Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover explain why keystone habits lead us to purchase products, goods, and services in our daily lives.

Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover explain why keystone habits lead us to purchase products, goods, and services in our lives. The Hooked Model can help shine new light on modern consumer psychology, neuroscience, behavioral finance, and their broader public policy implications for iterative continuous performance improvements in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship over time.

Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover (2014)

Hooked: How to Build New Products with High-Performance Habit Formation

 

Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover describe and discuss why keystone habits often lead us to purchase products, goods, and services in our lives. Every day, the alarm wakes us up, and we stagger to the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee. Further, we reach for the smartphone to help map the traffic from home to work, check the weather, and get an update on our family friends via social media. We perform all these keystone habits, tasks, missions, and activities automatically with almost no, little, or minimal thought, time, effort, and energy. We regard Apple, Nestle, Google, Facebook, and Amazon as part of our daily habit formation. These smart businesses often get us to incorporate their key products, goods, and services into our habitual routine from day to day. In a rare unique fashion, each successful business seeks to accomplish this medium-term goal for the foreseeable future. In essence, each smart business helps start some keystone habit, task, mission, goal, and life principle as part of a broader social movement worldwide. Specifically, Apple remakes, reshapes, and reinforces smartphones, tablets, computers, and other Internet-connective mobile devices as part of our modern digital lifestyle. Nestle makes a cup of coffee part of our daily routine before we catch up to completely engage ourselves in the day-to-day hustle and bustle of urban work. Moreover, Google refreshes our focus on the weather, the traffic from home to work, and the key headlines in politics, economics, and so on. In addition, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and many other social media networks remind us of most of the recent updates on our family friends, co-workers, teachers, classmates, and other colleagues in several different parts and regions of the world. Amazon provides us with a lot of vital useful information about many products, goods, and services on the global e-commerce platform worldwide. All of these online search cloud services, social media networks, and e-commerce platforms help make our lives smarter, faster, better, safer, more robust, and more convenient. In combination, all of these online search cloud services, social media networks, and e-commerce platforms serve as new vital hooks for almost all users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide to change their modern lives for the better.

 

What are the key lessons, insights, and takeaways from this new self-improvement book review for our modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship?

Consumer psychology experts Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover design their mainstream 4-step Hooked Model for new normal steady-state habit formation. This model puts the business brass ring closer to the ultimate grasp of smart developers of all kinds of successful products, goods, and services. Eyal and Hoover identify the common characteristics of successful products, goods, and services worldwide. In support of their 4-step model for habit formation, Eyal and Hoover draw many insights from consumer psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral finance to gently extrapolate from their recent personal and professional experiences in games, social networks, and advertisements. While the 4-step model seems to be specifically apt for online products, services, and social media platforms, we recommend Eyal and Hoover’s rich collection of human wisdom to almost all kinds of product managers, designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs across many product categories. In due course, our rare unique growth mindsets, keystone habits, hard truths, social skills, intellectual worldviews, prescient insights, cultural values and beliefs, and iterative continuous improvements combine to help enrich the social and economic lives of many others in our increasingly inclusive global human society worldwide.

 

In our modern life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship, we often tend to carry out numerous keystone habits, social skills, tasks, goals, missions, actions, worldviews, and many other behavioral responses with almost no, little, or minimal thought, time, effort, and energy. Today, some successful companies provide new products, goods, and services in support of our prescient insights, keystone habits, social skills, and even intellectual worldviews. In time, these companies reap many sales, profits, benefits, and sustainable competitive advantages in their blue-ocean niche markets, disruptive innovations, and sometimes even their adjacent markets. Eyal and Hoover describe, discuss, design, and develop the 4-step Hooked Model for habit formation. Specifically, this model comprises 4 major components: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment. Both external and internal triggers instruct people to perform some specific task, goal, mission, action, reaction, and behavior. People respond to these triggers by taking actions in anticipation of some rewards. These variable rewards tend to be random, unpredictable, and intermittent rewards for satisfying some specific human desires, solving some problems, or both. Over time, people are more likely to develop some specific keystone habits around some specific products, goods, and services when these consumers invest time, money, and effort in their best business use cases. In time, successful companies connect all of these 4 mainstream steps to trigger some specific actions by consumers who seek some rewards by investing their time, money, and effort into the practical use cases for some specific products, goods, and services. In effect, these successful companies exploit the central pain points, problems, tasks, goals, and missions for consumers. As a result, these smart companies strategically position their products, goods, and services as new blue-ocean oases of relief for these consumers.

