# How to Beat Distraction and Still Enjoy Life (ft. Nir Eyal)

An episode of [SOLVED with Mark Manson](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247526593), 9 Oct 2024, 1 h 01 min.

Audio: https://claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/441/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/episode.flightcast.com/tdubhqp677i7it4f5roeza3d.mp3

Why can’t we just do the things we know we should do? It’s a simple question with a very complex answer. To help us answer it, I sat down with my old friend, Nir Eyal, a behavioral design expert and author of the best-selling book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. I love Nir’s approach because he doesn’t linger on the surface of the problem of distraction by hocking the latest app or hack or fancy new time management method. Instead, he dives right into the thorny emotional realities we all face in trying to lead productive, meaningful lives. In this episode, we talk about what it means to be “indistractable” and how it’s probably the most important skill of the 21st century. We also get Nir’s take on the role of social media in our lives (his views on this might surprise you). And finally, he answers that timeless question: Why don’t we just do what we know we should do? Enjoy. About Nir Eyal Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir previously taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. His books have resonated with readers worldwide, selling over 1 million copies in over 30 languages. Nir’s book, Indistractable: http://geni.us/indistractable Nir on time boxing: https://www.nirandfar.com/timeboxing/ Nir on values: https://www.nirandfar.com/common-values/ Nir’s free schedule maker: https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/ More articles by Nir: https://www.nirandfar.com/best-articles/ CHAPTERS Chapters • 00:00:00 Introduction: The Writing Partnership That Solved Distraction • 00:02:32 What Is Indistractable? The Skill of the Century • 00:05:32 Traction vs. Distraction: The Power of Intent • 00:08:41 Internal Triggers: The Real Source of 90% of Distractions • 00:10:24 Self-Awareness and the Path to Mastering Internal Triggers • 00:12:22 Everything You Do Is About Escaping Discomfort • 00:14:18 Why We Can't Sit Still: The Evolutionary Purpose of Boredom • 00:16:10 The Goldilocks Zone of Pain and the Recipe for Burnout • 00:18:27 Make Time for Traction: Why You Can't Call Something a Distraction • 00:19:56 Time Boxing vs. To-Do Lists: The Productivity Debate • 00:22:00 Brilliant or Bullshit: The Social Dilemma Documentary • 00:22:58 The Social Media Debate: It's All Media, Not Just Social Media • 00:29:47 The Three Psychological Nutrients Kids Are Missing • 00:32:01 The Real Culprits: Standardized Testing, Hyper-Scheduling, and Lost Play • 00:34:14 Video Games as Protection and the Myth of Stranger Danger • 00:38:19 Legacy Media vs. New Media: Who's Really Causing Division? • 00:42:37 Audience Question: How Do I Do What I Know I Should Do? • 00:43:43 The Four Strategies in Action: From Internal Triggers to Pacts • 00:45:06 The Right Metric of Success: Did I Work Without Distraction? • 00:47:05 Mark's Struggle: Time Boxing vs. Word Count Goals • 00:49:34 Be a Scientist, Not a Drill Sergeant: Flexibility in Time Boxing • 00:52:14 Productivity Is Personal: Finding Your Optimal Tools • 00:53:43 The Problem with Habits and Flow: Not Everything Can Be Easy • 00:56:37 The 10-Minute Rule: Surfing the Urge to Distraction • 00:59:03 Wisdom of the Week: The Cure for Boredom and Repeated Mistakes Follow Nir on social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nireyal/ https://www.youtube.com/user/nirandfar https://twitter.com/nireyal https://www.facebook.com/nirandfar/ http://instagram.com/neyal99 ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action.…

## Transcript

[0:00] So most people don't know this writing a book is Almost impossibly hard like it just requires an insane amount of focus over such a long period of time like you're literally spending months and months and months by yourself struggling sitting by yourself Nothing keeping you in that chair other than your desire to finish this impossible project so as you would expect
[0:24] distraction plays a really big role in book writing. And it just so happens I was having such a hard time with my second book that a friend of mine who was also writing a book and struggling with distraction, we decided to start getting together and co-writing together and holding each other accountable. And so it turns out my accountability buddy
[0:45] who got me through my second book, Nir Eyal, is here. And irony of ironies, the book he was writing when we were writing together is called Indistractable, and it's about how to resist distraction. So Nir, I noticed in your book
[1:02] There was nothing about me. And I clearly, you know, as as the person who cured your distractions, I was a little bit hurt by that. So that's actually not true. No, you need to give another pass actually in the section on pacts.
[1:19] We talk about price packs. That's right. He got you. Price packs are where you make this pre-commitment where you decide in advance what the consequences will be if you don't do what you say you're going to do. It's the last step. Very important you don't do that first. But as the last line of defense, you can do these packs. There's different kinds of packs. And one of those packs is a price pack. And I actually talk about in the book how we made that $10,000 bet that if I didn't finish my book by January 1st, I was going to have to pay you $10,000.
[1:45] Damn it, Nir, you're making me look like an asshole. All right, I'm in the book. Read the book, everybody. Read the book. It's the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.
[2:03] Welcome, my friend, Mira Yal, my old friend. For people who aren't familiar with him, Mira is an author, a technologist, a former startup founder, an investor. But most importantly, you're most well known for writing about distraction, what you call behavior design, managing your focus, attention, and all the distractions in your lives. It is great to have you here. I feel like this is long overdue. You're beaming in. Thanks. From Singapore. Thanks for coming on, man. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
[2:32] Why don't we start out by just kind of getting into the core? Like, how do we want to take this? Do we want to take it, like, through the four factors in Indistractable? Like, do we want to go one by one? Or how are we going to do this? I think, yeah. Nir, if you want to take us, this first segment, we call it the fuck of the week. What are we giving a fuck about? What are we not giving a fuck about? What are we not giving a fuck about?
[2:50] We're having you on. We're going to be talking about giving a fuck about being and becoming indistractable. So if you could kind of frame this for us, what is indistractable to you? What is indistractability? And how do we get there? Yeah.
[3:04] Sure, sure. So I think, you know, becoming indistractable is the skill of the century, that for the first time in human history, we are inundated with so much abundance. And that's generally a good thing, right? It's the first time in history that more people die of diseases of excess from too many calories like diabetes, obesity, than die from starvation, right?
[3:24] And so that's actually a great thing, right? The price of progress is that we have so much abundance and we're seeing that same phenomenon happen when it comes to information. That we have so much entertainment. We have so much access. We can beam here. I'm in Singapore. You're in California. We have this free connection that we can have on our video screens. I mean, this would have been science fiction when we were kids. And yet the price of all that progress is that we have to learn how to focus our attention because
[3:49] Even though you can have the world's information in the palm of your hand, if you can't focus long enough to turn that information into wisdom, it might as well not even exist. So I think that the critical skill of the century is going to be the power to be indistractable because if you think the world is distracting now –
[4:07] Just wait a few years, right? Between AI and augmented reality and virtual reality and all the stuff that's happening in reality reality, the world is only going to become a more distracting place. So I think we're really bifurcating into people who allow their time and attention to be manipulated and controlled by others, by media interests, by their boss, by their kids, by all this stuff outside of them, and people who stand up and say, no, no, no. I decide how I control my time and attention because I am indistractable.
