The Power of Creating a "Good Enough for Now" Mindset

Dave Evans is a lecturer at Stanford University's design program and the co-author of Designing Your New Work Life. Before that, he was an early employee at Apple and a co-founder of Electronic Arts.

In this podcast, Motley Fool producer Ricky Mulvey talks with Evans about:

•  The power of creating a "good enough for now" mindset.
•  Deciding whether to quit or reinvent your job.
•  How to create more spontaneity in a hybrid work environment.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Feb. 13, 2022.

Dave Evans: It's a huge issue. Particularly in a post-internet world, are you willing to live with the constraint of your finitude as a mortal being? That's the philosophical ground I'm standing on that says, it's good enough for now, and that permission opens up a tremendous amount of opportunities.

Chris Hill: I'm Chris Hill and that was author Dave Evans. He's a lecturer at Stanford University and coauthor of the book Designing Your New Work Life. Previously, Evans was a co-founder at Electronic Arts and an early employee at a little company called Apple. While there he worked on things like the first computer mice for Mac computers and bringing laser printing to the masses. Producer Ricky Mulvey caught up with Evans to discuss how to use some of these design principles to improve your career and create a happier and more engaged life.

Ricky Mulvey: My guest is Dave Evans, a lecturer at Stanford University and a co-founder of its Life Design Lab. He's also the coauthor of Designing Your New Work Life. Also was an early employee at Apple and a co-founder at Electronic Arts. You talk about finding these dysfunctional beliefs, reframing them, Dave, but I think one of the things I've struggled with reading your book is spotting them in the first place. Maybe a little bit on what a dysfunctional belief is, and how you can find them in your life.

Dave Evans: That's a really good question, Ricky. Once you have found your first dysfunctional belief or two and you go holy cow, this thing has way more power in my life than I wanted to, you can get nervous about these things lurking. The fire swamp. I don't want to step on a dysfunctional belief and have it blow up in my face. If you take the bias to action version of the design mindsets, what that relates to is we really are imperatives. We really do live in a reality. I often say design thinking has a brutal commitment to reality. It doesn't work in magical thinking space. It doesn't work in the "should" world, it works in the "is" world. There's a bit of council lurking there to your question. I think the dysfunctional beliefs you ought to be aware of or be good at discerning are the ones that are in their way. Very often you can just say, be attentive to when I'm getting stuck. I'm getting stuck on this thing, it's getting in my way. It's a barrier. I'm constrained by it. I'm feeling the ropes of this judgment pulling me backward or whatever it might be. 

If I'm experiencing that, then I go, well, what's going on here? What's holding me back? Classic. Hey, what's your passion? But I haven't known my passion. I'm really stuck on this passion thing. Well, why am I stuck on this passion thing? Oh, because I'm supposed to find my passion. I believe I'm supposed to find my passion. Is that a dysfunctional belief? Let me take a look at that. Then you start assessing what's either the idea. Very often the question. Phrase it as a question like, what's your passion? What's your purpose? That stuff. Then say, well, what does that question believe? When you start interrogating your questions belief system, well apparently, what's your passion or what's the assumption built in even asking that question? 

The assumption is I have a passion. The assumption that is the beginning of the life journey, the life design process. The belief is that I will know it early in life, so it will be my guiding star. Then once I find it, I will be allowed to do it and I can even make a living at it. If you were in Silicon Valley and you think like a venture capitalist, I can make a killing at it. All five of those happen to not be true at all. All you really need to task yourself with, to be good at dysfunctional belief identification and demystifying, is catch yourself in the act of being stuck, and then try to suss out of that moment. What statement, what belief, or what question has me stuck? That's probably where there might be a dysfunctional belief lurking.

Ricky Mulvey: I think it's also easy especially when people are isolated, working from home by themselves more, it's easier to bruit and get bitter. I think that's where the root of maybe for me personally, a lot of dysfunctional belief stem is. Is this a place where I've been bruiting or bitter? If the answer is yes to that, then it's probably a dysfunctional belief coming from that.

Dave Evans: It can well be. There's more ways to get stuck than one. We talk a lot about interactivity. We talk a lot about this life design stuff is a lot easier to do with help, you need a design team, we're a design teams. The design team where all of us are doing the project together and we're truly collaborating is the preferred format. But let's say all you're doing is that, I'm doing a life design and I just need a place to share that out loud and need an echo chamber to hear myself. Hey, two good friends of mine, would you hang out with me while I'm doing this? You just be my feedback loop, you're not doing it. You don't think it's that interesting, but you're willing to work with me. That's hugely better than just being in the conversation with yourself. I think another trap, in addition to dysfunctional beliefs, that the present moment invites too many people to is being in too much conversation with yourself. Now being in a conversation with yourself, with somebody else is fine. You sit down with a good friend. You go, boy I really need to talk something to you, you got some time? 

