of articles by now over the past decade of being a professional author, and every time I write, it is hard freaking work. All I wanna do when I'm writing is to go check the news or let me, check email or or let me do some research, Everything but the act of the actual writing, it never gets easier. But what's gotten better, what I've trained myself to do is to now have a process in place. I know those ugly internal triggers are going to rear their ugly head.
I expect them. And what I do now, as opposed to trying to escape them with distraction, I allow myself to use the 10 minute rule. The 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, whether it's checking email when you shouldn't, whether it's eating that chocolate cake, if you're, you know, on a diet, if you're trying to quit smoking, you can give in to whatever that distraction is. Doesn't matter. You can give into it. You're a grown adult. You can do whatever you want, but not right now. You can give into it in 10 minutes.
Nir Eyal [00:19:52]:
That's why it's called the 10 minute rule. And you can resist pretty much anything for just 10 minutes. And so your choice for those 10 minutes what do you do for those 10 minutes? You have a choice to make. You give a fork in the road. You can either get back to the task at hand, get back to the writing, or you can do what's called surfing the urge. Surfing the urge acknowledges that if you can just hold your attention long enough to ride out that wave like a surfer on a surfboard, it will always pass. But, of course, that's not what we feel in the moment. We think we're always going to be bored, that you're always gonna feel anxious, that you're always gonna feel uncertain.
Nir Eyal [00:20:26]:
No. These sensations pass just like waves. What I do is for those 10 minutes, when I so I'll set a timer, I'll put my phone down, and then I typically, I'll repeat a mantra. Now my mantra, you can steal this, You can make up your own. My mantra is this. I take a deep breath, and I say to myself, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. I'm taking a positive view of those internal triggers.
Nir Eyal [00:20:53]:
What we find is that high performers, people who can crank out unbelievable amounts of new content, they can work for hours without distraction, They feel the same internal triggers everyone else does, but they interpret those internal triggers. They interpret the emotions differently. So I've chosen to tell myself it's not writer's block. I don't believe in writer's block. That feeling of I don't know what to do and this is boring and this is uncomfortable and it's not happening, it's not flowing. This is what it feels like to get better. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And then now I've reinterpreted that emotion as a positive feeling.
Nir Eyal [00:21:25]:
And if I can just do that, repeat that mantra for a few times, it literally takes me maybe 30 seconds, 45 seconds, I'll be back at work. And you know what? Every once in a while, maybe 1 out of a 100 times, for 10 minutes, I do nothing but repeat the mantra, and that's okay. And after 10 minutes, I can check YouTube or email or whatever. K? But that's 1 in a 100 times. Because what I've done over the years is to train myself to go from the 10 minute rule to the 12 minute rule to the 15 minute rule to the 20 minute rule. And so what you're doing most importantly here is that you're showing yourself you can do this. You can resist that distraction for just a few more minutes. That's where you regain your agency and control versus what most people do.
Nir Eyal [00:22:04]:
Oh, it's stupid social media. Oh, it's my email. Oh, it's my kids. Oh, somebody needs me. These tend not to be true. It's just your brain tricking you into thinking that somebody needs you or you have to go check or you have to go get distracted. No. You typically don't.
Nir Eyal [00:22:17]:
There's very, very few emergencies in your data that you actually have to respond to. What you're doing is responding to the feeling, the subjective interpretation of your emotion rather than an actual fact that needs to take you off track. So that's just one technique. Again, there's dozens of different techniques that I talk about in the book Indistractable, but that's one of the ones that I use probably every single day, to be honest.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:39]:
Wow. I'm, like, ready to do that 10 minute rule. I think that's an amazing and I love the mantra that you use with it. What was going through my mind is that allowing yourself to do the emails, is that a set time in your schedule? Is that, you know, I allow myself 30 minutes or 10 minutes to go and do social media, or to look at my emails? Where does that fit in with regard to with your writing, let's say?
Nir Eyal [00:23:09]:
It's absolutely planned for because what you don't want to do there's nothing wrong with these technologies. You know, the technology today gets a bad rap and people love blaming it for every social ill. And, I think it's gone overboard. It's become a moral panic in many ways because it didn't exist, and now the world, you know, messed up, and so there must be technology's fault. Well, of course, the world has always been messed up, and distraction has always been with us. The tools change, but the core human need to escape reality and to escape discomfort, that's nothing new. The solution to this is actually quite simple. So number 1 is master those internal triggers.