[4:34] And so that's, you know, I write books not because I have the answer. I write books because I need the answer. And I found that I was becoming incredibly distracted and not able to focus on the things that really matter to me. And so I really wanted to crack this code for myself. And the first thing I did was think, okay, well, I'll just go read other people's books on this, right? And so I read a bunch of books that told me, you know, technology is evil and stop using social media and stop checking email. But that didn't work, right?
[5:01] It's really easy for some professor to say that because they have tenure. But, you know, the rest of us with real jobs, we actually need to use email. We need to use social media. We need to use these technologies. So I wanted a tech positive approach that allowed me to get the best of both worlds. And so that's what I came up with with Indistractable.
[5:17] So take us through what you have four keys of indistractability or four, four factors of indistractability. Like take us through each one of those one by one. What are they? Why do they matter? Is there a specific order that we should go in? What's, what's your approach?
[5:32] Sure, sure. So let's start with, okay, let's back up. What is distraction? Let's start with some definitions here. So the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. What is the opposite of distraction? Most people, if you ask them what's the opposite of distraction, they'll say focus, right? I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused. That's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is not focus. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction, right?
[5:57] Of course it is, right? Traction and distraction. They're opposites. So traction and distraction both end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N. That spells action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to you, okay? It is an action that you yourself took.
[6:13] So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. The opposite, distraction, is anything that is not what you plan to do in advance, something that pulls you away from your values, further away from becoming the person you want to become.
[6:34] So this isn't just semantics. This is really, really important because the difference between traction and distraction is one word, and that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So I think we need to stop vilifying and moralizing and medicalizing what people do with their spare time. Like let's stop harping on video games are melting your brain and stop using social media and stop doing this, stop doing that.
[6:59] Look, anything you want to do with your time and attention is fine. Why is playing video games morally inferior to watching golf on TV? I don't know the difference. If that's what you want to do with your time, fine. Stop worrying about how other people spend their time. Ask yourself, how do you want to spend your time in accordance with your values? So if you plan for that, if that's what you said you were going to do in advance is play video games or go on social media or watch YouTube videos,
[7:24] Awesome, do it, enjoy it, don't feel guilty about it, but do it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's, certainly not the tech company's schedule. Conversely, just because something is a work-related task doesn't mean it's not a distraction. So I'll give you a perfect example in my own life. For years, I would sit down at my desk and I would say, okay, I'm gonna get started, I'm gonna work on that big important project that I've been delaying and procrastinating on, nothing's gonna get in my way, I'm not gonna get distracted, here I go, I'm gonna get started.
[7:55] But first, let me check some email, right? Let me just scroll that Slack channel. Let me just catch up on industry news because that's a work-related task. I'm being productive, right? But if it's not what I said I was going to do in advance, it's just as much of a distraction as playing Candy Crush or whatever, you know, stupid activity might distract you.
[8:11] So if it's not what you said you're going to do in advance, it is by definition a distraction. Okay, so now to frame this model, you've got traction, you've got distraction. Now what prompts us to take these actions? We have two kinds of triggers. So think of them as two arrows bisecting here. So the usual suspects are what we call external triggers. External triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment that can lead us towards traction or distraction. Now that's what people tend to blame.
[8:41] They tend to say, oh, I was planning to do something and then my phone rang and I got distracted. Those are called external triggers, but they only account for 10% of our distractions. There's been many studies on this. Only 10% of the time that you check your phone is it because of a ping, ding, or ring, an external trigger. So what's the other 90%?
[9:00] Turns out, studies find, that 90% of the time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of us, it's because of what's happening inside of us. These are called internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states.
[9:16] Boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the source of 90% of our distractions. Because what I discovered, the thing that most impacted my life looking at the research, was that distraction is not a moral failing. It's not some kind of broken brain syndrome for the vast majority of people. They don't have anything wrong with their brains. And even those who think they do, most of them are misdiagnosed, to be honest. It's simply that we haven't learned this skill set
[9:41] We haven't learned how to deal with discomfort in a healthy way that moves us towards traction rather than trying to escape it with distraction. So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, if you don't know what's really driving your distraction, that it's these uncomfortable emotional states you don't know how to deal with, you are always gonna get distracted. So now we have the four points of our compass.
[10:04] Number one, master internal triggers or they become your master. Number two, make time for traction. Number three, hacking back these external triggers. And then finally, as the last line of defense is to prevent distraction with packs, that's the four strategies we have to use to become indistractable. And using those four strategies in concert, anybody can become indistractable.
[10:24] I find there's like an interesting common thread that I see in a lot of those, which is self-awareness. Because A, I think a lot of people aren't aware of their own internal triggers. I know that, you know, a big story of my adult life has just been becoming more aware of my internal triggers of what has led to bad habits and bad behavior. But also, I think there's.
[10:47] there's a question of being aware of what your intent is, of what you actually want to accomplish. I think a lot of people, if you're muddy on where you're trying to get, then you're more susceptible to all the distractions because it can actually be a way of hiding the fact that you don't have clarity around what you want out of your life. And so talk a little bit about how self-awareness fits into all these components and what the process around that looks like.
[11:15] Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think, you know, a big part of it is that people don't have that self-awareness around what they're feeling in the moment. Because remember that, you know, the brain is a cognitive miser. We used to think about human motivation as carrots and sticks.
[11:33] That everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Sigmund Freud said this. Jeremy Bentham said this. Turns out neurologically, if you actually look at what's happening in the brain, it's not true. That metaphor doesn't apply. That in fact, everything we do, everything we do, it's not about carrots and sticks. It's that the carrot is the stick.
[11:53] The carrot is the stick. What am I talking about? Meaning? I'm imagining a very long, thin carrot that you are beating people with. So please explain yourself. Kind of. Yeah. That actually would be a better metaphor. It's almost like, remember that scene in The Matrix that Neo goes into that room where that kid is bending the spoon and the kid says, imagine there is no spoon. And then Neo realizes there's something else going on. And that's exactly what's happening with human motivation.
[12:22] that it's not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but in fact, all human motivation, everything you do, everything you do, is about one thing, and that is the desire to escape discomfort. So even pursuing pleasure, wanting, craving, urging, desire, hunger...
[12:42] All of those feelings to get the pleasure are driven by the desire to extinguish the wanting of that pleasure. So everything we do is about pain management. So that must therefore mean that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. That's all it is.
