Random Positive Reinforcement

From David Allen on the GTD Podcast:

“One of the factors of creating addiction is random positive reinforcement. If you’re trying to train your dog…you don’t want a treat every time. The more random, the more powerful the addiction to the behavior. There is hardly anything that has more random positive reinforcement than email and social media. Any of you golfers out there: one good stroke, one good drive, will keep you coming back to hit 400 crappy ones.”

The golf analogy perfectly describes the addiction to photography we experience.

Combine the random positive reinforcement of social media with the random positive reinforcement of photography and you get the success of Instagram.