Nir Eyal [00:23:40]:
And, again, there's a many, many different techniques you can use. The important thing is that you have tools in your toolkit so that when you feel that discomfort, you know what to do with it rather than most people's habit, which is just trying to escape it with the drink or with a click or with whatever. The second step is to make time for traction. I took inspiration from Steven Pressfield's work where he talks about the difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional writes or does whatever they're doing as a profession even when they don't feel like it. They put their butt in the chair and they do the work because that's what's required of a professional. And so one of the worst things you can do as an author is to wait for inspiration. Awful idea. Do not wait for inspiration because if you wait for it and you say, oh, I'll just, you know, whatever it comes, it comes, you'll get very little done versus it's amazing how much inspiration comes when you sit in the seat ready to type on your keyboard at 8 AM and do the work.
Nir Eyal [00:24:34]:
That's when the inspiration comes. And that only happens if you schedule it. Right? It's got to be on your calendar. And not just time for work. You know, I want you to plan time for whatever it is that is consistent with your values. What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. What I try and minimize, what's very important to me is to minimize regret. I don't wanna look back at my life and say, oh, I could have written this book, or I could have been a better father or I could have been in better shape or I could have, you know, spent more time with my loved ones, whatever the case might be.
Nir Eyal [00:25:06]:
I wanna say to myself, look, I spent my time, this tiny flash of time that I had on this wonderful Earth, I spent it the way I wanted to spend it. So for you, it's, oh, I wanna play video games all day or watch Netflix all day. There's nothing morally wrong with that. It's your life. You can do whatever you want with it. But what I wanna help people do is to spend their time the way they want. Right? With forethought, not because they were trying to escape ugly emotions, but because that's what they wanted to do with their time. So is there anything wrong with checking email? Of course not.
Nir Eyal [00:25:34]:
I gotta check email. I check email every single day, multiple times a day. But I don't do it when I'm trying to write, and now email becomes the escape from a difficult task. That's bad. That's distraction. But checking email when I have that time in my calendar, which I do every day, that's the appropriate time to check it, when I say I will.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:54]:
And that's the time boxing that you refer to in your books. Correct?
Nir Eyal[00:25:59]:
Exactly. And so time boxing eats to do lists for breakfast. I hate to do lists. To do lists turn out to be one of the worst thing you can do for your personal productivity because to do lists have no constraints. Right? There's no constraint. You can always add more and more and more and more. I want to finish that book, and I need to have a social media channel. I'm gonna start my newsletter.
Nir Eyal[00:26:17]:
There's no constraint. Right? It's just a big wish list of stuff you wish you would have done. Whereas a timebox calendar, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. It's ironic in that people are so cheap with their money. Right? They clip coupons and they split checks and they look for sales and bargains. With their money, they're so cheap, but with their time, we would give it away. Whatever stupid thing is in the news that has nothing to do with us, some conflict thousands of miles away, Oh, that's what we have to spend our time doing. Why? It's got nothing to do with us.
Nir Eyal [00:26:47]:
We just give our time away to whoever wants it and then we look back in regret of what we could have done with our time. But time is a nonrenewable resource. You can always make more money. You can't make more time. I don't care if you're Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, you can't make more time. We should be generous with our money and cheap with our time because we can't make more of it, which means we have to recognize that there are only 24 hours in a day, and it's only when you plan ahead how you will spend your time down to the minute. This is what professional authors do across across the board. I don't know any professional author who doesn't do this, frankly.
Nir Eyal [00:27:22]:
They say to themselves, This is my sacred work time. I've got to get in that time of the day. By the way, it's not much. I'll be completely transparent. If I get 2 hours of writing in a day, I'm a hero. That's wonderful. Right? But it's 2 hours of work with zero distraction. That is a game changer.
Nir Eyal [00:27:39]:
And that's all they gotta do. If you do 2 hours of writing every day without distraction, yeah, you'll finish a book in a year or less. But what most authors do is they wait around, wait around, they don't write, they don't write, and of course those 2 hours don't get met every single day. And then when they're on deadline a month before their book is due, oh my gosh, Now they've really got to crank for, you know, 247. So it's all about planning that time in your day when you decide what you are going to do in advance.
Susan Friedmann [00:28:04]:
Beautiful. Oh, we could go on and on now. I know that there's just so much because I'm like, one thing will lead to the other and how authors can better use their time. But I love the idea that we really delve deeper into those internal triggers, which I know are ones that we need to master, and only we can do that for ourselves. I really appreciate all of that that you've shared with us. How can our authors find out more about you, the books? Sure.
Nir Eyal [00:28:41]:
Thank you so much for the opportunity. Yes. It went by so fast. I have so much more to share. But I know. I want you to share more.
Susan Friedmann [00:28:45]:
But I know. I want you to share more. We gotta bring you back again
Nir Eyal [00:28:47]:
Happy to. Have any time. Yeah. We're just scratching the surface here. But yeah. So my website is called Nir and Far but Nir is spelled like my first name. So that's Nir and Far. So near and far, but near is spelled like my first name. And my first book is called "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products." And the second book, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life."