[13:05] And so when you look at that as the very first most important step, which is mastering these internal triggers, becoming aware of the fact that our processing, our rationalization of why I can't do something. Oh, I just need to check email for a minute or let me just watch that YouTube video or I just need a quick break or I need a cigarette or I need a drink or I need a – whatever it might be.
[13:25] they are just maladaptive habits around dealing with discomfort. That's all it is. It's just training ourselves to find the path of least resistance to alleviate discomfort. So for me, that was incredibly liberating because that meant if I was having trouble writing my book, if I wasn't spending time fully present with my family, if I wasn't exercising, if I wasn't eating right, it's just about learning how to manage discomfort. And once you have that skill set, once you have those tools in your toolkit,
[13:53] doing what you say you're going to do becomes much, much easier. Nir, there's a particular kind of discomfort that I want to ask you about. And it's something that keeps coming up. It's a simple question, but I haven't found a good answer for it. What is boredom? Why are we so uncomfortable with boredom? It seems like it's like, oh, it's just this, you know, we're not doing anything, so we should be fine, but we're not. What is that all about?
[14:18] Yeah, and you're right. I mean, I don't know if you know how right you are, but there's actually been some amazing studies where they actually put people in a room and tell them, don't do anything. Okay, just sit here. And all you can do is either sit here or give yourself – they tie them up with this band around their arm. They say, you know, here's a button. You can electrocute yourself or not, but just sit here.
[14:38] And it turns out that something like two-thirds of men – I think it's a much smaller proportion of women. They're much more rational than men apparently – will electrocute themselves just to feel something to avoid boredom. I mean how crazy is that? But actually this is an evolutionary attribute, that we have this on purpose.
[14:56] Because if you think about it, you know, one of the goals of many world religions is to transcend wanting, to transcend desire. Like that becomes the ultimate nirvana is not to want things, not to be attached to things. But if you think about it, evolutionarily, if there was a tribe of humans who were blissed out, who were contented, who were happy all the time, and they encountered our ancestors, right? People who are constantly bored, constantly wanting more, constantly seeking –
[15:25] our ancestors would have met them, killed them, and eaten them, right? Because it's not evolutionarily beneficial to be blissed out and not want. It's in fact our wanting, our boredom, our anxiety to do better that helps us invent world-changing medicine, that helps us overturn despots, that helps us make a better world. So that's an evolutionary attribute. The fact that we're antsy
[15:49] is what made our species so fantastic, is that we want to improve. That's why we dominated the earth. And so the reason we have that aversion to boredom is because it's spurring us to go do something to make our lot better. I think I talked about this in my book, that there's like a Goldilocks level of pain. The optimal amount of pain in life is not zero. It
[16:10] It's it's kind of a u-shaped curve right like if there's too much pain then you you it results in trauma and and Overwhelming feelings and and it like just cripples people But if there's not enough pain if there's not enough stimulation that is also a form of suffering it's almost like we there's like this perfect Goldilocks amount of struggle and challenge and and irritation that we thrive on that is
[16:36] It's like this perception of surmountable pain, of just enough pain that we feel like we can get over the hump. And that seems to be the hamster wheel that like generates a sense of meaning and purpose. Yeah. And it turns out what moderates what is the right level of discomfort is one thing.
[16:56] And that's control. There's some amazing research that came out of Oxford a few years ago from the work of Stansfield and Candy that found that we exactly know what is the recipe for burnout. Do you guys know the recipe for burnout? The recipe for burnout is a confluence of two factors. It's not what kind of job you do. It's not depressing work. If you ask people what kind of work –
[17:17] causes anxiety and depression and burnout, you would think it'd be like a sad job or a hard job. No, no. Turns out it's jobs that cause burnout are ones where you have high expectations coupled with low control.
[17:30] It has to be that confluence. If you have high expectations and high control, no problem. People can cope with the discomfort, with the pain in life, as you said, Mark, as long as they feel they have agency and control over modulating their behavior, like doing something about that. That's why you hear people's best experiences in life are when they were in that super hard game that they managed to rally the team, when they went to war with their fellow comrades. These life-changing experiences are when they had
[17:59] hard experiences and high control, people rise to the occasion. It's when we have high expectations with low control, that's when we burn out. That's when we get distracted. That's when we have all kinds of anxiety and depression issues, is when we lack agency and control. So step number two to becoming indistractable, and this is a game changer. So step number one, again, is mastering those internal triggers, having those tools ready to go so you can deal with that discomfort in a healthy way. Step number two is about making time for traction.
[18:27] And this is such a huge opportunity that most people don't take. When you ask most people, you know, you say, I'm struggling with distraction. I probably have ADHD. I can't get anything done because look at what's happening in the news and the elections and social media. And then you say, OK, but what did you plan to do today? Right. What did you get distracted from? Show me your calendar.
[18:51] I don't know. It's blank. Maybe I got a dentist appointment or a meeting here and there. But here's the fact. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what you got distracted from. I'll say it again. It's so important. You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if you can't show me on your calendar, what is it that you wanted to do? What is traction?
[19:11] You can't say you got distracted. Everything is a distraction unless you know in advance what you want to do with your time. So that's where this whole technique of time boxing, which I didn't invent. It's been around for decades. It's actually the most studied, well-researched time management technique that blows to-do lists out of the water. To-do lists suck for your personal productivity in comparison. There's a way to use to-do lists, which we can talk about. But for most people, to-do lists are really sinking their personal productivity as opposed to –
[19:36] a time box calendar where you say, hey, according to my values, and I show you exactly how to do this in the book, how do I turn my values into time so now I can look back at my calendar and say, okay, that's what I plan to do. Whether it's being with my kids, whether it's working on that project, whether it's playing video games, that's what I plan to do. That's traction. Everything else would be a distraction.
[19:56] I'm on team to-do list. I'm sorry, Nir. We could argue with Mark, Nir. We'll have to fight about it next time we see each other. No, I've converted a lot of people. People used to say, bring up people like you, or they would say, Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz.
[20:13] He wrote this very famous article that said, I don't keep a calendar. If you need to see me, you need to see me. That's fine. I don't keep a schedule. And then people would talk to me about this and say like, hey, look, here's a super successful guy. Look, he doesn't keep a schedule. And actually, about a year ago, he said, OK, I give up. Now we use a time box calendar. I do use a calendar, but I do love to-do lists. They make me very happy. Yeah.
[20:36] So just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with taking things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper. I do that as well. That's great. What you don't want to do is run your life on a to-do list. So if you wake up in the morning and you say, ooh, what should I do with my day? And you look at your to-do list, you know what you're going to do? You're going to do the easy stuff.
[20:53] You're going to do the urgent stuff. You're going to do the fun stuff on the to-do list. You're not going to do the stuff that requires your full attention that's oftentimes difficult to do. You're going to delay on that, right? Because a to-do list doesn't tell you when to do what you say you're going to do because it has no constraints. It just goes on and on and on. So it's not that a to-do list is a bad idea. It's that people don't use to-do lists properly by putting those tasks inside their schedule as well.