 

The Manipulation Matrix serves as a 4-quadrant chart for habit formation, and this chart helps us analyze our hidden internal cues, motives, and desires for applying the Hooked Model for smart habit formation to each aspect of modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Specifically, the facilitators can often help serve as new art curators and product managers who believe their products, goods, and services make a positive contribution to the global society. These facilitators often use, apply, and leverage their products, goods, and services for the best business use cases in practice. Also, the peddlers often serve as marketers and advertisers who sell their new products, goods, and services to consumers in the mass market. However, the peddlers seldom use, apply, and leverage their own products, goods, and services as part of our modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Moreover, the entertainers create new art items, invent new technological solutions, and seek to spread happiness for the broader, more pervasive, and more prevalent social enjoyment of particular users, adopters, and consumers. These entertainers often tend to focus on building, designing, and selling successful hits in our modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In addition, the dealers serve as myopic manipulators who sell their products, goods, and services to make money. In life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship, we should focus our time, effort, money, and energy on serving as the facilitators and the entertainers who combine to develop new inventions, innovations, and solutions to help solve some problems for many others worldwide. At the same time, we should avoid serving only as the dealers and the peddlers who tend to focus on sales, profits, and some other near-term benefits. In effect, the Manipulation Matrix often helps us strategically position products, goods, and services as novel non-obvious creative inventions, solutions, innovations, and broader oases of relief for many users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide.

 

Like all past technological advancements, the recent digital innovations contribute to our habit formation with both positive and negative ripple effects, social impacts, and chain reactions. These digital innovations span social media networks, smart-phones, tablets, e-commerce platforms, online search engines, generative artificial intelligence large language models (Gen AI LLM), graphics processing units (GPU), semiconductor microchips, electric vehicles (EV), quantum computers, high-speed broadband networks, telecoms, cloud services, autonomous robotaxis (AR), virtual reality (VR) headsets, new vital AI-driven healthcare solutions, and pharmaceutical medications, treatments, and therapies. Many of these recent digital technological advancements have turned into compulsions, whereas, some other advancements have turned into full-blown addictions. As the Hooked Model suggests, many early technology adopters often serve as substantially more effective brand evangelists and megaphones for the smart companies and their products, goods, and services. Most of these early technology adopters, brand evangelists, and megaphones help inform, attract, and retain hundreds, thousands, and even millions of new users at almost no, little, or minimal marginal cost.

 

When some smart companies successfully form new keystone habits, these smart companies present users with an implicit common choice between their old lifestyle and a new way for these users to fulfill their current needs, desires, demands, and other preferences. These smart companies match the right variable rewards to the end results, actions, reactions, interactions, and other behaviors. For this purpose, these companies should seek to better understand what truly matters to these new users. In recent decades, these companies increasingly find, assess, and confront the brutal facts that their economic value emerges from product features, functions, benefits, techniques, and opportunities, as well as the broader keystone habits and social movements in association with these new products, goods, and services. In practice, we can find all these vital useful hooks in all kinds of personal experiences. These personal experiences often burrow into our growth mindsets and our wallets too. Ubiquitous broadband access to the Internet helps transfer substantially more data at faster speeds than ever before. As a result, this Internet access has helped create a substantially more addictive, attractive, and interactive virtual world.