Susan Friedmann [00:29:10]:
Beautiful. Yes. I love that play on words. When I saw that near and far, I was like, that's brilliant. Because it also allows people to know how to pronounce your name, because NIR is not a name that people often know here, at least in the States. So
Nir Eyal [00:29:27]:
So, You're absolutely right. Yeah. But you'd be surprised how many times I get introduced on stage when someone says, okay. Now we're gonna hear from an expert on habit formation. He writes at the popular blog near and far. Please welcome, So not everybody gets it, so I appreciate that you figured it out.
Susan Friedmann [00:29:44]:
Oh, dear. That's gonna make me laugh a lot. We always end off with, guests leaving our listeners with a golden nugget. You've shared so much already, and just can I squeeze just one sort of little piece of golden nugget out of here?
Nir Eyal [00:30:03]:
If you were to summarize "Indistractable" into one takeaway, it's this. That the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That distraction is not a moral failing. There's nothing wrong with you. People think that they're somehow less because they get distracted from time to time. Everyone gets distracted. That's part of the human condition. But there's a very simple antidote.
Nir Eyal [00:30:27]:
The antidote to this impulsivity issue is forethought, that there is no distraction we can't overcome as long as we plan ahead, as long as we use forethought. But if you wait till the last minute, if the chocolate cake is on its way to your mouth, if you're on a diet, if the cigarette's in your hand when you're trying to smoke it, if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is reach for your cell phone before you even said hello to your loved one, it's too late. You've already lost. You have to plan ahead. And if we plan ahead, today, there is no distraction we can't overcome tomorrow.
Susan Friedmann [00:30:59]:
Beautiful. Thank you. Oh, and as I said, if you're willing, we'd love to have you back. We can continue this. I know that, there's just so much more that we can learn from you, Nir.
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. And listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you want it to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return that you were hoping for.
So go to BookMarketingBrainstorm.com to schedule your free call.
And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparked some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Nir Eyal. Nir specializes in the psychology of technology and business, known for his best-selling books "Hooked" and "Indestructible," which won him the 2019 Outstanding Works of Literature Award. Nir has taught at Stanford and cofounded multiple companies. His work focuses on creating habit-forming products and managing distractions. His insights have been featured in major publications such as Time Magazine, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, and many, many more, All the way from Singapore,
Nir, welcome to the show, and I'm literally just over the moon to have you as this week's guest expert and mentor.
Nir Eyal [00:02:04]:
Well, I am so thrilled and honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Susan Friedmann [00:02:08]:
You and I were discussing just before we went on the air, and the 2 main books that you've written, and I know you've written so many more other things, but the 2 that stand out are Hooked and Indistractable. As I was mentioning, our listeners, primarily nonfiction authors, first time authors, and they're struggling. They're struggling often with marketing. They're struggling with the many distractions that are out there in the marketplace. I'm just gonna throw this net wide and let's see where it goes. But what advice would you give an author in that situation?
Nir Eyal [00:02:55]:
Wow. That's a big question. I know. I was like, okay. Let me Where do we start?
Susan Friedmann [00:03:01]:
I knew you could handle it.
Nir Eyal [00:03:04]:
Well, I would say there's 2 phases in my career, at least. So I'll start with saying that, you know, your mileage might vary. So all advice is autobiographical. So here's kinda my story. I found that my career to date has really been in 2 phases. The first phase was spent in anonymity, that nobody knew who I was or what I was writing about. And in many ways, I enjoyed that anonymity because I didn't have any expectations around my writing. I remember when I first started, I had a few dozen blog subscribers, friends and family, and I was thrilled that they were reading my blog post.
Nir Eyal [00:03:37]:
Then I got a few 100, then a few 1,000, and then I I self published my first book, Hooked. I just put it in as a PDF, and I put it up on Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing, and sold it on Amazon. And then it started getting a few reviews, then it got more reviews, then I got a 100 reviews. And then I got a call from an agent saying, hey. I really like your book. I see it's doing really well on Amazon. Why did you self publish? Let's go sell this for real. So I said, oh, okay.
Nir Eyal [00:04:00]:
Interesting. And so that was really how my author career started. I didn't plan it at all. Actually, the reason I started writing as more than just a a hobby was when I sold my last company, I just needed a break. I was working really hard in this startup and, I had a friend who just said, you know, do what you would do if money was no object. She asked me that classic question. What would you do if money was no object? And I thought for a little bit, I thought, you know, if money was no object, I would read and write. Right? I would just learn for a living.