[21:19] Yeah, I've had a lot of conversations with people like to do lists are very similar to goals, which is I think the way to do them well is to be flexible with them. So like I'll set a to do list for the week and I'll like roughly kind of plan out. Here's what I'm going to do Monday. Here's what I'm going to do Tuesday. Here's, you know, everything on Wednesday.
[21:35] But then things start to get shuffled, right? Like it's like, actually, this is way more important than these three things. So I'm going to move these three things to Thursday. And then I'm going to do this this afternoon. And like, I think you need to like critically think about your to-do list as you're going through it. If you just go through it mindlessly, then yeah, it's probably not going to end well. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.
[22:00] All right, we're back. I'm really excited for this brilliant or bullshit because you have developed a bit of a reputation here as the social media defender. You know, social media has become everybody's favorite punching bag and scapegoat for all of the problems of the last 10 years. And you have been one of the few people that has like vocally stood up and said, hey, it's not as bad as everybody thinks. So Drew, lead us into brilliant or bullshit.
[22:30] Yeah, for Brilliant or Bullshit, we're going to be doing is The Social Dilemma, the documentary, the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. Is it brilliant or bullshit? And Nir, I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but why don't you take us through both your relationship with the documentary and then your thoughts on it as well? Well, OK. You said brilliant or bullshit. I want to create a third B, which is both. OK. Brilliant and bullshit.
[22:59] What do I mean by that? That, you know, I think what's oftentimes lacking in our conversation around these complex topics is nuance, right? That we want dichotomies. We want good guys and bad guys. We want, you know, black and white thinking. And that's not reality, right? That's Star Wars. I don't know. That's not reality. Even Star Wars is more complex than good guys and bad guys. And so certainly these complex social issues like social media, social media, good or bad? The answer is yes. It's good. Yes. And it's bad. Yes. Right?
[23:29] Many things are both. And so it's about this much more complicated look at social media in terms of who is using it, how much they are using it, what they are doing when they're using it, and what they would be doing instead of using it. So it's a much more nuanced question. But if you want to focus in on that film specifically, it's more bullshit, I think, because while I respect the fact...
[23:54] that the movie focused attention on how people can waste their time on social media, I think the aperture was way too small. I don't think the problem is social media per se, as much as it is all media being a source of distraction. I mean, let's call a spade a spade here.
[24:10] You right now are watching this on a form of media, right? Which Mark and Drew are benefiting from by getting sponsorship that you probably saw an ad that pays their bills. And that's great, right? They are monetizing your attention. They are turning your eyeballs into money just like the New York Times, just like Fox News, just like Facebook. All these companies do. That's their business model.
[24:31] Does anybody not know that? Like, did we really need a movie to guilt us into thinking that watching something on YouTube is so bad for us? When if that's how you want to spend your time, fine. There's nothing inherently evil about that. What's evil is when we don't.
[24:47] do these things instead of living our life. When we look back in regret and say, ah, why did I spend so much time watching Fox News or CNN or whatever social media when I really wanted to spend time with my kids, when I really wanted to work on that big project, when I really wanted to go get in shape, that's when it's harmful. So if you do it with intention, there's nothing wrong with that.
[25:08] But that message was never communicated. So I sat down with the social dilemma people. I sat down with them for three hours, and I gave them the entire summary of my book, and I wasn't in the movie. Now, I'm not bitter about that. What I'm bitter about is that nobody offered solutions of what to do with the problem. Yeah.
[25:26] So it's as if imagine you go to a doctor, right? You go to a doctor and the doctor says, oh, I'm so sorry. Mark, you have a terrible disease. It's probably lethal. It's probably going to kill you. I'm so sorry. Oh, my God, doctor. Well, do you have a cure? In fact, I do have a cure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have the cure. Well, can I have it?
[25:42] No, I'm not going to give it to you, which is that's malpractice. And so what the Social Dilemma movie did was freak everyone out using the very psychology they derive. It was on Netflix, for God's sakes.
[25:57] algorithmically driven, sensationalized, full of hooks and slithingers. All the psychology of scaring the shit out of people with, oh my God, you're a puppet on a string. And what's ironic is if the social media companies wanted to create a movie to get people to use their products more, they would have created the Social Dilemma movie. Why? Because the reason people can't stop using social media is because they think they can't stop using social media.
[26:25] It's called learned helplessness, that when you believe there's nothing to be done about a problem, what do you do? Nothing. I can't. Look, the social dilemma told me I was a puppet on a string. We're all addicted, right? And we actually know this. It sounds far-fetched, but there's actually been studies that show that there is a correlation between adverse mental health issues.
[26:45] and not how much time you spend on social media, but what you believe is the effect of social media, meaning that it doesn't matter how much time you spend. What matters is if you believe social media is bad for you, that's the people who are much more likely to have mental health issues. So in a way, you're creating this problem by telling people there's nothing you can do about it, as opposed to, I would have been much more for the film if they had put stuff in the movie that anyone can do. For example,
[27:12] How about turning off those goddamn notifications that are constantly interrupting you? Is that so hard? I mean, it takes five minutes. Turn off those stupid notifications. How about planning time to use social media as opposed to using it whenever you feel bored and lonesome and checking it 52 times a day? Use it on your schedule.
[27:29] These are simple things anyone can do. And I think that the fact that they didn't talk about those very simple solutions that anyone can do until the very, very end. They put a couple stupid points when nobody was watching the credits anymore. That's where the movie really fell flat. Yeah. I was very disappointed by it. And I was very disappointed by how popular it became. But I do think it became a little bit of a social craze of just piling on the social media stuff. I like the point you make about media because –
[27:57] You and I are old enough to remember television in the 80s and 90s, and there was a bit of a hysteria around kids watching TV. I remember hearing all these things of like, oh, the amount of TV you watch is rotting your brain, and there are all these scary statistics of like the average person back in the 90s was watching six to seven hours of television a day.
[28:18] It's a lot of the same concerns and a lot of the same fears. And to your point, it's not social media. It's just media. As long as there is mass entertainment and as long as it's going to be packaged extremely well, you're always going to have a very large population of people who feel a certain amount of emptiness in their lives or...
[28:38] Who are craving distraction from whatever is uncomfortable in their life that they're they're gonna be susceptible to it as you know We just had Jonathan Haidt on the show a few months ago who is really Taking up the the banner of you know social media is kind of at the root of of the mental health crisis. There are a couple of things I would love to hear your perspective on you know one of the things I tried to kind of push him on was this claim that this is happening
[29:08] of all the studies and data that I've seen, it seems to be very much an Anglosphere thing. When you look at countries and cultures that are more communal, more collectivist, that they're not as lonely, they're more religious, they have people are still going out in person and inhabiting the physical world, you don't see a lot of these same mental health effects happening in those parts of the world. And so to me, it just feels like
[29:35] Social media can't be the whole story. It seems to be like, in my opinion, it's like one piece of a much larger narrative going on. I'm curious, like, how do you see the situation?
