Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
27 published records
01 / recommendation
“It's not being stolen, we're giving it away. And so, what we need to do is to empower ourselves by showing ourselves in practice as well as in theory that we can postpone that distraction when we say we will.”
02 / evaluation
“These are things in our outside environment, the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff in our outside environment, which we tend to blame for distraction, but studies find, that's only 10% of the reason we get distracted, 10% of the time it's because of something outside of us.”
03 / recommendation
“Another, you asked for more tools. Another product I love is called Focusmate. Have you tried Focusmate?”
04 / commitment
“One is this idea of just set a ten-minute timer and just tell yourself, "I am going to work on something that I really want to work on right now for 10 minutes and that's all I'm going to do.”
05 / observation
“"Oh, inbox zero. Let's get all the way to zero. Oh, that's cool. Okay, now the days are over.”
06 / belief
“I was going to ask what it was like beforehand. Nir, I think we delivered on our promise.”
07 / belief
“The carrot is the stick. So, what that means, I think that's incredibly empowering because what that means is that whenever we don't do something, whenever we procrastinate, it's just a feeling.”
08 / belief
“I don't believe in anything supernatural, but I think there's a lot of wisdom to be adopted from the practices of organized religion, and one of those is this secular prayer reminding me of my purpose.”
09 / belief
“I would say understanding these four steps of master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers, and preventing distraction with pacts.”
10 / belief
“Awesome. So, let's go through this and I'd love specifically example you shared, I think many people run into this.”
11 / belief
“I think about Linea, where they pay people to do a little project within their company.”
12 / belief
“You've touched on this point that I want to come back to around how you're not as confident that we're as addicted to technology and apps as we think, and I think that's really important.”
13 / belief
“I call it deep work time within the day. This was the only thing I had in the calendar, so I didn't do the other things, which I think would've been really helpful, but I had a, I called it deep work time.”
14 / uncertainty
“I don't know if this is an emotion or feeling, but there's just this, I need to get serious and start using my brain and there's going to be this deep work moment where I just get real deep and it takes a lot of effort to push me into that.”
15 / commitment
“I am going to be working on that as soon as we get off. Nir, thank you so much for being here.”
16 / belief
“For our last topic, I wanted to spend some time on Hooked, which I think could be its own podcast.”
17 / belief
“If we think about our temperament as these immutable qualities, as the attributes of our personality, we have to be very careful about what kind of identity and what kind of limitations we let in to our psyche.”
18 / commitment
“And we weren't being intimate because we were busy playing with our devices as opposed to each other. And so, I started doing this research around Indistractable and I learned about this technique around making an effort pact.”
19 / commitment
“If you know people are getting addicted to your product, you do have an ethical responsibility. And I've written about this for the past 10 years now about specific legislation that I think we need around what's called a use and abuse policy for people who are pathologically addicted.”
20 / evaluation
“I don't know what it's like now, but when I wrote the book, this was certainly the case that everybody from Stewart Butterfield on down, the CEO on down, believed that to do people's best work, they had to work without distraction.”
21 / commitment
“Every time that I am tempted to go do something else, which is all the time, what I will do is I will take out a timer, I'll take out my phone and I'll say, "Set a timer for 10 minutes.”
22 / evaluation
“This is tricky. So, I think the reason I'm struggling answering this is because there's a difference between habits and routines and a lot of things that people think are habits are not really habits.”
23 / recommendation
“The problem is our inability to deal with discomfort. So, what I have adopted for myself and what I'd advise anyone who finds themselves in this situation is to always identify what is that internal trigger, what is that itch that you are looking to escape when you get distracted, because that is the source of 90% of our distractions.”
24 / evaluation
“Becomes pretty easy when you look at both words, traction, distraction. They're opposites because both words come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull, and they 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 us.”
25 / recommendation
“What you want to do, and this is step number two, is you're making time for traction by turning your values into time, which means you are going to make a time box schedule because you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.”
26 / evaluation
“I have to use these tools. So, I wanted much more practical advice, and what I discovered was that the root cause of distraction is much more interesting and the solution is far more empowering than stop using technology, technology's evil, it's melting your brain.”
27 / evaluation
“They're not negations, they're complements. And I think I am uniquely qualified to write both these books because I know these techniques work and I know where they don't work.”