Nir Eyal [00:04:30]:
Wouldn't that be so fun to just take a topic you really wanna dive into and just get your self-made solo PhD in that topic? I couldn't think of anything better. And so that's what I started doing. I just started blogging about this topic. And in that phase of my career, it was really a joy. I would wake up at 4 in the morning with an idea to write, and I could, you know, go to my kitchen and take out my laptop on on my kitchen table and just write down a few thoughts and then post it immediately to my blog. And I it didn't really matter who read it. I think many times authors are so set on the end destination that they forget about the joy in the process. And so one of my mantras to never lose that spark that sustains me as an author is it's always follow your creativity.
Nir Eyal [00:05:13]:
Right? Follow that creativity. Follow that curiosity that drives you forward. What is the answer to the question you want to know? And specifically speaking to nonfiction authors, you know, my MO has always been to follow the question I want the answer to. And it has to be a problem I'm facing in my own life. So when I have a problem in my life and, frankly, I have endless fodder to write about because there's always a new problem, typically, I'll talk to my wife about the problem, maybe I'll talk to some friends about the problem. And if I can't quite figure out the answer by that point, I'll read books about the topic. And 9 times out of 10, somebody else has already written a book about this problem, and there I have my answer. But every once in a while, every few years, I read all the books I can on a topic and I'm still not satisfied with the answer.
Nir Eyal [00:05:56]:
And so that's when I feel like I have to write a book about it because none of the other books just solve the problem for me. And so that kinda leads me into the second half of my career. The first half of my career was until Hooked was published, until my first book was published. And then it just started doing very, very well. And then I started entering the second phase of my career where because I got busy, because I now I had speaking engagements and I had consulting work and I had investment opportunities, now I got so busy with all these other things that were blessings, were fantastic, but they all took me away from the thing that made me successful in the first place, which was the research and the writing. That's when I entered in the 2nd phase of my career where now I wasn't anonymous anymore. Now I was somebody that people were calling and I was busy. And it, in a way, started to extinguish that joy of following my curiosity and following my creativity.
Nir Eyal [00:06:46]:
That actually became the opportunity for my second book because there was this moment in my life where I remember I was with my daughter one afternoon, and we had some daddy daughter time, some time to just be together. And we had this book of activities that dads and daughters could do together. And one of the activities in this book was to answer this question, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because in that moment, for whatever reason, I just thought I'd look at my phone for one quick sec. Let me just do this one thing on my device. And by the time I looked up for my phone, my daughter was gone because I was sending her a very clear message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was, and she left the room to play with some toy outside. It was because I got busy that I got distracted from the thing that made me successful in the first place, which is why I wrote my second book, Indistractable. One of my mentors, Gretchen Rubin, who's also a fantastic author, she's wonderful, she told me research is me search.
Nir Eyal [00:07:43]:
And so that's been very much what drives me as an author is researching my own problems. And I think in many ways, that is an underutilized hack that if you base your self worth, if you're trying to judge yourself on commercial success as a nonfiction author, you're just bad at math. Right? You just don't understand the odds are way stacked against you. What is it? 95% of nonfiction books never sell over 5,000 copies? 250 copies. Would 95% never sell more than 250 copies? Is that right? I mean, it's staggering. It's abysmal. Right? So you just have to be really, really bad at math. So saying to yourself, oh, I wanna be a bestseller.
I wanna sell a 1000000 copies. I mean, that that's getting struck by lightning. It's just so, so rare. So that cannot be the right reason to write a nonfiction book. The right reason to write a nonfiction book is that you are so entranced by this topic, you are so pulled by the unending desire to answer the damn question you can't get out of your head. That's the right reason to write a nonfiction book. Because even if it fails commercially, even if nobody buys it, you will have written the book for one very important person, and that is you. That I wanted the answer to my question.
Nir Eyal [00:08:57]:
In both my books, the subtitles are how to's, how to build habit forming products. That was the driving question. How to control your attention and choose your life. That's how to become indestructible. And that answer is what led me to keep following my curiosity. That's what drove me. And so even if nobody else bought the book, it didn't matter because it's frankly, I was writing for me.
Susan Friedmann [00:09:17]:
Woah. Amazing. I mean, just that alone, listeners, you've gotta listen to it again because there were some nuggets of wisdom there. You're looking at many different aspects here, and I think there was sort of the 2 books, the habits and the psychology that's involved here, especially in the Indestructible. Talk to us about the idea. You talk about mastering internal triggers. Things like boredom that really take us away and distract us from what we need to do. Sometimes I think, how can I do this? I'm looking for some excitement somewhere else, but not in what I'm doing.