[29:47] Yeah, absolutely. I greatly respect Jonathan. I think he's an amazing researcher. Our kids used to play together back when I lived in New York. And there's a lot we agree about. In fact, well before he wrote The Anxious Generation, we co-authored an article saying that, hey, we don't exactly agree that social media is the source of the problem. I think it's a symptom of the problem. We can get into what that means in a minute. But that our conclusions are the same. So when you look at what he recommends, I'm in complete agreement.
[30:16] I don't see a really good reason why kids need cell phones before 13. That's, you know, that's, that's the age when these social media companies say is the minimum age to give your kid a product that the product manufacturers tell you is not for people under a certain age is, is lunacy. Like what are we doing as parents? You say, Oh, but I can't stop my kid who pays for your kid's cell phone. You,
[30:37] did, right? So letting your kid use a product that below the age limit, I think is crazy. I think we should raise that age limit. I'm fully in agreement with, he says 16 years old, that seems very legit to me. Phone-free schools, that makes a lot of sense to me. So at the end of the day, we agree on the conclusions in terms of what to do. I think we're in full agreement.
[30:56] I think what's different is that I think that this is, like you, a factor, not the whole story. And I think the whole story has to do with something much deeper, which is the fact that children in the Anglosphere –
[31:11] are severely deficient in what we call psychological nutrients. And so psychological nutrients, that's kind of the name I gave, these three elements of self-determination theory. Self-determination theory is the most widely accepted theory of human flourishing and motivation. Every psychiatrist and psychologist on the face of the earth knows self-determination. It's been around since the 1970s. And self-determination theory says that every human being, in order to have proper mental health and wellness, needs three things. We need competency, autonomy, and relatedness.
[31:41] And when you look at children's lives today as opposed to previous generations, they are severely deficient in these three psychological nutrients. If you think about the sense of competency, Peter Gray is a researcher who drew the same conclusions that Jonathan Haidt drew around social media being the cause of the problem. He actually concluded that it was the No Child Left Behind Act.
[32:01] The fact that kids are constantly tested, you know, starting in the first grade, four, five, six times a year on these standardized tests, and that teacher salaries are tied to these kids' performance on standardized tests means that we have built a generation of kids who are constantly told you are not competent. You are not enough. And so if you don't have that sense of competency and mastery in the real world, this is called the needs displacement hypothesis. If you're not getting what you need in the real world, you look for it in the virtual world.
[32:30] And so that's why they are online playing these games, going on TikTok, going on various sites, because that's where they feel competent. That's where they feel mastered because they're not getting that sense in the real world. Then if you think about autonomy, we know that this is the most scheduled generation in history. You know, there's only two places in society where you can tell people where to go, what to think, how to dress, what to eat, who to be friends with, and that's prison and school.
[32:57] And so it's no surprise if we hyper-regulate our children and we put them in cages, they act like animals. And that's exactly what's happened. And so by hyper-scheduling our kids, it used to be at least, you know, when we were kids, you know, three o'clock, school's out. The rest of the day, you just got to play. Well, not anymore. Because if you have money, well, now your kids in test prep and swimming lessons and Mandarin lessons. And if you don't have money, because the media has convinced us of this myth of stranger danger, we're locking kids up inside. Right?
[33:26] And this is something that Jonathan and I greatly agree on. Kids need play. They have to have that socialization that comes from play. But parents are starving their children from those social relationships, which leads us to this third psychological nutrient of relatedness, that when kids don't have time for play, and we know that kids have less time for play in the Anglosphere than ever before, well, they're looking for what they would get with play online if they can't get it offline.
[33:54] So if you're not playing in neighborhoods like we used to play, you know, our parents said, go outside and don't come back until the streetlights turn on. Parents are terrified. They're not doing this for their kids. And so what the heck are kids supposed to do indoors? They go on Fortnite. Well, what is Fortnite? I hear parents complaining about, oh, my kid plays too much Fortnite. I say, have you actually played Fortnite? It's not a video game.
[34:14] It's a way to interact with your friends, just like we used to be on the phone talking to our friends. That's what they're doing on Fortnite. And in fact, it turns out it may have some protective effects. If you think about the fact that, you know, even Jonathan will say this, that girls are doing much worse than boys. Partially we think it's because boys have video games to give them those psychological nutrients they're missing. And then finally, the last point is that we have to remember none of this stuff happens in a vacuum, right? The critics of technology, they only point to the bad stuff.
[34:42] But you gotta remember, zoom out a bit. Look at the big picture here. That if you look at all the things that used to kill kids in our generation, drunk driving, record lows, drug use, other than cannabis, record lows, truancy, record lows, murder rates, record lows. This was supposed to be the generation of the super predator. They built prisons all over America to house these kids who were gonna commit crazy crimes. That never happened. Why? Because if you wanted to invent a device
[35:11] to keep kids safe at home and off the streets, maybe one of these devices is not such a bad idea. So it turns out, despite the fact, he's absolutely right, that we're seeing greater rates of suicide among certain demographics, mostly girls in the Anglosphere. That's true, we're not seeing it everywhere, we're only seeing it in certain demographics. Overall, it's much safer to be a kid today than before these technologies.
[35:34] Now, I'm not saying these technologies don't cause harm. And in fact, I'm the biggest advocate to saying don't be a parent who just let their kid do whatever they want online. Absolutely not. There's a whole chapter in my book on how to raise indistractable kids. And, you know, I have a 16-year-old myself. And this is something we have to do mindfully because, of course, you know, as Paul Virilio said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.
[35:55] So ships are great. We sail ships all the time. Do we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships better. We made them safer. So what we will do as a society, whether it's children, whether it's adults, we're going to do the same thing we've always done as a society when it comes to a new technology is we don't stop using the technology. We adapt and we adopt to it, meaning...
[36:15] We adapt our behavior. We adapt our norms. We have new standards around how we use these technologies. We change our behavior. That's what I'm trying to do with Indistractable. And then we invent new technology. We adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technology. So I think this is something we're working through. I think if we just blame social media for all of our troubles, we don't get to the root cause of the problem, which, of course, is something we love to do. People love to say, it's not my fault. My kids are crazy. It's because of...
[36:43] social media, as opposed to saying, wait a minute, maybe it's this much, this new technology of institutionalized learning, right? Nobody ever thinks about school, this ridiculous notion that we can put one teacher in front of a classroom of 30 kids and expect five-year-olds to sit there and just take it.
