Nir Eyal's Blog, page 3

Getting Great Sleep is Much Easier Than You Think

A few years ago, I started waking up at three o’clock every morning. Over the years, I’d read many articles about the importance of rest, so I knew the research was unequivocal: Quality sleep supports cognitive performance and lowers the risk of diseases and health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, and dementia. Knowing that, I’d toss and turn in bed, disappointed that I wasn’t following through on my plan to get seven to eight hours of shut-eye.

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How to Be Lucky in Business and Life: 4 Science-Backed Principles

Something as vague and indiscernible as “luck” has no place in the business world, right? Except studies show luck can make all the difference between business success and failure. Turns out, it’s not a matter of being born lucky. You can, quite literally, make your own luck in business and in life.

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How to Stop Overthinking

We all dwell on unresolved personal conflicts from time to time. Who hasn’t ruminated on a hurtful comment or unintentional harm we might have caused someone? Feeling bad about something you did, or something done to you, is human. But while it’s expected that the arguments we’ve had, the negative events we’ve experienced, and the major decisions we face haunt us, rumination can also pile on new problems.

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How to Handle a Distracting Boss

See if you can relate to Sarah. She’s a software engineer who loves her job—except for her manager, Tom. To Tom, everything is a crisis worthy of interrupting Sara, even when she’s trying to focus on her work. One morning, while Sarah was coding a critical feature, Tom called and asked her to drop everything to help with an urgent report for the CMO.

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Only People Who Believe in Luck Have It

Richard Branson will be the first to tell you that he’s generally a lucky person in business and life. An adrenaline junkie, he’s lived through several near-death experiences, including in the early ’70s, when he and his then-wife survived a shipwreck that no other passengers did by jumping off the boat in a storm and swimming to shore. Branson isn’t the only uber-successful person to say that luck was on their side.

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Can You Think Yourself Thinner?

As a clinically obese teen, my parents were desperate to get me to a healthy weight. My mom coaxed me on a walk through our boring, middle-class Central Florida suburb every Sunday. The road we walked was paved with good intentions, but for me, it was hell: the heat and humidity, the painful chafing between my thighs, the inevitable embarrassment of applying Vaseline to said chafing. … If I was going to suffer, I would need a reward, and it had better be a good one!

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Work Productivity Hacks & Tips for Today’s Workplace

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Why Successful People Only Get More Successful

You know those people who just seem to get more and more successful? It’s as if each success gives them momentum to achieve even more. Bridgit Mendler is a former Disney child star turned singer, lawyer, and entrepreneur. Amor Towles was a very successful investment banker for two decades and then became a very successful author. Well, there’s a secret to their success, and no, it’s not the obvious money, privilege, and social class (although those certainly count for something). It’s not even their natural talent.

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How to Become an Indistractable Reader

When I was growing up, you couldn’t pay me to read a book about self-help or business. Now, I read between 60 to 80 books every year. A good non-fiction book is the distilled knowledge of years of research and insight and costs just a few bucks. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of such a cheap, efficient way to learn lessons that could change your life without having to do the work or live the experiences the author had to bear?

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Want to Live Longer? Change Your Mind About Aging

Typing in “longevity” into Amazon reveals over 40,000 books on the topic. Each author purports their own cure, typically involving a special diet, miracle supplement, or painful practice. However, there is one often overlooked factor that studies have found increases lifespan by seven years or more.

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