Nir Eyal [00:10:06]:
Yeah. So let me back up just a bit to talk about what distraction really is. So, and this is a problem that I don't know an author who doesn't struggle with distraction. It is part of the job description is that we always feel like we're not putting out enough, you know, new content. We always feel like we could be doing more. Somehow we know what we need to do. We need to just sit down and write, and yet somehow we're doing everything but that thing. This is a problem I faced.
Nir Eyal [00:10:29]:
You know, I I faced it with my family. I faced it in my profession. I faced it, when I would say I was going to exercise or eat right, but I didn't and I wouldn't. And despite knowing what to do, I didn't do it. And so to me, that was a fascinating question. And by the way, it's not a new question. In fact, Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. If Plato was talking about this 25 100 years before the Internet, this can't be a problem caused by our technology.
Nir Eyal [00:10:56]:
This is a very old problem. It's part of the human condition is that despite knowing what to do, we don't do it. I want to answer for myself why. Why is that? And I very quickly realized that it's not the technology. It's not Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat. Those are just the tools. Those are the symptoms. They're not the cause, the root cause of the problem.
Nir Eyal [00:11:15]:
So let's talk about the root cause of the problem. Let's start with what is distraction. If you ask most people, what is the opposite of distraction, they'll tell you it's focus. Right? I don't wanna be distracted. I wanna be focused. But that's not actually true. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction.
Nir Eyal [00:11:37]:
Of course, it is. It's opposites, traction and distraction. Both words come from the same Latin root, trihare, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letter word, a c t I o n, that spells action, reminding us that traction is an action that you take that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Any act of traction is anything that you said you were going to do. That is an act of traction. Conversely, distraction is any action that you take that pulls you towards something that you did not say you were going to do. Right? Moves you further away from your values, further away from your goals, further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. Now you can think of kind of a number line on the left and the right.
Nir Eyal [00:12:20]:
You've got traction and you've got distraction. Now I want you to imagine a horizontal line, 2 arrows pointing, bisecting that, horizontal line, 2 vertical arrows pointing inside, and this represents external triggers and internal triggers. External triggers, these are the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all the things in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction. Now, that's what people tend to blame. Right? They tend to blame their phone. They tend to blame the news. They tend to blame Twitter. They blame their kids.
They blame their boss. They blame all these things outside of themselves. Now that is a source of distraction, but studies find it only accounts for 10% of your distractions. Did you know that? 10% of the time you check your phone, is it because of a ping, ding, or ring. What's the other 90%? The other 90% of the time that you check your phone, that you get distracted, 90% of the time, it's not because of what's happening outside of us. It's because of what's happening inside of us. This is called an internal trigger. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape.
Nir Eyal [00:13:27]:
Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, anxiety, uncertainty, these uncomfortable emotional sensations that we look to escape with some kind of distraction, to take our mind off of that feeling. Whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, we will always find a way to take our mind off that problem, off that uncomfortable emotional state, unless we get to the root cause of the issue. That's what the first step to becoming indestructible is all about. It's about mastering those internal triggers, or they will become your master.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:00]:
Have you got any tips on that?
Nir Eyal [00:14:02]:
Absolutely. Yeah. So there's dozens, actually. This is what the book Indistractable is all about. It's basically around putting strategies in place for these four points of the compass. Right? So we talk about traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers. Step number 1 is master internal triggers. Have tools in your toolkit ready to go so that when you feel that discomfort, you know what to do with it.
Nir Eyal [00:14:22]:
And I'll get back to that in just a second. The next step is to make time for attraction. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say it again. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a blank, white, empty calendar with nothing on it, And that's always the days that, you know, as an author before I wrote this book, I said, oh, I've got nothing planned today. I'm gonna write all day. I'm gonna be so productive.
Nir Eyal [00:14:48]:
I'm gonna finish that chapter. It's gonna be fantastic. And, of course, those are my least productive days. Right? Because the worst thing you can look at is a blank page and a blank calendar. We need constraints. In order to do our best work, we need constraints Starting with, how are you going to spend your time? So if you don't have something in your calendar that is traction, you cannot say you got distracted, but you can't have distraction without traction. The 3rd step is to hack back the external trigger. So this is where we take care of all the pings, dings, and rings, not only on our devices.
Nir Eyal [00:15:17]:
What about stupid emails that we didn't need to send or read, meetings we didn't need to attend? Those are the kind of distractions that we don't think about. We think of them as work related tasks, but they can be just as much, if not more of a distraction because we don't even realize that we're being taken off track. Right? Because they trick us into prioritizing the urgent and the easy work at the expense of the hard and important work we have to do to move our lives and careers forward. So how do we hack back those external triggers? And then finally, the last step is to prevent distraction with PACT. A PACT is what we call a pre commitment device. It's when we decide in advance what we will do when distraction rears its ugly head. So it's the last line of defense. It's the firewall against distraction.
