Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. You know how you strive to stay productive during the day, yet there are all those buzzes, bings, and dings calling out to you from every direction?

If you've ever felt like you could be so much more productive, if only those distractions would just quiet down, then get ready to feel empowered.

I had the pleasure of speaking with

NIR Ayal, author of Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Neer writes,

consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He previously

taught as a lecturer in marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of

Business and the Hassel Platner Institute of Design at Stanford. He was dubbed by the MIT Technology

Review as the profit of habit-forming technology. Bloomberg Business Week wrote, Neer Ayal is the

Habits guy. And I learned a ton in this conversation. I hope you enjoy. Well,

NIR, welcome to the Modern Mentor podcast. It is an honor and a pleasure to have you on the show.

And I can't wait to dive into this conversation. Oh, thank you so much for having you,

Rachel. So when I picked up your book, Indistractable, something that struck me about it pretty early on

is that, as I understand it, you didn't just decide to start writing this book one day,

but rather you wrote it as almost a little bit of an antidote to another book that you had

written some years earlier. And I'd love for you to share a bit of that backstory with us.

So my first book, Hook, is about how to build habit-forming products.

And indestructible is about how to break bad habits.

And the good news is we can have our cake and eat it too, that we can use technology to help us build good habits in our lives and all sorts of companies from

ed tech to fintech to health tech all kinds of companies use my first book hook to help people

build good habits in their lives and of course that's a wonderful thing right we want kids to

get hooked to education we want people to get hooked on to new health behaviors that help them live

healthier lives. We want people to save money by changing their consumption habits. So there's

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