‘I don’t write what I know, I write what I want to know.’
You know Nir Eyal. He’s an authority on behaviour change and human potential, a respected academic and the bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable. His latest book is called Beyond Belief: The science-backed way to stop limiting yourself and achieve breakthrough results.
But did you know that he’s not writing for you, dear reader – he’s writing for himself, to satisfy his curiosity about a topic that’s caught his attention? Or that when he sits down to write, it immediately triggers an anxiety response: ‘Why is this so difficult? It’s boring. What if nobody likes my book? What if I don’t make my deadline? What am I even doing?’
In this fascinating conversation, we explore what beliefs mean for life and work and, most relevantly for this podcast, writing. You’ll discover how he replaced those anxious questions with a more liberating belief, which I guarantee will work for you too (I know because it worked for me).
And – of course – we talk about AI: where it’s helpful for writing and where it becomes a dirty thief if you let it.
Nir’s website: https://www.nirandfar.com/
Nir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nireyal/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: Well, this is very exciting. I’m here today with Nir Eyal, who is an authority on behaviour change and human potential, a former lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He’s the author, and I’m sure you know this, of the international bestsellers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
And his new book is called Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. So first of all, welcome to the podcast, Nir. It’s great to have you here.
Nir Eyal: Thank you. Great to be with you, Alison. Thanks for having me
Alison Jones: So I’m really fascinated by the progression that your sort of cognitive journey has taken. You’ve been sort of putting it out in the books that are out there, so from the habits to the, the focus to now this idea about belief, and I just talk us through that sort of progression of ideas.
Nir Eyal: Sure. So I I think unlike other nonfiction authors, I don’t write what I know, I write what I want to know. And so I’m bringing readers on a journey of a subject that I don’t have the answer to. And that’s because I write about my problems. I have to write about something that I am genuinely interested in finding the answer to.
So it’s almost like a murder mystery. I want to know the answer. I want to know who done it. And so with Hooked, I had this question around how do you build habit-forming products? It became the subtitle of the book, and I didn’t find any other books on the topic. Lots of books about how to change personal habits, but I couldn’t find any about how do you change habits through the products we use.
The second book, Indistractable, was kind of the other side of the coin. It was about how do we break bad habits to many of the products that we use as well.
Alison Jones: Now that you’ve equipped the product designers to hook us, how do we get ourselves out of that?
Nir Eyal: I kind of intended. I, you know, I like to court controversy, so that’s kind of what I wanted people to think. Actually, that’s not the case because we want to get hooked to Fitbod to get us hooked to exercise. We want to get hooked to Duolingo to help us learn a new language. We want to get hooked to the good stuff, but we want to unhook from the bad stuff.
It’s not the same stuff though, right? I’ve never worked for Facebook. I’ve never worked for Instagram or Twitter. I’ve never worked for any of those companies. Who do you think I stole these secrets from? Right? They’ve been around for a long time. The casinos have been around for a very long time, so I was just applying it in a way so that hopefully companies that can build healthy habits in users’ lives can use it for good, and that’s exactly what’s happened.
You know, every conceivable industry from healthcare to personal finance, all kinds of industries have used the hook model to build healthy habits in their users’ lives as intended. Now, Indistractable was about the other side, right? We want to get hooked to the good products. We want to disconnect, to become indistractable when it comes to the bad products, but they’re not the same products.
So, you know, so we want to get– we want to disconnect from scrolling too much or drinking too much or smoking too much, all, all the bad habits. So that’s what Indistractable was about. And then Beyond Belief, same story. I had this burning need to solve a problem for myself, and when I didn’t see other books that tackled the topic, I wanted to go deeper myself.
Alison Jones: It’s a lovely expression of what I’ve always sort of deeply felt, but you don’t hear articulated so much. I think people do have this sense that author, authority, I must write about what I know and, you know, and then they– school teachers say that, don’t they? Write what you know about. But actually, it’s such a great personal and professional development project book, isn’t it?
It gives you an excuse to have really interesting conversations with really interesting people about stuff that you’re passionate about
Nir Eyal: So true, and this is why I love my job. Because, you know, turns out if you spend five or six years on a topic relentlessly trying to get to the answer to a mystery that’s not solved to your satisfaction, turns out you become the world expert in that topic. And then people start calling you thinking that you know the answer, Because, you know, if you spend enough time…
Alison Jones: …you wrote the book on…
Nir Eyal: …get a, a PhD level education in whatever you’re really curious about….
Alison Jones: …but it’s a very egoless way to do it, isn’t it? It’s not about saying, “Look everybody, I have answers.” It’s like, “Oh, I’ve got some really good questions and I really want to explore them.” I love that. Well, tell us about Beyond Belief, Because, some of the stuff in there is mind-blowing. So, I mean, what surprised you?
What did you discover? Why belief- why do beliefs matter so much?
Nir Eyal: Yes. So I think what, what got to me about Beyond Belief, and the reason I wrote the book was that after I wrote Indistractable, which I, you know, rigorously researched for six years, there’s 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies, and it really does work. As much as people complain about, you know, the algorithms are taking over our brains and everybody’s addicted to social media and using their phones, actually, you know, I spent a few years and I wrote, you know, what is it? 250 pages. You can read it in an afternoon. It solves the problem. Invariably, everyone who follows these four steps in this book is free from their distractions. They become indistractable.
And yet, I would hear from time to time, you know, I do these office hours with my readers every Wednesday night for an hour. Anybody can call me. They book time and I answer any questions they have if they’ve read my books. I love talking to my readers and answering their questions. And every once in a while, maybe every 10th 10th or 20th caller would say “You know, I read ‘Indistractable.’ I really liked it. I really enjoyed it. It’s just that it didn’t work for me.”
And I’d say, “Oh, tell me more. You know, let’s walk step by step. I want to see where it didn’t work for you. I’m so fascinated by, you know, how I could improve the book and the methodology. So where did it fall down? Let’s talk about step one. How did step one go for you?” they’d say, “Oh, you know, I read step one. I read it. I read it. I just didn’t do it.”
Alison Jones: “I think we might have found the issue.”
Nir Eyal: Yes. “Yes, so I understand. No problem. I get it. Okay, let’s go to step two. Maybe you just skipped step one. How did step two go for you?” And they’d say, “Oh, you know, step two I really liked that part of the book. Super interesting. It’s just that I didn’t do that one either.”
And they would wait sometimes for months to tell the author of a book that the thing that they didn’t do didn’t work. And so I became really fascinated by this. Why is this in an age where we have so much information, we’re drowning in information, we all basically know what to do, why don’t we do it?
And I thought, you know, I was an econ major in college and what they teach you in economics is that behaviour is all about incentives, that if you want some kind of benefit, your paycheck, some kind of reward, some kind of benefit, some kind of utility, then you will do the behaviour to get that utility, that human behaviour is all about incentives.
But there’s something missing, right? It’s not good enough to just know what to do and why I want to do it, because if that was the case, we would all have six-pack abs and be multimillionaires. The information’s all out there. We know what to do. We know we’re supposed to go to the gym. We know we’re supposed to work on that business.
We know the stuff that we’re supposed to do. And if you don’t know, buy a book on it. Ask ChatGPT. You know, Google it. It’s all there. The, the missing element is belief, that we can know exactly what to do with the behaviour, we can want the benefit, but if we don’t have the belief holding what I call this motivation triangle together, we won’t do it.
And so that’s really where the book kicks off about all about the powers of belief to change what we see, what we feel, what we do, and ultimately who we become.
Alison Jones: And the power of that is unbelievable Because we– I’m really interested in that relationship between what we believe and what’s true and what’s useful. And you have a really interesting sort of taxonomy around that. So I really want to sort of dive into… There’s a bit– We’re going to get a bit philosophical here, but I think
Nir Eyal: Sure. Yes, it’s, I it’s super important because we kind of use, you know, “I believe this, I believe that,” and we take that to mean that it’s a fact, that it’s a truth.
truth But it’s not exactly a fact. That a fact is something that is true whether or not you believe it, okay? The world is more like a sphere than it is flat.
