Nir Eyal is an Israeli-born American author, lecturer, and investor. He wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2014), Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (2019) and Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results (2026), the latter of which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list upon publication.
Biography Nir Eyal was born on February 19, 1980, in Hadera, Israel. When he was three, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in a suburb of Orlando, Florida. He earned a B.A. at Emory University in 2001."Nir Eyal." Contemporary Authors Online. Gale, 2015. Retrieved via Gale in Context: Biography database, October 11, 2019. He then worked for Boston Consulting Group and started a solar panel company before attending Stanford for his MBA.
Academic and literary career After graduating from the Master of Business Administration program at Stanford in 2008, Eyal and fellow students founded a company that placed online ads in Facebook, with Eyal as CEO. His work in the company sparked his interest in the psychology of users, and he went on to become a consultant in product design. In 2012, he taught as a lecturer in marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and as an instructor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. Eyal's expertise is in behavioral design, which incorporates elements of behavioral science to enable software designers to develop habit-forming products for businesses.
Eyal maintains a blog, NirAndFar.com, where he developed and first published the "hook model", followed by the publication of his 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which became a Wall Street Journal best seller. The title reflects Eyal's idea of the "hooked model", which aims to "build products that create habit-forming behavior in users via a looping cycle that consists of a trigger, an action, a variable reward, and continued investment." His book helped inspire the product development framework used to create strength training app Fitbod.
His second book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, was written with Julie Li and published in September 2019, It received the 2019 Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award. Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results, his third book, was edited by Julie Li and published by Portfolio on March 10, 2026. Beyond Belief debuted on the New York Times bestseller list upon publication.
Eyal has spoken out against over-broad proposals to regulate habit-forming technologies, arguing that it is an individual user's responsibility to control their own use of such products. Critics have noted that this stance echoes strategies employed by the tobacco industry, which historically emphasized personal responsibility while minimizing corporate accountability for creating addictive products. This parallel has been highlighted by technology ethics researchers who point out that both industries have used similar rhetoric about individual choice and self-control to deflect from discussions about the intentionally addictive design of their products.
Published works
References
External links
Book Review-”Hooked” : How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal