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The Billion Dollar Mind Trick: An Intro To Triggers
- eurleif 15y agoMakes me think of "there are no atheists in foxholes". Does religion have a trigger on despair?
- reddit_clone 14y agoEsp. fear of death and aftermath. If people know what happens after death, religions will be out of business overnight.
- naa42 14y agoThis popular phrase often strikes me as untrue. For example, at the end of WWI number of religious soldiers in Russian army reduced drastically. Church in Russia collapsed after First World War/Russian Civil War.
- jamesaguilar 15y agoMeh. In this sense one could become "addicted" to writing in a journal. "Addict" is quite the pejorative term to use for someone who likes taking and posting pictures of things. That said, triggering is a fascinating phenomenon and can be used consciously on yourself for fun or profit.
- acgourley 15y agoBecause a journal-writing does not give a variable-reward triggered dopamine hit after the activity, it does NOT form a habit in the same way instagram does.
- roc 15y agoIt doesn't? What about blogging?
- paged90 15y agoBlogging gives the blogger a rewarding experience of being listened to - I wouldn't say that's a trigger, people enjoy being heard, so while they have listeners, they're gonna speak. The reader on the other hand gets a new post, which could be about anything, and sometimes the post will be bad, other times good, really good. This will create a variable reward system, and keep the reader coming back.
- acgourley 14y agoBlogging can definitely be habit forming, especially micro blogging, or, tweeting. I just didn't think that's what he meant.
- jamesaguilar 15y agoYou presumably have some evidence that posting a picture to Instagram gives you such a hit, while posting an article to your blog does not. Or at the very least you have some reason to believe this. Could you show it to me? It's going to need to be pretty strong evidence to convince me that blogging, a medium where some posts get a lot of feedback, others a little, and still others none at all, is a system without a variable schedule of rewards.
- acgourley 14y agoI agree blogging can count here, when you said journal I thought you meant pen-and-paper private journals.
- vm 15y agoThis article skims the surface of habit formation. For a great read on the topic, checkout the current bestseller: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business. http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/1400069289 http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/14000... The jist of it is that we all have habit loops that we respond to without realizing it. They flow through the cycle of CUE->ROUTINE->REWARD->CRAVE. Everything starts with a CUE, which triggers the habit. It could be something as simple as the little red indicator on your iphone app. This is followed by ROUTINE - or the series of actions that we normally think of as a habit. Next is the REWARD which can be surprising at times - you might think you get that cookie after lunch to enjoy the sugar rush, but in reality you might just enjoy talking to coworkers in the cafeteria. Lastly, for any habit to stick, you must CRAVE the reward at the end. The book goes in more depth about how to use this cycle to structure habits in your own life (I have FINALLY started to workout and wake up early since reading the book). It also has great case studies about how advertisers, product managers, people managers, and more are structure these habits to influence consumers, employees, etc
- astrofinch 14y agoI found this book unusually good for a popular nonfiction book, in the sense that it actually had a decent insights/page count ratio: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching-Training/dp/0553380397 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching-Training/dp/05...
- nickpinkston 15y agoThe article isn't half-bad, but must we always refer to things based on "Billion Dollar" money-centric thinking. What happening to "world changing", "breakthrough", etc. hyperbole? Maybe it's less measurable, but it'd be nice for us to at least frame what we do as trying to accomplish more than deal digital heroin to make GigaBucks.
- ajays 15y agoIt's about Instagram, and there are people still mulling the "billion dollar" figure about Instagram getting acquired by FB.
- nickpinkston 15y agoInstagram being cared about because of acquision size is part of this too. I'm skeptical about what "value" is really created with companies like this. Zygna seems like a net-loss for society, "they're gonna make billions!" seems to justify it in the eyes of many...
- uvTwitch 15y agoNo, we don't, but billion-dollar is a far more appropriate thing to associate with instagram than world-changing.
- Swizec 15y agoI still remember learning about this at Doublerecall HQ in Palo Alto. It was an interesting evening of random charts on a drawing board. The idea was so profounding everyone had to know, immediately. If I remember correctly Nir and one of the founders were at a seminar together where the power of triggers was explained. That evening I looked at the two websites who have become my daily destinations almost instantly: Buffer and 750words. Both send you an email every day. It's not spam. It's a useful and interesting email. Something you do want to receive. It changed the way I think of new project ideas forever.
- sek 15y agoPart 2: The Multi Billion Dollar Mind Trick: Manipulate People by Simulating Success Computer games are based on psychology, they try to make people think they accomplished something with as little effort as possible. Millions of people are addicted to it.
- paged90 15y agoDo you think that's it? By that logic, I could make a game that's ridiculously easy and become a millionaire like that. People will beat it, no effort, success. I think there's got to be a perceived effort and learning curve involved.
- scott_w 14y agoThat can get people hooked initially. The tricky part is to get people coming back. That involves increasing the difficulty (but not too much), so the user feels a sense of accomplishment. Throw in elements of randomness and, voila, you have an addictive game. There are studies that go into more depth than this, but that's the basic outline.
- peter_l_downs 15y agoDoes anyone have good information on "beating" these triggers? Knowing they exist is a good start, but I'd love to be able to stop checking FB / Twitter / HN (gasp) when I'm feeling bored.
- tedunangst 15y ago1. Pick a deadline for your timeout. 1 day, 1 week, ... 2. Change your password to something random, write it down. 3. Logout. 4. Wait until timeout expires before logging in. See how you feel.
- nireyal 15y agoThis is such a common struggle in the tech community, yet few have as much self-awareness as you do to admit it. Thank you! I will be blogging about how to unwind habits in my next post but in the meantime understanding the different types of behavior change might be useful to you, see: http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/03/how-to-design-behavior.html http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/03/how-to-design-behavior.html I hope this is helpful.
- Mz 15y agoFor me and my sons, mindlessly checking stuff while bored was rooted in health issues. In other words, we were both bored and too ill for something more challenging than passive entertainment. Working on underlying health issues did a lot to change that. Old habits return when we are somewhat under the weather but it isn't a big issue like it once was. Best of luck.
- aw3c2 14y agowhat kind of illness?
- Mz 14y agoI happen to have cystic fibrosis, as does my oldest son. I am real sensitive to dust, chemicals, etc. Having spent some time on alternative med sites, I have come to believe that allergens, chemicals and the like leave a lot more people in a mental fog than most people would think.
- contextfree 15y agoI thought this was going to be about database triggers. =\
- rfugger 14y agoThese desire engine articles make me wonder if similar ideas were circulating around the tobacco industry in the 60's.
- PaperclipTaken 14y agoI think these triggers are an important insight into human behavior, not just because of the profit that can be had by activating them, but because of the great potential for abuse/utility. On one hand, we see potentially dangerous abuse of these triggers, such setting people up to waste time on Farmville style apps or making repetitive comments on Facebook. On the other hand, there is a potential to train ourselves so that our triggers lead us to more productive situations. Instead of reading a newsfeed generated by people we could ultimately care less about, what if our go-to for boredom is performing some 30 second crowd-sourced task? Or maybe we look at something relevantly educational, like an elegant programming trick of the day. For the most part, when I get an internal trigger like boredom or anxiety or exhaustion, I go to something non-productive, like /r/wtf. But recently I've been replacing /r/wtf with HN, and while most of the browsing is still mindless, it's a lot more relevant to my career path and often leads me to other useful things like 750words.com Right now, the most successful companies that make use of triggers are mostly parasitic to our everyday lives, but I'm wondering if that can't change to become something that we benefit from.
- pazimzadeh 14y ago"The minimalist interface all but removes the need to think. With a click, a photo is taken and all kinds of sensory and social rewards ensue." This is drivel. Half of the content is even linkbaited away.
- hosh 14y agoThis feels nauseating, considering: - http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/01/06/the-gollum-effect/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/01/06/the-gollum-effect/ - http://dopamineproject.org/2011/12/the-dopamine-matrix-where-truth-is-stranger-than-fiction/ http://dopamineproject.org/2011/12/the-dopamine-matrix-where... No wonder we have a recent resurgence in Zombie Apocalypse myths in pop culture. I suppose, this too shall pass.