Sorry, flat Earthers, the world doesn’t care what you believe. A fact is a fact. You cannot change facts. On the other end of the spectrum, we have faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. God rewards the righteous. There’s no amount of evidence going to change someone’s mind on that. That is a matter of faith.
But between fact and faith, we have something very special called a belief. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. And what makes beliefs so special is that unlike faith, which people almost never change, unlike facts, which you cannot change, beliefs are malleable. Beliefs are not truths, they are tools. That’s the most important lesson that I learned in the six years writing these books, is that we can change our beliefs because they don’t have the same level of the burden of evidence of truth.
Because so many of our beliefs about the future, “I’m not good at public speaking.” Always? Is it like eye color? Is it something you’re born with? No. It’s a skill like any other. If I believe that I’m no good at public speaking, well, I don’t put myself out there, and that becomes the truth. Because I believed it, I act accordingly, it changes my behaviour, and then it becomes a fact. But by changing our beliefs, we can in fact change what we do, what we see, what we feel, and ultimately who we become because these beliefs are malleable.
And so that’s what I really wanted to teach myself how to do, right? If you think about, you know, as a, as an author, writing is super hard. It’s really…
Alison Jones: …let’s come on that. Yes.
Nir Eyal: Yes, it’s really hard. And so what I was really jealous of, you know, I noticed some of my author friends, for some, somehow for them it seemed effortless.
Somehow that they didn’t have this belief that I had that writing is hard. For them, writing was joyful, and I wanted that. I wanted that secret weapon of doing something that to me appears to be difficult and draining and you know, boring and often frustrating. How can you see it differently? And it turns out that is within our control if you know how.
Alison Jones: And it doesn’t have to be that you persuade yourself of the reality of something. Is it that, again, there’s that, that relationship is more complex. You talk in the book about how placebos work even when you know it’s a placebo, and that, that blew my mind. So how does that work?
Nir Eyal: Isn’t that amazing? So we– This was a big part of… it’s amazing. So yes it’s absolutely true. We used to believe that placebos required deception, that we have what we call a double-blind controlled study, and so in a medical trial, the patient as well as the doctor, nobody knew who was getting the placebo and who was getting the active substance.
And then Dr. Kaptchuk at Harvard decides that he wants to run a little experiment, and he calls in patients who are suffering from irritable bowel syndrome. Now, irritable bowel syndrome is known to be highly susceptible to the placebo effect. So he calls in these patients. He tells them, “This is a placebo.”
He holds up the medicine jar right in front of him. It says “placebo” on the label. He says, “This is a placebo. It is an inert substance.” But here’s the important part, here’s what he says: “It has been shown to help some people with the symptoms of IBS.” That’s all he says. He gives these patients the placebo, knowing full well what it is.
It turns out that this placebo, what we call an open label placebo or an honest placebo, was as effective at reducing the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome as the leading pain medication. In fact, some people after the study called Dr. Kaptchuk and said, “Dr. Kaptchuk, can I please get some more of those amazing pills?
Those placebo pills were great. How can I get some more?” In fact, now, I’m not kidding, you can search at this very moment, you can go onto Amazon, you can search for placebo pills, and you will see for sale placebo pills labeled as such. There’s no deception whatsoever, and in the description, you will see five-star reviews for fast-acting relief.
Alison Jones: It’s incredible, isn’t it?
Nir Eyal: Incredible. So, so here’s the question, right? If we know that placebo pills can have such a tremendous effect, and there’s some caveats, right? The placebo’s a big misconception is that placebos heal. Placebos do not heal because there’s a difference between sickness–
Alison Jones: …of it…
Nir Eyal: …exactly, sickness and illness.
So placebos don’t cure cancer, placebos don’t heal a broken bone, but they definitely are very effective with illness. Sickness is in the body, illness is in the mind. Those are two separate things. And it turns out 80% of our healthcare spending is on illness, not sickness, on the symptoms, on the perception of those symptoms.
So if it’s as effective for IBS, for anxiety disorder, for ADHD, for insomnia, the list of the things that placebo pills are good for or effective at is so long, where else can it be effective? Can it help you go to the gym? Can it help you write when you’re bored and finding it difficult?
