Nir Eyal

I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track.

We need to learn how to avoid distraction. Living the lives we want not only requires doing the right things but also necessitates not doing the things we know we’ll regret.

On the right side of the continuum is traction, which comes from the Latin trahere, meaning “to draw or pull.” We can think of traction as the actions that draw us toward what we want in life. On the left side is distraction, the opposite of traction. Derived from the same Latin root, the word means the “drawing away of the mind.” Distractions impede us from making progress toward the life we envision. All behaviors, whether they tend toward traction or distraction, are prompted by triggers, internal or external.