 

Unfortunately, numerous lean companies build, design, and develop their products, goods, and services to bet on some specific actions, reactions, and interactions of users worldwide. These companies often seem to dictate what these users should attempt to accomplish in due course. Instead, these companies should allow users to figure out on their own what they can learn to achieve in due course. Specifically, these companies should help empower all kinds of users to engage in substantially more immersive personal experiences with the new products, goods, and services. As these users invest slightly more time, effort, money, and energy in each product, good, or service through their tiny bits of mental work, this product, good, or service becomes more valuable in their daily lives. In time, these users help figure out the best business use cases for each product, good, or service. As the Hooked Model suggests, many early technology adopters, users, and consumers often serve as substantially more effective brand evangelists and megaphones for the companies and their products, goods, and services. Many of these early technology adopters, brand evangelists, and megaphones often help inform, attract, and retain hundreds, thousands, and even millions of new users at almost no, little, or minimal marginal cost in the next few years. As a result, these smart solutions, products, goods, and services often help habitually alter our insights, actions, reactions, interactions, and behaviors every day.

 

Today, we use, apply, purchase, and leverage many products, goods, and services to accomplish some specific tasks, goals, missions, actions, reactions, interactions, activities, and other behaviors. Many keystone habits often empower us to become substantially more efficient in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

When we use, apply, and leverage some specific products, goods, and services to support our keystone habits, some smart companies score small constructive wins in sales, profits, benefits, and several other sustainable competitive advantages in their blue-ocean niche markets, disruptive innovations, and even adjacent markets. Many marketers try hard to reverse-engineer the rare unique customer experience so that the best business use cases require loyal keystone habit formation. Today, for instance, smart phones, tablets, computers, and game consoles provide users, early technology adopters, and consumers with around-the-clock access to broad-band Internet connectivity. Through social media networks and global e-commerce platforms, these marketers use, apply, and leverage machine-learning algorithms and even deep, dense, and complex neural networks to help better target keystone habits, buyer behaviors, purchase patterns, and rare unique customer experiences. Today, the real-time, correct, and accurate identification of keystone habits serves as another data-driven competitive advantage for smart companies.

 

Investors now calculate each smart company’s customer life-time value (CLTV) to gauge the business value of a given product, good, or service over the full lifecycle of the rare unique customer experience. In the new fundamental view, substantially more loyal habit formation further enhances the higher CLTV. As these users, early technology adopters, and consumers incorporate a given product, good, or service into their daily lives, they become less resistant to price hikes. For this reason, the CLTV often tends to increase further as each smart company applies the freemium business model to classify customers into several different price segments. Loyal consumers tend to tell their family friends, classmates, and co-workers about some specific product features, functions, benefits, and other advantages. All these loyal users, early technology adopters, and consumers routinely enjoy and recommend new smart products, goods, and services via social media networks and global e-commerce platforms. These word-of-mouth advertisements span online customer reviews, endorsements, and testimonies etc. These fresh forms of advertisements are genuine, credible, cost-effective, and influential on the Internet. Today, Internet influencers and key opinion leaders (KOL) worldwide help serve as the mainstream gatekeepers for new products, goods, and services via social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, and Pinterest etc as well as global e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, Shopee, Alibaba Taobao, Etsy, Walmart, Flikpart, JD, Pinduoduo, Mercado Libre, Lazada, and so forth.

 

With almost no, little, or minimal thought, time, effort, money, and energy, we often engage in keystone habits to accomplish some specific tasks, goals, and missions by buying, using, applying, and leveraging many products, goods, and services as part of our modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. When we use our smartphones to check the weather, the traffic from home to work, and the main recent updates on our family friends, classmates, coworkers, and other colleagues on social media, we remake, reshape, and reinforce most of these keystone habits on a daily basis. These keystone atomic habits serve as the compound interest of self-improvement. In due course, these keystone atomic habits often empower us to be substantially more efficient in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Sometimes we make our best conscious efforts to cultivate small, subtle, persistent, and incremental keystone habits, social skills, intellectual worldviews, actionable insights, dynamic capabilities, and several other core competences. As we practice what we preach over many years, we often turn such small, subtle, and persistent keystone habits, social skills, and prescient insights into the positive flywheel effect, or equivalently, our chosen iterative steady process of building momentum through incremental progress in pushing a big heavy flywheel. In time, our chosen keystone habits help promote personal growth, system-wide mastery, and self-improvement. In essence, most of the keystone habits empower us to become substantially more efficient in our modern life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship.