Can it help you sustain your perseverance and resiliency? Absolutely it can, if you know how to use them correctly.
Alison Jones: And that gap between what we know at one level to be true and what we choose to believe, that I think is absolutely fascinating. And I love the point you make about, you know, the utility of a belief as being just as an important a consideration here as the actual truth of it.
It’s incredible.
Nir Eyal: I’m very science-based. I would make fun of many of these things, you know, like, traditional Chinese medicine and chiropracty and, you know, I mean, the list goes on and on. There’s all kinds of of treatments that, you know, science shows is no better than a placebo, and that’s kind of a, a bad thing.
“Oh, you’re no better than a placebo.” No, placebos are very effective.
Alison Jones: Right.
Nir Eyal: …don’t need to con… I mean, there’s one level, you know, for scientific efficacy that’s a different story when it comes to sickness, that it does need to beat a placebo. But when it comes to these these symptoms that are illness related, that are about pain and suffering, the interpretation of our suffering, we should be using more placebos. Not just, you know, pills and shots and potions.
Not, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about beliefs, right? Having certain beliefs that you’re using, not because they are necessarily true, but because they work, because they are useful.
So, for example, with my writing, I used to say to myself this script of, “Oh, you know, this is… why is this so difficult? It’s boring. What if nobody likes my book? What if I don’t make my deadline? You know, what am I even doing? What if this goes nowhere?” And I would go down this anxiety spiral that was not serving me because of what I call limiting beliefs, right? All these limiting beliefs that were sapping my motivation.
Well, in the process of writing Beyond Belief, I discovered that I could install what’s called a liberating belief, a belief that increases your motivation. So now, instead of going down that anxiety spiral, now I have a new liberating belief. What’s that liberating belief? As opposed to, “Oh, this feeling right now is bad.
If I was a real professional author, I wouldn’t feel this way. Why is this so hard?” You know, just, “Other authors don’t experience this,” which is all just belief, now, the liberating belief is this: whenever it gets… I still feel the same physiological symptoms, the anxiety, the fatigue, the boredom, still get those.
But now I interpret that response that, that information that we call emotion, I interpret it differently. Now, the thing I say to myself is this: is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better.” Do I know that for a fact? Maybe not. I don’t know. But it’s a belief. It’s useful. And so beliefs are tools, not truths.
Alison Jones: Yes. Amazing. And I think it’s really interesting that you admit so openly to, to finding writing really hard and boring and, you know, anxiety making up because, well, it isn’t it? And, or it can be if you don’t, you know, do the belief flip. So what’s interesting is that this is your third book, so you ploughed through all those bad, difficult feelings, and we talked right at the beginning about why you might do that, because it’s such a fascinating thing to do.
But why? What is it about writing that you value that got you through the hard yards to this point?
Nir Eyal: To me, my rule, and this has been another one of my liberating beliefs, is to follow my curiosity. That, I love my readers, I’m so thankful. You know, I’ve sold over a million copies. It’s an incredible honour that people find my work helpful. But I’ll be totally honest with you, I write for me.
I want to know the answer. I want to solve my own problems. And frankly, I think the reader can tell that. You can tell when an author is just calling it in because they want to have written a book, right? They want the honour of, “Oh, you know, look at me I finished a book.” That’s not why I write. I don’t want to show off what I know. I need the answer. And so that’s what always carries me through, is that curiosity.
Alison Jones: Just damned if I’m not going to finish this book and find out the… I love that. You talked as well about talking to your readers. Tell me a bit more about that, Because I’ve never heard an author do that. I love that
Nir Eyal: Yes. Yes, so it serves a couple purposes. One is that I get a lot of emails of, you know, “Can I just pick your brain? Can I just ask you a quick question?” And you know, can I just take you out to coffee?” Which I’m flattered by, but I just don’t have time. And so what I do is I have time in my calendar every single week, 15-minute blocks, so four hours every week– or sorry, four blocks every week, so an hour.