[36:59] That's not a problem that social media created. The fact that 10% of American children are diagnosed with ADHD, 10%, and up to 25% of American boys, one in four boys today are diagnosed with ADHD. This is not something that social media created. This is something institutionalized that somehow we don't want to come to grips with, that maybe we're expecting children to do things that maybe children aren't designed to do. A five-year-old is not designed to sit and listen to a teacher blabble on
[37:29] For hours on end, that's not what five-year-olds, six-year-olds should be doing. And yet we blame it on all these exogenous conditions. So all I'm saying is there are deeper reasons here than just saying, ah, it's technology's fault, which is exactly what parents have been doing for thousands of years. They've always said it's the latest trend. That's what's causing my kids problems as opposed to a bit of introspection. Well said, sir. Well said. I have a little bit of a follow-up there. So I think...
[37:56] almost everybody, even if they do disagree with John Hite or you or whatever, everyone kind of does agree on the solution, like you said, where you and John Hite disagree, but you agree on the solutions. Great. But what about – he made another very astute observation when Mark interviewed him, I thought anyway, which was a lot of times these moral panics –
[38:19] are misplaced in a way that kind of hides the real problem. So like for television, for example, we thought television and video games, they're rotting kids' brains. You know, it's gonna be the end of childhood as we know it. That didn't happen. It doesn't rot our brains, but it does destroy what he calls social capital. It made everybody, it forced everybody to go sit at home and just kind of, you don't know your neighbors anymore. Now you're just inside
[38:46] isolated. Do you think there's any parallel there with social media? Because they kind of did, well, we've been told anyway, they've kind of done this sleight of hand, right? They came in and they gave us all this free cool shit. We could connect with everybody anywhere at any time. And then they kind of pulled the rug out from under us and started monetizing our eyeballs and attention. Is that just another form of moral panic or is there something to that, do you think? Is the panic misplaced or is it just not even a thing?
[39:16] So again, I wish I could give a black and white yes or no right or wrong answer. But I think I'll refer to soft face right here. Damn it, Nir. You with your nuance again. Just give me the answer.
[39:28] I'll go way back. I'll quote Sophocles. Sophocles said, Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. So, of course, these things give us all kinds of goods, and they're also going to excise a cost. They're also going to give us bads. And so the solution isn't to say, stop using it. That's ridiculous. It's about getting the good while doing away with the bad. And this has happened over and over again with every technological revolution, right? The car. Is the car good?
[39:55] Or bad. Yeah, it's kind of both. It gave us global warming. It also gave us the ability to transport goods and services to people who need them. So they always come with a curse. And so what we're going to do as a species is to figure out how to get the best of these devices without letting them get the best of us. I think, though, what we need to be very careful of is a drumbeat for action that only comes from one source.
[40:25] Where do we hear the call to regulate social media from? You hear it from traditional media. And nobody's turning the lens on traditional media who is in competition with social media. Right. We know that Fox News, we talk about in the social dilemma, they talk about how Facebook at the time, that was what social media social dilemma was about, how Facebook was causing social derision. We know that Fox News is.
[40:49] had a much bigger impact on changing people's opinions than Facebook did during previous elections. So what I think we need to do is to refocus the lens to say, wait a minute, how do we make sure that people are getting the right media diet, not just on social media? At least on social media, we can tweak the algorithms.
[41:08] Right. Mark Zuckerberg and other people, you know, if there was regulation as such, or even if you just want to keep people engaged, it turns out that giving an occasional dose of someone else's opinion that's not yours in the social media feed can actually increase engagement. Whereas if you're watching Fox News, you are only getting one side of the story all day long or MSNBC or whoever else you want. So in a way, social media has the opportunity to give a more diverse opinion set if we so designed it, whereas our older technologies, they're only spouting the same perspective.
[41:37] And so I think we need to be a little bit skeptical about old media, legacy media, telling us that new media is so bad for us and when they're not looking at themselves in the mirror. I feel like social media is similar to to-do lists, which is the more conscious you are as you use them, the better it gets, the more benefit it gets. Do you like that? Do you like that connection there? No? Not good? Not good?
[42:01] Nier liked it, Drew. Nier likes my harebrained theories. All right, we'll be right back.
[42:13] All right, we're back. You know, during the break, I was thinking, Drew, hear me out here. We have a social network that is a to-do list. Oh, God. And we can share to-do lists. It's the eighth circle of hell, it sounds like. You can see each other's to-do lists. No, no. Are you in? I'm out. Nir, do you want to invest in my to-do list network? Yeah, Nir, you go ahead. I'm out. I want to see the pitch deck first.
[42:37] All right, we've got some audience questions. Nir's gonna join us and help us answer them. What do we have first, Drew? We do. This one comes from Kartikey, I think I'm saying that right, from YouTube, who asks, how do I get myself to do the things that I know I should do? We get some variation of this question all the time. We know what we should do, we have all the information. Why don't we do it?
[43:00] Yeah. I mean, this is the question that drove the writing of this book, as well as my research for the past decade and a half here, is all about this question. This is a fascinating question. In fact, Plato asked this question. The Greek philosopher 2,500 years ago, he called it akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. It is such a good question. Why is it?
[43:18] That despite knowing what to do, we don't frickin' do it. And today, you know, you can't argue you don't know what to do. Maybe, you know, our grandparents could say, well, I don't know how to lose weight because I don't have access to that information. I don't know how to start a business. Today, you know, right? And if you don't know, Google it. All the information is right there. The problem today is that not that we don't know what to do. It's that we don't know how to get out of our own way. We don't know how to stop getting distracted. Right.
[43:43] So the answer is to use these four strategies in concert. Number one, master the internal triggers. You need to have a plan in place so that when you feel bored, lonesome, indecisive, fatigued, uncertain, you know what to do with that sensation as opposed to what most people do is escape, right? I can't deal with this discomfort. Let me scroll something or click something or smoke something as opposed to, wait a minute, let me deal with this discomfort. Because what high performers do, what we find in studies is that high performers, they feel the same way the rest of us do.
[44:13] They also get bored and lonesome or indecisive. They feel the same way, but they know what to do with that feeling. And high performers will use that discomfort. They will use those internal triggers as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction rather than trying to escape it with distraction. So that's the first and most important step. You have to have a tool ready to go to deal with that discomfort. And there's about a dozen of those different tools in my book.
[44:37] The second step, make time for traction. You've gotta have that calendar so that you know, okay, I'm gonna work on that task without distraction. And the important thing here is, when you use a to-do list, back to railing on to-do list, Mark, when you use a to-do list, it's all about checking cute little boxes, right? That becomes the metric of success. I'm gonna check cute little boxes. That's what I used to do. It's so satisfying. It's so satisfying. I used to do that too. I'll go even deeper. I'll expose this. I used to write things in my to-do list
[45:06] After I had done that, just for the joy of coming up. How stupid is that, right? So that is the wrong metric of success. The right metric of success is not did I check off a cute little box because you know what you're going to do. You're going to do the easy stuff, the urgent stuff.
[45:22] Rather, the right metric of success is did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? That's it. That's it. Not did I finish. This is really important. Not did I finish. But did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction?