 

Some smart companies that seek to form keystone habits among customers stave off competition in the global product market. New market entrants find it difficult to change these keystone habits, buyer behaviors, and purchase patterns even when these new entrants provide technologically superior products, goods, and services. For instance, almost all kinds of computer keyboards continue to use the QWERTY old standard format configuration for the first typewriters back in the 1870s. Better layouts come to the global market for computers, tablets, smart phones, and other mobile devices, but they cannot catch on. Once people become proficient at touch-typing on the same QWERTY keyboard, they are loath to learn some other system, even if this new system might be more efficient in some sense.

 

The Habit Zone serves as the sweet spot between the frequency of a behavior and its practical utility. People perceive the practical utility of a behavior as easy, kind, efficient, attractive, and convenient when these people engage in this behavior on a continual basis. As these people continue to engage in this behavior on an almost daily basis, this behavior becomes a keystone habit. Some smart companies seek to design new products, goods, and services to hit this Habit Zone for global market users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide. New products, goods, and services often fall into 2 main metaphorical categories: vitamins and painkillers. Vitamins can often help satisfy some internal human cues, desires, demands, and preferences. However, the vast majority of global users, early technology adopters, and consumers perceive vitamins as nice-to-have health supplements, or products, goods, and services for some specific use cases; whereas, these vitamins may be neither necessary nor sufficient. Specifically, most people can live without vitamins. Most people feel good about taking vitamins, but these people may not feel terrible if they miss a day. On the other hand, most people perceive painkillers as vital and necessary healthcare solutions. People feel pain if painkillers are out of reach. For this reason, people often find it hard to live without painkillers. Their absence hurts; and people often take painkillers to ease their pains as one of their keystone habits. In a new positive light, some smart companies often learn from their prior mistakes to reframe their products, goods, and services as painkillers instead of vitamins. In this fundamental sense, many consumers now cannot imagine a breakfast without coffee, a day without TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, or a week without Google for real-time updates on the weather, the traffic from a place to another, and the major headlines in global politics, economics, and so forth.

 

The Hooked Model includes 4 major components for habit formation: trigger, action, reward, and investment. Both external and internal triggers instruct people to carry out some specific tasks, goals, missions, actions, reactions, and behaviors. People respond to these triggers by taking actions in anticipation of some variable rewards. In effect, these variable rewards help satisfy some specific human motives, desires, demands, and preferences. As people invest slightly more time, effort, money, and energy in some new keystone habits, this new habit formation reinforces itself over time.

Eyal and Hoover describe, discuss, design, and develop the 4-step Hooked Model for habit formation. Specifically, this model comprises 4 major components: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment. Both external and internal triggers instruct people to perform some specific medium-term tasks, missions, actions, reactions, interactions, and behaviors. People respond to these triggers by taking actions in anticipation of some variable rewards. These variable rewards tend to be random, unpredictable, and intermittent rewards for satisfying some specific human desires, solving some problems, or both. Over time, people are more likely to develop some specific keystone habits around some specific products, goods, and services when these users, adopters, and consumers invest slightly more time, money, effort, and energy in the best business use cases. In time, successful companies connect all these mainstream steps to trigger some specific reactions by consumers who seek variable rewards by investing their finite and scarce time, money, effort, and energy into the best business use cases for these products, goods, and services. In effect, these smart companies often focus on exploiting the central pain points, problems, tasks, goals, missions, desires, demands, and other preferences for global market users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide. As a result, the smart successful companies strategically position their products, goods, and services as new blue-ocean niche market solutions, disruptive innovations, and new, vital, and spunky oases of relief for these users, adopters, and consumers.

 

All sorts of smart successful companies use their products, goods, and services to hook many market users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide on some specific keystone habits, social needs, desires, demands, buyer behaviors, and purchase patterns. Both external and internal cues, triggers, distractions, and influences spark our thoughts, insights, worldviews, actions, reactions, interactions, and behaviors. These cues, triggers, distractions, and influences often tell us some specific tasks, goals, and missions that we should accomplish in due course. Smart companies strategically position their products, goods, and services near customer needs, desires, demands, and other preferences. These product market strategies often help us better identity the right product-market fit, the total addressable global market, and the best business use cases for several products, goods, and services. When we see, smell, taste, hear, and touch some external trigger, this trigger helps prompt our proper actions, reactions, interactions, and behaviors. The process can often shine light on the particular pain points, problems, tasks, goals, and missions for global market users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide. For instance, the login button serves as an online external trigger on a homepage. Also, the like button often serves as a rare unique call to action on social media networks. In addition, the share button helps many users, adopters, and consumers to spread fun, love, peace, joy, happiness, and fulfillment via online content curation and free collaboration worldwide.

 

In many cases, smart companies invest substantial time, effort, money, and energy to earn several external triggers for global market users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide. In due time, these smart companies create, share, and publish their own rare unique AI-driven podcasts, video clips, films, movies, reports, articles, and even ebooks to establish their global industry authority, expertise, and reputation. Sometimes these external triggers go viral via Internet influencers and key opinion leaders (KOL). Also, these smart companies can often purchase online advertisements to help attract many global market users, adopters, and consumers. Over many years, these smart companies offer several different freemium product features, functions, benefits, and other competitive advantages to further enhance the customer experience. In time, these smart companies convert these freemium global users, early technology adopters, and consumers into loyal premium clients. In this iterative continuous process, many different external triggers often serve as some specific calls to actions for these loyal premium customers. A wide variety of external triggers can often help these smart companies appeal to several different blue-ocean niche market segments.

 

Today, these smart companies seek to achieve iterative continuous improvements in the external triggers for many different freemium users, clients, buyers, and even long-term subscribers. From online customer reviews to recent client testimonies and formal endorsements, these word-of-mouth recommendations help spread the social enjoyment of the best business use cases for longer-term client relationships via social media networks and global e-commerce platforms. In recent years, the mainstream social media and e-commerce outlets span Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Walmart, Rakuten, Shopee, eBay, Etsy, Flikpart, JD, Pinduoduo, Mercado Libre, Lazada, and so on. In addition, these smart companies use, apply, and leverage AI-driven tools, robots, machines, and avatars to remind freemium users, early technology adopters, and consumers of the next regular, recurrent, and intermittent product upgrades, software solutions, or both. Different users, adopters, and consumers can set up bespoke tailor-made automatic notifications on their smartphones, computers, tablets, and other mobile devices.

 

Internal triggers serve as the hidden intrinsic cues, motives, desires, demands, and other preferences in favor of our subconscious associations between what we think and what we feel. What we think reflects our thoughts, insights, worldviews, actions, reactions, interactions, and behaviors. What we feel reflects our emotions, growth mindsets, and several other forms of internal motivation. Hence, boredom prompts us to check our emails, smartphones, computers, tablets, and other mobile devices, even though no one attempts to contact us in the first place. Creative anxiety often allows us to think outside the black box to come up with new disruptive innovations, lateral software solutions, and many other iterative continuous improvements. The sweet spot between boredom and creative anxiety often empowers us to achieve the flow experience. Psychologists identify this flow experience as the rare, unique, and positive peak-performance internal state, and this flow experience arises from the best use of emotional intelligence. In this flow experience, we fully engage our hearts, minds, and souls in some tasks, goals, missions, and activities. With stellar skills, we enjoy this experience so much that we completely immerse ourselves in applying our innate talents in light of a bigger, brighter, and broader long-run vision, social good, or life purpose. Through this flow experience, we can often feel many positive emotions such as joy, love, awe, peace, interest, gratitude, and inspiration. High-EQ experts often use, apply, and leverage these common positive emotions to enhance self-care, self-efficacy, and internal motivation. In this flow experience, the human brain becomes calmer. This rare unique brain feature empowers us to complete intellectually hectic, hard, arduous, and formidable tasks, goals, missions, and activities with minimal thought, time, effort, and energy.