And anybody can call me as long as they’ve read one of my books. You know, I ask them a few questions about what you want to talk about, so I read it in advance what their questions are, and I get so much out of it. I mean, I love asking questions as much as I like being asked questions, so I always walk away from those discussions with either new content to go explore or a new angle at things, so I love it.
And actually, I’ve made some of my best angel investments from those calls as well, that people use my methodology for their businesses, so that’s paid off financially as well.
Alison Jones: I love that. And I imagine this– I sort of want to do this at beta draft stage rather than fi– Because I can imagine you get really helpful feedback. Does that feed into the next book?
Nir Eyal: Oh totally. The next book or the next revision, you know, people will call and say, “Hey, I don’t think you got this exactly right.” Amazing. Thank you. That’s priceless.
Alison Jones: There’s this great story you should know about. I can just imagine. Yes, that’s absolutely brilliant. I love that. So I always ask my guests for their best tip. I mean, you’ve sort of given us about 80 already, so I am being a bit greedy here. But if there’s somebody listening and they are kind of stuck in the, “This is really hard. If this– If I was any kind of writer, this would be feeling better,” you know, if they’re in that sort of space, what else would you say to them? I mean, it could be a really down and dirty, practical, tactical thing, or it could be some lofty mantra. What would you say?
Nir Eyal: Well, wow, there’s a lot. I, you know, all advice is autobiographical, so I’ll tell you what’s worked for me. I think number one is managing your attention. So you know, what the biggest mistake I see authors making is that they say, “Well, I just don’t feel inspired. I have writer’s block, and so I’m not going to write today.”
That’s ridiculous. That is totally a belief. There’s never been a diagnosis where you go see a doctor and a doctor says, “Oh, I took a look at your blood work and it looks like you have writer’s block.”
Alison Jones: “Terrible case of writer’s block.” Yes.
Nir Eyal: Exactly. It is a belief. It doesn’t mean it’s not real. All pain is real, and it’s all in your head.
So you need a new liberating belief to free you from that. And so one of the things that, that I found to be incredibly effective is time boxing. That’s the secret to my success that I don’t write when I feel like it, I write when my calendar tells me it’s time to write. And that’s, and this I stole from Steven Pressfield, right?
That’s what he says,
Alison Jones: The War of Art.
Yeah
Nir Eyal: Amateurs write when they feel like it, where professionals put their butt in the chair and do the work. It doesn’t mean the work has to be good, but you do need to get into that routine of doing the work. And I think you know, the mantra that I constantly repeat to myself is follow your curiosity.
If you are chasing the New York Times bestseller list, if you are chasing a big payday, you’re just bad at math. That is a terrible reason to become an author. A good reason to become an author is because writing is fun. Writing is how you understand what you think. Writing is how you understand the world around you.
That’s a good reason to write, not because you want fame and fortune.
Alison Jones: I mean, I’m nodding so hard that I’m sort of in danger of doing myself a bit of damage to my neck. But I also I’m feeling a little bit sad because I know how many people are interpreting that message that this is hard, and now they have the option to say, “Hey, Claude, write me…” And I think that’s process of writing is such a, a valuable, enjoyable, in a really, in a way that running a marathon is enjoyable, you know, productive time.
So what would you say to someone who’s like, “Do you know, I haven’t got really time to write the book, but I’ve got some ideas and I’m just going to turn to AI to fill them out”?
Nir Eyal: I mean, it, it’s easier than ever to write a book. It’s harder than ever to write a good book.
Alison Jones: Yes
Nir Eyal: All right? Anybody can… Now all of a sudden, with a push of a button, anybody can write a book. They’re just words. But I think what AI is doing, I, you know, I’m not worried that AI AI is getting smarter.
I’m worried that we’re getting dumber. I mean, I see it with myself. It’s just so easy to say, “Oh, well, let me just see what Claude thinks. Let me see what ChatGPT thinks.” And you are robbing yourself. I mean, I intentionally don’t do that anymore. I mean, I’ll still use AI to, you know, do grammar checks and things like that.
I think it, why not? It’s great.
Alison Jones: It’s hard not to if you use Word.