[45:40] Mark, this is how you wrote your second book and how I finished Indistractable. Remember, we sat down together. We said, all right, we're going to write for 45 minutes and we're not going to stop until the clock rings. That's all that matters. It wasn't about finishing. It was about working without distraction because then for the first time, you'll be able to say to yourself, okay, I've got this much to do.
[45:58] how much did I accomplish in this period of time when I worked without distraction? And then you can plan out how long the rest of the tasks will take you. As opposed to a person who just used a to-do list, they start on a task for five minutes, they start working on it, oh, let me just check email for a quick minute, oh, I could use a cup of coffee, and oh, Janet's at the water cooler, hey, Janet, okay, what was I working on again? I totally forgot.
[46:17] And so they take way longer to finish a task because they have no idea how long it takes to finish. And we know that on average, people take three times longer to finish a task than they estimate. This is why, because they don't have this feedback loop on how long things take. You can only do that with time boxing. So that's the third step, the second step, sorry. The third step is to hack back the external triggers of where we talk about how to
[46:39] Clear all those pings, dings, and rings. That's kind of kindergarten stuff. That doesn't take too much time, but still important. What's more important are all those stupid meetings you didn't need to go to that are nothing more than a distraction. Emails that didn't need to be sent and received. We can go through each and every one of those as well to hack back the external triggers. And then as the last line of defense, that's when we use these pacts where we have this pre-commitment that keeps us on track. So it's really about using those four strategies in concert.
[47:05] I do have a comment about the time versus because, you know, as somebody who's written multiple books, I've struggled both ways with this. Right. Like you can set the task, which is like I'm going to write 1500 words today. And the flaw of that is that you quickly find yourself just writing a bunch of shitty words that aren't usable so that you can hit your your your metric and say you're done for the day.
[47:30] From there, I switched to what you just described, which is like, okay, I'm going to write for three hours today. And it doesn't, if I do 1,500 words or 500 words or 3,000 words, it doesn't matter. As long as I write for three hours today. The flaw of that is that I can just sit there and like kind of half-ass an hour or two of it and say I did three hours. And so I've struggled with this. And I'm being very genuine here. Like I've struggled with this.
[48:00] Some tasks are more suited towards certain metrics than others. Like there are some tasks that like...
[48:07] Like you either pay your electric bill or you don't. Like there's no, I'm gonna time box 20 minutes to pay my electric, it's like, no, you just pay your fucking electric bill, right? Like it's a very yes or no binary thing. Whereas there are other, you know, say like researching something or brainstorming, like there's theoretically, you could research something infinitely
[48:31] Right? So you have to put a time limit on it. So this is less of a question and more of just like a little bit of a digging further into this topic of, I've come to the conclusion over the years that some things are more well suited towards some measurements of productivity than others. And I also believe that some, like people's personalities tend towards, like when I've experimented with time boxing,
[48:58] I just look at my calendar and I get so fucking stressed, like instantly. And I feel it feels so inflexible and so rigid and like anything that goes over or under or I'm late to, like it feels like a failure that it's like –
[49:17] I need a little bit more like flexibility in my life. So it's like I do this. Yeah. I do a combo of like calendar plus to do list, but I don't I'm not too religious about either one of them. I kind of like they live in harmony. But anyway, so the good news is the good news is that.
[49:34] you can plan for this flexibility. The problem is that a lot of people let perfect be the enemy of good. And we know that timeboxing and using what's called setting an implementation intention, just a fancy way of saying, planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. We know it works. I mean, study after study after study have shown this. The thing is people, very common trap, they make it overly rigid. And they think that the right mindset is to be a
[49:59] you have to do this and then you have to do this and that becomes exhausting. The right mindset is not to be a drill sergeant, it's to be a scientist. What is the job of a scientist? The job of a scientist is to make a hypothesis, run an experiment, look at the results and then run new experiments based on those results. So when you make a time box calendar, in the day it's set, it's locked and loaded.
[50:19] But there's no rule that says you can't change your calendar for the next day or the next day or the day after that. So right off the bat, I know, Mark, anybody who tells me I'm going to do three hours of writing in my schedule, no way. I don't know anybody who can do it. We've both written bestselling books. I don't know anybody who can write for three hours. So what you will learn, what I would definitely learn is if I try – and I've done this where I said, okay, I'm going to write for – I was never that ambitious. I said two hours.
[50:44] And then after two hours, oh, my God, I am. This is not working out. This is miserable. OK, well, then tomorrow, you know, I'm going to do I'm going to do a 30 minute time box, schedule a 15 minute break and then do another 30 minute time box. And that works out much, much better for me. So that experimentation is one thing that makes it much easier to follow that schedule.
[51:02] The second thing is that you can actually plan time for spontaneity, right? People say, well, what if somebody needs me? What if I'm not sure, you know, what I want to do? That's fine. So, for example, with my daughter, we have time every weekend. We have a big three-hour block of time.
[51:18] And we call it planned spontaneity. We don't know what we're gonna do together. Maybe we'll go to the park, maybe we'll get some ice cream, I don't know what we're gonna do. But I know what I will not be doing. I will not be checking social media, I will not be taking work calls because I've scheduled that time for someone I love very much. So that is a huge benefit of timeboxing is that you know you have scheduled out your values in advance. When it comes to spending time with people you love.
[51:40] in my calendar, taking care of my body, exercising. You know, at 46, I'm in the best shape of my life, not because I have good genes or because I'm particularly athletic, but because I do what I say I'm going to do. So the part of the problem is that people get so scared about scheduling their day, they don't even try it. As opposed to the idea is you're constantly asking yourself week after week, how do I make my schedule easier to follow?
[52:01] If something was too hard to do, well, then pare it down for the next day or make adjustments, move it around. But the idea is that if you don't plan that time, you look back and say, what the heck was I doing, right? I was doing all this other junk as opposed to the stuff that's really important to me and my values.
[52:14] Yeah, I think the commonality here, I've always said that productivity is personal. And I think what I mean by that is all these things that we're talking about, they're tools, right? And every tool is like the optimal use of timeboxing for you is going to be different than it is for me. And it's going to be different than it is for Drew. And
[52:34] Same thing with any lists that we make or any email organization, inbox organization that we do. The optimal point is always going to look different for everybody. And so I think there's a certain amount of flexibility that has to be brought to whatever tool you choose to use. And I think that gets lost a lot. Like whenever I see productivity advice online, it's just like it gets lost. People get very religious about it.
[52:57] Or a particular tool. Oh, you have to use this software and only this software. That's ridiculous. There is no magic tool, right? It is about iterating and adapting. Everybody's different. And to your point, your original point is like everybody's internal triggers are different.
[53:13] Right. Your productivity system and whatever tools you use in the way ways you use them should be catered to towards your personality, your particular internal emotional triggers, your weak points and strong points, etc. The original question was, how do I get myself to do the things that I know I should do? What if we change that slightly? Would you change your answer if it were, how do I get myself to feel like doing the things I should do?