 

From day to day, we send emotional cues, colors, and signals in many encounters. These emotional cues, colors, and signals affect our family and friends, coworkers, leaders, teammates, and even strangers. When we apply emotional intelligence at its best, we are able to enter the new normal steady state of a natural flow of ideas, thoughts, insights, lessons, worldviews, actions, decisions, and behaviors. The key flow empowers us to immerse ourselves in creative, optimal, and impactful actions, pursuits, and experiences. During this key flow, we enjoy with intense mental focus what we try to accomplish in due time. Good examples of flow experiences include reading a novel, writing a book, composing music, coding a new software solution, playing a sport, and painting a portrait. A sense of accomplishment, or warm glow, often serves as the intrinsic reward for each of these flow experiences.

 

Many global market users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide form new habits in response to the tiny stressors as part of the flow experience in each hectic day. Smart companies often exploit these pain points, problems, buyer behaviors, and purchase patterns by strategically positioning their products, goods, and services as new niche blue-ocean oases of relief. Global users, adopters, and consumers habitually reach for these products, goods, and services to solve some specific problems in modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. As a result, these smart companies strategically tailor their rare unique products, goods, and services as external triggers to global market users, early technology adopters, and consumers worldwide. In time, these users, adopters, and consumers respond to their internal triggers by finding comfort and relief in the best business use cases for these products, goods, and services.

 

In the broader context of human habits, we often take some specific actions almost instinctively with no deliberate thought. The Stanford behavioral social scientist B.J. Fogg applies his Behavioral Model in the powerful formula: B=MAT. Some specific Behavior takes place in the presence of sufficient Motivation, Ability, and a Trigger. For instance, we might hear the smartphone ring for several seconds. If we buried the smartphone at the bottom of a briefcase, we might simply let the phone call go to voicemail. Perhaps we had set the smartphone on silent mode. As a result, we would never hear the smartphone ring in the briefcase. In this special case, some element of the formula was weak, absent, or both. For this reason, we would take no action even though someone tried to contact us through a phone call.

 

Fogg groups human motivators into 3 broader social categories: We seek pleasure and avoid pain; We seek hope and avoid fear; and We seek social acceptance and avoid social rejection. Online advertisements often capitalize on these motivators. Sexually provocative images of beautiful actresses provide the promise of pleasure in promoting GoDaddy as the biggest global service provider of domain names for websites. Shots of men who gather to drink Budweiser demonstrate broader social acceptance in the team context. The neoclassic Apple ad shows the high hopes of heroes from Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King, and John Lennon to Richard Branson and Bob Dylan to make a new vital point: People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

 

Many people sometimes seek to simplify their intellectual worldviews, insights, and decisions. This simplification leads to several mental models, intellectual shortcuts, or heuristic rules of thumb. In effect, such simplification further remakes, reshapes, and reinforces the deeper, broader, more pervasive, and more prevalent nature of keystone habit formation. Smart salespeople apply some specific heuristic rules of thumb to suggest scarcity by putting products, goods, and services on sale for the foreseeable future, whereas, many other salespeople seek to reframe the broader sales environment in the right social context for some specific social needs, desires, demands, habits, pain points, problems, buyer behaviors, and purchase patterns.