Nir Eyal: Right. Right, and why shouldn’t we? I mean, I that’s not, you know, anybody’s zone of genius is being incredible at grammar and spelling. So why not? Let, let’s let the algorithms do that. But when it comes to original thinking, you’re really robbing yourself of understanding what you believe.
It’s almost the same way that, you know, when we hear speech. Speech is one level of understanding a topic, that I can change the intonation of my voice or the long dramatic pauses that I have between a thought, and it sounds very persuasive. doesn’t give you that.
Alison Jones: Yes
Nir Eyal: Writing is the reader, by themselves, without you in the room, reading what you have to say.
And in that process of creating the written word and expressing an idea, you will discover that what you thought you knew with utmost conviction ain’t so. Because when you put it on the page, you realize that what you thought you knew is not true. And I think that is something that is way too valuable to rob yourself of.
And the AIs can’t do it for you. They really can’t, because by definition, the AIs are regurgitating information that they have already processed. It’s a word prediction machine. That’s all they’re doing. They’re not intelligent. They’re … I hate the terminology “AI”, we should just call them algorithms.
They’re not intelligent. They’re not problem solvers, at least in the context of our writing. They’re really good at imitating thought, but they’re not actually thinking. They’re not experiencing cognition the way we do. But they can fake it really well, and I think that is really robbing us of something.
Not that I’m anti-AI. I think we should definitely use it, but…
Alison Jones: …but not for writing. Yes, don’t write for you.
Nir Eyal: Not, definitely not for that first phase. For that rough draft it really does behoove you to, to do it on your own.
Alison Jones: Absolutely. Brilliant. And I know I sort of led you down that, but I’m really glad that we got that point in, because it feels really important to me. And I always love it when people talk about the intrinsic value of writing because I think that’s often people who are thinking, “Oh, I would love to write a book. I would love to have a book in my business.” Like, you know, “I’d love to have written a book.” They don’t necessarily focus on what, how valuable that process is going to be for them.
Nir Eyal: Absolutely.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. I also always ask my guests to recommend us a book. Doesn’t have to be a business book, but Yes, what book…
There, there’s a lot of recency bias in this. Often people are like, “Well, I’m reading this just now and it’s the best book I’ve ever read.” But, you know…
what would you suggest?
Nir Eyal: I’m let’s see. A book that I oftentimes recommend because I don’t think it got enough attention, a book by Rory Sutherland that’s called Alchemy. And it’s a great book. I don’t think enough people read it. It’s a really great read. It’s in a topic area that I really like around behavioural economics and applied psychology.
And then the second book I’d recommend real quick, because I think everyone should read it, is a book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness. And especially if you’re feeling depressed about the state of the world, pick up this book today. It will tell you how, you know, many– back to the subject of beliefs, how we believe the world is terrible, how everything is collapsing, everything’s awful, the world’s on fire, everything is miserable. Not true. Like, just not true.
Alison Jones: The facts do not support that story.
Nir Eyal: The facts do not support it.
Alison Jones: And actually, if you look at Hans Rosling’s he did a TED Talk, didn’t he, with a fabulous moving sort of, it’s the best graphical illustration of…
Nir Eyal: …so good.
Alison Jones: Yes. The late, great Hans Rosling.
Nir Eyal: He was fantastic. I know I love– What I love about that book is he gave this quiz to the smartest people on Earth, the professors, right? He found hundreds of super smart professors, and he gave them this quiz of the state of the world, you know, female empowerment and democracy and public health all these things that we care about.
How well is the world doing on all these metrics? It turns out the professors, the most educated people on the planet, did worse than if he had given the same exam to monkeys. They literally scored worse than random chance. They scored worse than if monkeys had taken the test.
Alison Jones: I mean, that in itself is, it means it’s a great recommendation, isn’t it? I love that. Thank you. Two fantastic recommendations. Brilliant. So Nir, if people want to find out more about you, more about your books, they want to give you a call, where should they go?
Nir Eyal: Yes, so my website is nirandfar.com, but Nir is spelt like my first name, so that’s N-I-R and far.com. And the latest book is called Beyond Belief.
Alison Jones: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute treat talking to you.
Nir Eyal: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Alison.