[53:43] Isn't that the real question? Isn't that the real question? So, you know, we have all these strategies and these tools and these all of this. The real question is, why do I not feel like doing the things I know I should do? Right. Would you change your answer or is this also the same recipe?
[53:56] It's a great point, and I don't think that we know, frankly. I mean we have some approaches which I think have some real disadvantages. For example, you hear people saying a lot about, well, just get into flow, right? Just make it into flow. Or even better, make it into a habit, right? A habit has become code for I know I should, but I don't want to. Yes, yes.
[54:19] I want to get into an exercise habit. I hate freaking exercising, but if I create a habit, I'll have this autopilot button that will just make it easy to do. I don't like writing, but I know I really want to write a novel, and so can I just turn that into a habit? Well, no, you can't, right? Because what's the definition of a habit? The definition of a habit is the impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. How exactly do you write with little or no conscious thought? That doesn't sound like something that's going to be actually very readable. Or if you go to the gym and you're exercising with little or no conscious thought, you're
[54:48] You're not going to beat any PRs. You're not going to get much stronger. It requires effort. It requires hard work. So part of, you know, if you can find an activity that gets you into flow and is fun and you can turn into a habit, wonderful. Do it. How exactly do I do my taxes in flow?
[55:08] I don't, how do I do my taxes habitual? It sucks, it's no fun. And so that's the kind of behavior that people get distracted from. Nobody gets distracted from doing the stuff they like. That's easy. You can get into flow when it comes to stuff you like doing. It's the hard stuff you don't like doing, but of course,
[55:25] pretty much everything worth having in life is on the other side of discomfort. And so that's where we need a different approach. We don't need to try and ignore the discomfort, but rather we want to lean into that discomfort to know how to deal with it so that we can use it to propel us towards traction, rather than trying to escape it all the time with distraction. So the problem with, I think, some of these strategies that tell us to make the thing fun, right, to add the spoonful of sugar, is that
[55:51] When that doesn't work, when that invariably fails, and it's hard and uncomfortable, people start thinking, well, they're messed up, right? That there's something broken about them. There's nothing broken about them. It's this stupid technique, this lie that everything can be fun. No, some work is gonna be hard. And so the strategy should be to deal with that pain. As I said, time management is pain management, and expecting it to be difficult. Let me give you one concrete example so everybody can take away. So when I'm writing,
[56:20] And this is – writing is always hard work, right? I've written two books. I've written countless articles. It's always hard. All I want to do when I'm writing is go watch one of Mark's videos on YouTube or go do something else, right? Go check email. That's all I want to do when I'm writing or do research. I need to do research, right, which is just more procrastination.
[56:37] So what I've implemented now is a technique that comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, which is called the 10-minute rule. The 10-minute rule acknowledges that these uncomfortable internal triggers, they crest and they subside. But that's not how we feel them. In the moment, we think it's always going to be there, right? When you're bored, oh, I'm always going to be bored. When I'm uncertain, oh, I'm always going to be uncertain. When I'm anxious, I'm always going to be anxious. That's not the case.
[57:00] that emotions come and go. And so what acceptance and commitment therapy teaches is that if you can ride that urge, like a surfer on a surfboard for just a few minutes, that emotion will crest and subside. So here's what I do. So when I feel that urge, and this comes back to identifying what is that feeling, right, is it boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, if I can name it, and then just take a minute, and I do what's called the 10 minute rule, I set a timer for 10 minutes,
[57:27] I take a deep breath, and now I have a choice to make. I can either get back to the task at hand whenever I'm ready, or I can use these techniques to surf the urge. And one of the techniques that I use to surf the urge is a mantra. And so my mantra, you can steal it, you can borrow it, you can make up your own. My mantra when I feel this urge is to tell myself,
[57:49] This is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. And I'm acknowledging that it's not supposed to be easy, that if it was easy, everyone would do it. And so I'm not trying to escape that discomfort, I'm leaning into the discomfort by saying, yeah, bring it on, discomfort, that's part of the process. And what I find is that if I just repeat that mantra, and I try and just wait for 10 minutes until I can give in to that distraction, until that alarm rings, what I find is that nine times out of 10, way before the 10 minutes are up, I'm back to the task at hand.
[58:17] And so what you're doing over time is that you're increasing your self-efficacy. If you're saying, hey, I'm just going to work on this task for 10 minutes, okay? I'm not going to check my phone for 10 minutes. And if that's too long, make it five minutes, whatever it is. But over time, the five-minute rule becomes a 10-minute rule becomes a 15-minute rule. And what you're doing is building your agency. Remember that sense of control that we talked about earlier that's so important? That becomes your control valve is, yeah, these things don't control me. I control them. I can wait 10, 15 minutes until I decide to do something else.
[58:45] Viewing that pain management, as you put it, as it's a skill that can be built and developed. It's a muscle that you grow over time through consciously increasing it. We have a wisdom of the week. Do we have a wisdom of the week? We do have a wisdom of the week. It's by Nir Eyal, actually. Wait.
[59:04] I thought of one actually while he was talking. Oh, okay. All right. It actually fits perfectly given one of the things that he said. Okay. So Blaise Pascal once said, all of humanity's problems stem from people's inability to sit in a room quietly alone. Oh, okay.
[59:22] That's pretty good. You're so unimpressed. I was so excited about that. Because I'm so impressed by the one I have for that Nir said in one of his books. All right. Say Nir's and then we'll let the audience decide which one's better. Nir or Pascal. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. I thought that was a pretty good one. Wait, but that's not even my quote. That's actually Dorothy Parker. Oh, that's Dorothy. That is Dorothy Parker.
[59:49] I'm pretty sure that was Abraham Lincoln, and then before that it was Einstein. Yeah, before Lincoln. Can I add one more? Let's add one more so that- Yeah, please, please. Save this, please. It is a good one. So Puello Coelho said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. I like that. That's a good, so the point here is that like, okay, let's say social media is rotting our brains. Let's say all the critics are right. Okay, fine, let's give it to them. And now what?
[1:00:17] Right. How many times do we say goddamn Facebook, Instagram, TikTok before we freaking do something about it? If you're not doing anything about it, you're making a decision to constantly be distracted. Whereas an indistractable person says, you got me once. You're not going to get me again. Well said. Nir, it's been a pleasure, sir. Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. You're so well spoken. You're so smart. I miss you, dude. Like, I hope one day you come back. I hope one day I see you again.
[1:00:43] Yes, I know. We had a lot of fun together. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure I'll be in LA soon or hopefully you come out to Singapore and visit. And yeah, great to see you as always. Miss you, buddy. Yeah, you too, man. You too. All right. Thank you, Nir. Thank you, Nir. Talk to you soon. My pleasure. Thanks, guys. Take care. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Burney. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.