 

The Hooked Model helps focus our human attention on some variable rewards as we crave desserts, snacks, fatty acids, and other food items such as cheese, pasta, sugar, and chocolate. Many of these variable rewards arise as easy, obvious, and attractive due to our intrinsic motives, emotional needs, desires, demands, nutrient deficiencies, hormonal changes, and even behavioral responses to some external and internal triggers. As people act, react, adapt, and behave, they experience the comfort and relief of satisfying their hidden hormonal and emotional urges, desires, demands, and other preferences. In a new positive light, we can often reframe this experience as part of the vital iterative continuous process of solving some specific problems, pain points, buyer behaviors, purchase patterns, and so forth. In modern neuroscience, some recent research studies show that the positive anticipation of some rewards helps activate the human brain’s nucleus accumbens. In time, these nucleus accumbens serve as our brain centers for the positive promise of pleasure. As people learn to expect these rewards, however, several incentives begin to lose their emotional value at the margin. In many cases, we often better re-anchor these variable rewards by linking our active anticipation, time, effort, and energy to many different forms, levels, and cascades of these variable rewards. Sometimes regular, recurrent, and intermittent rewards revive the new normal steady-state dopamine-driven neural circuitry in the brain’s nucleus accumbens. In due course, the brain’s nucleus accumbens adapt to fresh variable rewards, re-anchor intrinsic motivators, and continue to serve as new pleasure centers of dopamine-driven neural circuitry. In life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship, we learn to make iterative continuous improvements in linking our time, effort, energy, and active anticipation to different variable rewards to help ensure smooth, steady, and robust dopamine-driven neural circuitry in the brain’s pleasure centers. Variety is the spice of life.

 

Most variable rewards fall into 3 broad types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self. Tribe rewards tap into the desire for us to connect socially with others in our increasingly inclusive global society. Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, and so on, and video games such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Black Myth: Wukong, and so on often deftly exploit this universal social desire. Specifically, people visit Facebook frequently to check whether their friends like their recent posts. Moreover, many League-of-Legends players set out to earn honor points in recognition of their fair game progression. In this new light, our rare unique keystone habits, growth mindsets, social skills, cultural values, hard truths, actionable insights, intellectual worldviews, and iterative continuous improvements often combine to help enrich the social and economic lives of others in our inclusive global human society worldwide.

 

Hunting for food and shelter is another common but hidden human desire, demand, and behavior. In this positive sense, hunt rewards help satisfy many of our intrinsic desires, demands, motives, and other preferences. Scrolling through social media networks provides variable rewards in association with gathering major information cascades and other online resources. These online resources often include reports, podcasts, ebooks, blog posts, research articles, video clips, films, and even movies. With American patent approval, accreditation, and protection for 20 years, our AYA fintech network platform provides proprietary alpha stock signals and several other personal finance tools for stock market investors worldwide. We build, design, and describe our new, nonobvious, and proven proprietary algorithmic system for smart asset return prediction and fintech network platform automation. Unlike our fintech rivals and competitors who chose to lock up their respective proprietary algorithms in a black box, we open the black box by providing the free and complete disclosure of our American patent publication on fresh financial software technology from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In a rare unique fashion, we can help stock market investors identify accurate alpha stock signals in order to enrich their stock market investment portfolios. With no need to crunch data over an extensive period of time, our premium members choose their own bespoke tailor-made alpha stock signals for profitable investment opportunities in the American stock market. Smart investors can consult our proprietary alpha stock signals to ferret out unique opportunities for transient stock market undervaluation. Our macro analytic reports, podcasts, ebooks, blog posts, and research articles etc help stock market investors better understand several global macro trends, topics, and themes in trade, finance, technology, fiscal-monetary policy coordination, and vital competitive dynamism in some strategic sectors. Most of these strategic sectors span social media networks, smart-phones, tablets, e-commerce platforms, Internet search engines, generative artificial intelligence large language models (LLM), electric vehicles (EV), graphics processing units (GPU), semiconductor microchips, telecoms, quantum computers, cloud services, autonomous robotaxis (AR), virtual reality (VR) headsets, AI-driven healthcare solutions such as AlphaFold, high-speed 5G broadband networks, and biopharmaceutical medications, treatments, and therapies. In time, many investors can combine our rare unique proprietary alpha stock signals with richer, wider, and deeper macro-financial knowledge to win in the stock market. With new proprietary alpha stock signals and personal finance tools, we can help stock market investors achieve their near-term and longer-term financial goals. High-quality stock market investment decisions can help investors attain the near-term goals of buying a new smartphone, a car, a house, good healthcare, and many more. Further, these high-quality stock market investment decisions help investors attain the long-term goals of saving for travel, passive income, retirement, self-employment, and even college education for children. In essence, our AYA fintech network platform can empower stock market investors via better social integration, education, and technology.