Nir Eyal [00:16:00]:
And if you do one thing in these four strategies, just one small act, and I give dozens throughout the book, anybody can become indistractable. So let's dive into step one. Let me give you some very practical tips. And there are over a dozen different things you can do just in this first step of mastering these internal triggers, but I'll give you just one I use almost every single day. And this is called the 10 minute rule. I didn't invent it. It's been around for decades from what's called acceptance and commitment therapy. The 10 minute rule acknowledges that our sensations, our emotions, our feelings, these are fleeting.
Nir Eyal [00:16:33]:
But, of course, that's not what we think in the moment. When we experience boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, when we feel these uncomfortable sensations, our brain tricks us into distraction because we think we're always gonna feel that way. This writing isn't going very well. I must have writer's block. Let me just go do some quote unquote research for a minute. I'm guessing everybody listening right now is guilty of this. I know I certainly am or used to be. What do you do when your brain is trying to trick you into doing something that is not what you said you were going to do? So, what acceptance of commitment therapy acknowledges is that these sensations are fleeting, and you don't control your emotions.
Nir Eyal [00:17:12]:
You should know that you don't control your emotions any more than you might control the urge to sneeze? If you feel the urge to sneeze, you've already felt it. You can't control the urge to sneeze. All you can control is how you will respond to that urge, hence the term responsibility. So when you feel the urge to sneeze, do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick? No. You take out a tissue and you cover your face because that's a responsible thing to do. The same goes for these internal triggers. There's no rule that says you have to act on everything you feel. Right? If you feel bored, if you feel lonely, if you feel anxious, so what? That's just a signal.
Nir Eyal [00:17:50]:
It's just an emotion. The feeling is the psychological interpretation of that physiological response. There's a big difference between an emotion and a feeling. An emotion is physiological, a feeling is psychological, and you can interpret that emotion any way you choose. Rather than saying, I'm bored. This is hard. This is lonely. Whatever the case might be, we have to train ourselves to have tools in our toolkit so that when we feel that emotional discomfort, we don't look to escape it with distraction, but rather what high performers in every industry, especially when it comes to the arts, high performers relish those internal triggers.
Nir Eyal [00:18:28]:
They learn to welcome that discomfort, and they use it as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction rather than what most people do is try and escape it with distraction. So, okay, enough. How do we do this? What do we do? Give me a tip. The tip is to use what's called the 10 minute rule because, again, these emotions are fleeting. But when I'm writing, and this happens every day, listen, I sold over a 1000000 copies, I've published thousands of articles by now over the past decade of being a professional author, and every time I write, it is hard freaking work. All I wanna do when I'm writing is to go check the news or let me, check email or or let me do some research, Everything but the act of the actual writing, it never gets easier. But what's gotten better, what I've trained myself to do is to now have a process in place. I know those ugly internal triggers are going to rear their ugly head.
I expect them. And what I do now, as opposed to trying to escape them with distraction, I allow myself to use the 10 minute rule. The 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, whether it's checking email when you shouldn't, whether it's eating that chocolate cake, if you're, you know, on a diet, if you're trying to quit smoking, you can give in to whatever that distraction is. Doesn't matter. You can give into it. You're a grown adult. You can do whatever you want, but not right now. You can give into it in 10 minutes.
Nir Eyal [00:19:52]:
That's why it's called the 10 minute rule. And you can resist pretty much anything for just 10 minutes. And so your choice for those 10 minutes what do you do for those 10 minutes? You have a choice to make. You give a fork in the road. You can either get back to the task at hand, get back to the writing, or you can do what's called surfing the urge. Surfing the urge acknowledges that if you can just hold your attention long enough to ride out that wave like a surfer on a surfboard, it will always pass. But, of course, that's not what we feel in the moment. We think we're always going to be bored, that you're always gonna feel anxious, that you're always gonna feel uncertain.
Nir Eyal [00:20:26]:
No. These sensations pass just like waves. What I do is for those 10 minutes, when I so I'll set a timer, I'll put my phone down, and then I typically, I'll repeat a mantra. Now my mantra, you can steal this, You can make up your own. My mantra is this. I take a deep breath, and I say to myself, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. I'm taking a positive view of those internal triggers.
Nir Eyal [00:20:53]:
What we find is that high performers, people who can crank out unbelievable amounts of new content, they can work for hours without distraction, They feel the same internal triggers everyone else does, but they interpret those internal triggers. They interpret the emotions differently. So I've chosen to tell myself it's not writer's block. I don't believe in writer's block. That feeling of I don't know what to do and this is boring and this is uncomfortable and it's not happening, it's not flowing. This is what it feels like to get better. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And then now I've reinterpreted that emotion as a positive feeling.
