Hooked by Nir Eyal

These are my notes from Hooked by Nir Eyal. Each one contains a core idea from the book that stood out. The goal of writing my notes this way is that each could be it's own independent idea with the need for the specific context within the book.

The Big-Wave Surfing of Technology Waves

Mike Maples Jr. published a blog post in 2012 that detailed the patterns of technological waves. Every decade or so, a new wave comes. First, it was PCs, then servers, the internet, and social media, each one building on to the next one. Mike says there are 3 phases each one goes through. They start with infrastructure. Advances in infrastructure are the preliminary force that enables a large wave to gather. As the wave begins to gather, enabling technologies and platforms create the basis for new types of applications that cause a gathering wave to achieve mass penetration and customer adoption. Eventually, these waves crest and subside, making way for the next gathering wave to take shape. The opportunities for entrepreneurs are created when technology has suddenly made a behavior easier to do. The ability for others to complete complex behaviors becomes simplified.

Declared Versus Revealed Preferences

People don’t know what emotionally motivates them. If they did, all their needs and desires would be met. It’s an entrepreneur's job to understand how consumers' problems are being solved today so that they can give them exactly what they want. Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter said, "the Internet is a giant machine designed to give people what they want. We often have the broadest enabling tool to do all things... But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done." The best products are solving the timeless and universal needs that are revealed by what they prefer to do, not what they declare they want to do. The discrepancies between declared and revealed preferences are where opportunities are.

Understanding Counterintuitive Behaviors

When people make rational decisions, we can predict their behaviors with a high degree of certainty. B.J. Fogg described the 6 elements of simplicity (time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routine) as ways to influence behaviors, or predict them. In Econ 101, supply & demand are taught in a way that when price goes down, purchasing goes up. With this analogy in mind, we'd expect that when ability goes up (from a greater level of simplicity) more people will perform the behavior. That's not always the case. There's always exceptions because we don't always act in rational ways. Nir Eyal suggests "companies can boost users' motivation or increase their ability by understanding heuristics — the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and form opinions." Heuristics are a better predictor of actions. Understanding them deeply is a way to integrate directly into the patterns of thought that influence consumers.

Anticipation of Action

Dopamine is the chemical that drives our habits; we’ve evolved to crave it. For our brains, it is the pleasure center that makes us feel good. All of our habits tap into this part of our brain. However, it’s not actually the act of doing things that generate pleasure. Stanford professor Brian Knutson conducted a study where he had people gamble under an fMRI machine. Throughout this, they observed the parts of the brain that were most active. The pleasure centers of our brains are not most active when we receive the reward, but when we anticipate we will receive it. It was concluded that what pushes us to act is not the sensation from the reward itself but from our need to alleviate the craving. Really, what it is can be attributed to the stress of desire more than the outcome.

All Superpowers Can Be Used for Evil

The world is becoming more connected. Data has quickly become the most valuable resource, second to attention. Companies are able to collect, mine, and process data faster than ever. The reach of what can be tracked and optimized continues to grow with the progression of technology. Paul Graham said, "Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40." All of this data can be used to improve lives or turn people into mindless, dopamine-driven zombies. We can rise to new levels with greater abilities or sink into a downward trend of degeneration. We get the superpower of carrying out complex behaviors to focus our energy and attention on other things. It’s our decision to determine if those are the right things or not.

Competing With Digital Distraction: A Mind Monopoly

An infinite number of distractions exist in the world today. Notifications compete for the real estate on our home screens every minute of the day. To compete and stay relevant requires mastering novel tactics to integrate how users think. A company’s value is no longer just the metrics on a balance sheet but also the function of the space they occupy in a user’s mind through the strength of the habits they create with their product. The products get integrated into daily routines or emotion triggers, making them irreplaceable by any other distraction. The best products become too strongly associated to be ignored.

Habit Substitution

Entrepreneurs often build products that are only marginally better, rarely ever 10x, than what exists in the market today. They believe because there is some small improvement, people will switch over from the alternatives. Rarely do they win because user habits are a competitive advantage. John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard, went as far as to claim that "many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while they undervalue the new." His claim was for a company to own a market they must be at least 9x better than what exists today. We use the QWERTY keyboard not because it was the most efficient organization, but because the most efficient keyboard was only a marginal amount better in speed and accuracy. The cost to change habits and behaviors was much higher than the benefits it could provide.

Addictive Antibodies

The world is becoming more addictive by design. Morally, the creators of these products have not caught up to the speed at which technology is progressing. It isn’t neglect or ill will that drives this. We just don’t have the past to lean towards in order to understand the second or third-order effects of a world driven by addiction. Paul Graham says, we haven’t had time to develop societal antibodies to addictive new things. The responsibility falls on us as individuals to figure out what we should avoid and then carry through with it. Developing your own antibodies to addiction is the easiest way to reduce the stimulation and ensure improved behaviors that lead to a better life lived.

3 Steps to Deconstructing Innovation

Denis J. Hauptly deconstructs innovation in his book Something Really New into 3 steps:

1. Understand the reason people use a product or service.
2. Lay out the steps they must take to get the job done (intention to action).
3. Start removing steps until you get the simplest process.