 

Self-rewards often relate to the variable rewards, payoffs, and incentives for people to solve some specific problems, pains, flaws, faults, failures, setbacks, obstacles, distractions, difficulties, and disappointments in modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. These self-rewards involve a real sense of accomplishment, job satisfaction, and even iterative continuous improvements in team performance, focus, personal growth, and the flow experience. Playing video games often serves as a powerful expression of this social need for self-rewards. Reading a book often provides the same level of intellectual stimulation for self-rewards. In addition, self-rewards can further involve writing up a research article, composing music, coding a novel proprietary software solution, playing a sport, and painting a portrait. Often warm glow, social acceptance, and team recognition arise as the mainstream self-rewards for each of these flow experiences.

 

When we invest slightly more time, effort, and energy in some prior purchases, we often further commit ourselves to some specific tasks, missions, actions, reactions, and behaviors. In this iterative continuous cycle, we are more likely to develop new keystone habits around some specific products, goods, and services when we tend to invest some additional time, effort, and energy into their best business use cases. Even such small investments often help reinforce strong emotional bonds between ourselves and some specific products, goods, and services. For instance, IKEA is a good recent example of such strong emotional bonds in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. IKEA’s customers love their furniture more as they learn to assemble furniture on their own. This bespoke tailor-made customization enriches the unique personal experiences of learning to assemble furniture on a standalone basis. Warm décor serves as one of the mainstream aspects of the modern Nordic lifestyle.

 

Once we commit to some specific social skills, habits, growth mindsets, worldviews, and so on, we are more likely to repeat the same actions, reactions, and behaviors in the future. At first, people may be reluctant to erect a sign in their yard to promote a social cause. After the first time, however, their resistance declines substantially. Smart volunteers often apply the same strategy to seek support for a political party, a presidential candidate, or both, several times in some specific zip codes, regions, and states. These team efforts can come to fruition when smart volunteers connect the dots between some specific keystone habits and broader social movements in the local community.

 

Many people often tend to avoid cognitive dissonance to fit into a more comfortable social context. Cognitive dissonance refers to the wider social need for us to revise a well-known perception, stereotype, or generalization. Specifically, we experience cognitive dissonance when our actions cannot match our thoughts, insights, values, beliefs, words, worldviews, and so forth. In this broader social context, most people would likely try what others enjoy even if their first taste is unpleasant. This reaction often applies to drinking soup, wine, and coffee. In a famous fable, the fox declares the grapes are too sour when he cannot reach them. This fable is another example of cognitive dissonance.

 

As people spend more time, effort, and energy on mainstream social media outlets Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, and other social networks, and global music hits and video games such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Black Myth: Wukong, and so on, it is more likely for these people to further increase their screen time online. From Internet contents, newsfeeds, and data streams to social skills, followers, and subscribers, these online tokens now serve as new emotional hooks for these social media lovers, gamers, and netizens worldwide. For instance, each iPhone owner builds his or her rare unique music library on iTunes over many years. For this reason, the vast majority of iPhone owners remain reluctant to leave for some other service providers Google Play, Android, Amazon Music, Bandcamp, Spotify, Music Bee, Media Monkey, and Clementine etc. LinkedIn is another good example. When users post their resumes on LinkedIn, it is not likely for these users to switch to another similar site. Over many years, many active users, traders, and Internet influencers work hard to build good reputation on Amazon, Airbnb, Alibaba Taobao, eBay, Etsy, and YouTube etc. Once these users achieve good reputation with fresh tokens of high emotional value, they are averse to giving up all their past efforts in building up these new emotional hooks, tokens, and online profiles.