Nir Eyal [00:21:25]:
And if I can just do that, repeat that mantra for a few times, it literally takes me maybe 30 seconds, 45 seconds, I'll be back at work. And you know what? Every once in a while, maybe 1 out of a 100 times, for 10 minutes, I do nothing but repeat the mantra, and that's okay. And after 10 minutes, I can check YouTube or email or whatever. K? But that's 1 in a 100 times. Because what I've done over the years is to train myself to go from the 10 minute rule to the 12 minute rule to the 15 minute rule to the 20 minute rule. And so what you're doing most importantly here is that you're showing yourself you can do this. You can resist that distraction for just a few more minutes. That's where you regain your agency and control versus what most people do.
Nir Eyal [00:22:04]:
Oh, it's stupid social media. Oh, it's my email. Oh, it's my kids. Oh, somebody needs me. These tend not to be true. It's just your brain tricking you into thinking that somebody needs you or you have to go check or you have to go get distracted. No. You typically don't.
Nir Eyal [00:22:17]:
There's very, very few emergencies in your data that you actually have to respond to. What you're doing is responding to the feeling, the subjective interpretation of your emotion rather than an actual fact that needs to take you off track. So that's just one technique. Again, there's dozens of different techniques that I talk about in the book Indistractable, but that's one of the ones that I use probably every single day, to be honest.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:39]:
Wow. I'm, like, ready to do that 10 minute rule. I think that's an amazing and I love the mantra that you use with it. What was going through my mind is that allowing yourself to do the emails, is that a set time in your schedule? Is that, you know, I allow myself 30 minutes or 10 minutes to go and do social media, or to look at my emails? Where does that fit in with regard to with your writing, let's say?
Nir Eyal [00:23:09]:
It's absolutely planned for because what you don't want to do there's nothing wrong with these technologies. You know, the technology today gets a bad rap and people love blaming it for every social ill. And, I think it's gone overboard. It's become a moral panic in many ways because it didn't exist, and now the world, you know, messed up, and so there must be technology's fault. Well, of course, the world has always been messed up, and distraction has always been with us. The tools change, but the core human need to escape reality and to escape discomfort, that's nothing new. The solution to this is actually quite simple. So number 1 is master those internal triggers.
Nir Eyal [00:23:40]:
And, again, there's a many, many different techniques you can use. The important thing is that you have tools in your toolkit so that when you feel that discomfort, you know what to do with it rather than most people's habit, which is just trying to escape it with the drink or with a click or with whatever. The second step is to make time for traction. I took inspiration from Steven Pressfield's work where he talks about the difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional writes or does whatever they're doing as a profession even when they don't feel like it. They put their butt in the chair and they do the work because that's what's required of a professional. And so one of the worst things you can do as an author is to wait for inspiration. Awful idea. Do not wait for inspiration because if you wait for it and you say, oh, I'll just, you know, whatever it comes, it comes, you'll get very little done versus it's amazing how much inspiration comes when you sit in the seat ready to type on your keyboard at 8 AM and do the work.
Nir Eyal [00:24:34]:
That's when the inspiration comes. And that only happens if you schedule it. Right? It's got to be on your calendar. And not just time for work. You know, I want you to plan time for whatever it is that is consistent with your values. What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. What I try and minimize, what's very important to me is to minimize regret. I don't wanna look back at my life and say, oh, I could have written this book, or I could have been a better father or I could have been in better shape or I could have, you know, spent more time with my loved ones, whatever the case might be.
Nir Eyal [00:25:06]:
I wanna say to myself, look, I spent my time, this tiny flash of time that I had on this wonderful Earth, I spent it the way I wanted to spend it. So for you, it's, oh, I wanna play video games all day or watch Netflix all day. There's nothing morally wrong with that. It's your life. You can do whatever you want with it. But what I wanna help people do is to spend their time the way they want. Right? With forethought, not because they were trying to escape ugly emotions, but because that's what they wanted to do with their time. So is there anything wrong with checking email? Of course not.
Nir Eyal [00:25:34]:
I gotta check email. I check email every single day, multiple times a day. But I don't do it when I'm trying to write, and now email becomes the escape from a difficult task. That's bad. That's distraction. But checking email when I have that time in my calendar, which I do every day, that's the appropriate time to check it, when I say I will.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:54]:
And that's the time boxing that you refer to in your books. Correct?
Nir Eyal[00:25:59]:
Exactly. And so time boxing eats to do lists for breakfast. I hate to do lists. To do lists turn out to be one of the worst thing you can do for your personal productivity because to do lists have no constraints. Right? There's no constraint. You can always add more and more and more and more. I want to finish that book, and I need to have a social media channel. I'm gonna start my newsletter.
Nir Eyal[00:26:17]:
There's no constraint. Right? It's just a big wish list of stuff you wish you would have done. Whereas a timebox calendar, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. It's ironic in that people are so cheap with their money. Right? They clip coupons and they split checks and they look for sales and bargains. With their money, they're so cheap, but with their time, we would give it away. Whatever stupid thing is in the news that has nothing to do with us, some conflict thousands of miles away, Oh, that's what we have to spend our time doing. Why? It's got nothing to do with us.
Nir Eyal [00:26:47]:
We just give our time away to whoever wants it and then we look back in regret of what we could have done with our time. But time is a nonrenewable resource. You can always make more money. You can't make more time. I don't care if you're Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, you can't make more time. We should be generous with our money and cheap with our time because we can't make more of it, which means we have to recognize that there are only 24 hours in a day, and it's only when you plan ahead how you will spend your time down to the minute. This is what professional authors do across across the board. I don't know any professional author who doesn't do this, frankly.
Nir Eyal [00:27:22]:
They say to themselves, This is my sacred work time. I've got to get in that time of the day. By the way, it's not much. I'll be completely transparent. If I get 2 hours of writing in a day, I'm a hero. That's wonderful. Right? But it's 2 hours of work with zero distraction. That is a game changer.
Nir Eyal [00:27:39]:
And that's all they gotta do. If you do 2 hours of writing every day without distraction, yeah, you'll finish a book in a year or less. But what most authors do is they wait around, wait around, they don't write, they don't write, and of course those 2 hours don't get met every single day. And then when they're on deadline a month before their book is due, oh my gosh, Now they've really got to crank for, you know, 247. So it's all about planning that time in your day when you decide what you are going to do in advance.
Susan Friedmann [00:28:04]:
Beautiful. Oh, we could go on and on now. I know that there's just so much because I'm like, one thing will lead to the other and how authors can better use their time. But I love the idea that we really delve deeper into those internal triggers, which I know are ones that we need to master, and only we can do that for ourselves. I really appreciate all of that that you've shared with us. How can our authors find out more about you, the books? Sure.
Nir Eyal [00:28:41]:
Thank you so much for the opportunity. Yes. It went by so fast. I have so much more to share. But I know. I want you to share more.
Susan Friedmann [00:28:45]:
But I know. I want you to share more. We gotta bring you back again
Nir Eyal [00:28:47]:
Happy to. Have any time. Yeah. We're just scratching the surface here. But yeah. So my website is called Nir and Far but Nir is spelled like my first name. So that's Nir and Far. So near and far, but near is spelled like my first name. And my first book is called "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products." And the second book, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life."
Susan Friedmann [00:29:10]:
Beautiful. Yes. I love that play on words. When I saw that near and far, I was like, that's brilliant. Because it also allows people to know how to pronounce your name, because NIR is not a name that people often know here, at least in the States. So
Nir Eyal [00:29:27]:
So, You're absolutely right. Yeah. But you'd be surprised how many times I get introduced on stage when someone says, okay. Now we're gonna hear from an expert on habit formation. He writes at the popular blog near and far. Please welcome, So not everybody gets it, so I appreciate that you figured it out.
Susan Friedmann [00:29:44]:
Oh, dear. That's gonna make me laugh a lot. We always end off with, guests leaving our listeners with a golden nugget. You've shared so much already, and just can I squeeze just one sort of little piece of golden nugget out of here?
Nir Eyal [00:30:03]:
If you were to summarize "Indistractable" into one takeaway, it's this. That the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That distraction is not a moral failing. There's nothing wrong with you. People think that they're somehow less because they get distracted from time to time. Everyone gets distracted. That's part of the human condition. But there's a very simple antidote.
Nir Eyal [00:30:27]:
The antidote to this impulsivity issue is forethought, that there is no distraction we can't overcome as long as we plan ahead, as long as we use forethought. But if you wait till the last minute, if the chocolate cake is on its way to your mouth, if you're on a diet, if the cigarette's in your hand when you're trying to smoke it, if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is reach for your cell phone before you even said hello to your loved one, it's too late. You've already lost. You have to plan ahead. And if we plan ahead, today, there is no distraction we can't overcome tomorrow.
Susan Friedmann [00:30:59]:
Beautiful. Thank you. Oh, and as I said, if you're willing, we'd love to have you back. We can continue this. I know that, there's just so much more that we can learn from you, Nir.
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. And listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you want it to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return that you were hoping for.
So go to BookMarketingBrainstorm.com to schedule your free call.
And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparked some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