Oh, yeah, thanks, Ricky. Appreciate. The person talks for 20 minutes, you don't say a word and they go, boy, that was really helpful. Thank you so much, sure. I'll sit in front of you while you pontificate for a while. What happened there was hearing my own voice in the presence of being received by another person, being in a communion context is an entirely different experience than being by myself. I think one of the issues you just described is while we've been hybriding, there's part of the conversation we're having just by ourselves too much. You almost have to solve the Zoom problem, you probably have to do a little more. I revitalized the small support group that I formed in 1973, 47 years ago during college, which 20 years ago started renewing itself on an annual basis.  A guys retreat, we'd disappear to [inaudible] island for a couple of days. We said, guys, this is getting awful. We need each other more than ever. We started going to biweekly.

Ricky Mulvey: It's a good point. You start this book, Designing Your New Work Life with the reframe of good enough for now.

Dave Evans: Yep.

Ricky Mulvey: Is that why you initially planned on starting it? Because it's an incredibly powerful reframe, which is when you're by yourself, you feel very stuck and you have to go to that place of, is it good enough for now? Can I survive in this place for a little bit? Is that why you originally planned on starting when you and Bill Burnett were writing this book before the pandemic?

Dave Evans: No. But we got there quickly. The actual story of the book is rather odd. We have this charmed relationship with Canoff and Penguin Random House. They've been incredibly generous to us and the world has been incredibly generous to us. We're still just astonished at this whole movement. The publisher comes back to us and goes, it's not a book, it's a movement. We got to keep it going, and I go, oh, yeah, can you spell sequel. They said, we really want you guys to keep going. Please send us a list of books you could write next, designing your whatever. We said, well, OK, and so we brainstormed a list. We sent them a list of eight book alternatives. I can't even remember them. It's written down somewhere. They picked Designing Your Work Life, which I totally would have lost about it. I didn't think that was what they're going to pick it all. It's actually a spec book, we were told to write the book. The reason they told us to write the book was luck, our perception anyways, anecdotal, but it's intuitively informed by smart people, is that the first book has seen this redesign your life in a big inflection moment. When you're coming out of college, you're in your midlife crisis. 

That it's not meant to be that, it can be used in all kinds of stages and seasons of life, but it is the big change part, they think. A lot of people can't afford a big change or don't want to be changed. I might like it a little better right where I am. Can you bring this down to the ground? If I had to pick a place where it might make life a little better, well, I spend an awful lot of my energy at work. In fact, we've known for many centuries that that's the largest single expression of human energy is the workplace. How about making it better there? We write the book. Bill and I sit down to write the book. This is the long version of the story. It really was funny. I sit down with Bill and I go, oh, God, we're screwed, dude we are screwed. They picked the book we know nothing about. We haven't taught this course for 10 years. We wrote the title down. I didn't even know what I meant when I wrote that title down, what the hell is this book about? Bill goes, we'll figure it out, we're designers, look, and I go, OK, what do we do first? He goes, well, I go, I know, a little bug list. 

Now that's an old terminology in the design world. A bug list is like, well, what should I work on? Well, what bugs you? It's like the comedian, hey, doesn't it bug you when lights go...? What's a bug list list look like? I say, well, what's a good bug list at work? Then literally, 20 minutes later we had the book design. What we forgot was between us, we had 75 years of business experience a lot of it in consulting to other organizations, so we had seen a lot of workplaces and worked with a lot of people, and seen a lot of people in pain. The bug list of the worker was very easy to generate. Then we had to cull it down to the book. What we were looking for was problems that lots of people have that we can make some progress on without requiring them to completely reinvent themselves or jump out of the airplane with a parachute on. That begat, I think we can help them make it a little better. Then Bill goes yeah, that's actually good enough. I go, no, it's never good enough. We have to address the good enough problem because there's never going to be good enough.

Except it is. Where it is for now. I can go, that's it. It's good enough for now. Literally we just sat down to write this book. We had no idea what it was. We came up with what it could be in about 20 minutes and then there was a fundamental problem, this huge activation energy problem to even be willing to read the book much less try which is like, are you actually willing to be happy? Do you have permission to be happy? That's what the conclusion is, permission to be happy. A long answer to a short question, it was a really good question. Nobody has asked me that question yet. You are the absolute first person that's gotten this answer because it's a huge issue. Particularly to post-internet world, are you willing to live with the constraint of your finitude as a mortal being? That's the philosophical ground I'm standing on that says it's good enough for now. That permission opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity.

Ricky Mulvey: I think one of the reasons it's hard to get to that, things are good enough for now is the hedonic treadmill which describe in detail and you write, "trust us when we tell you this journey on the treadmill rarely ends well." We're on the internet all day. Especially, we're talking to investors on the show too I think you can feel that when you're saving and you're investing which is in some ways, you need to be on that treadmill to save more. You need to be an investor, you need to set up for your future down the road. But also if it's something you're obsessing over, it's going to be mentally incredibly difficult and you're never going to feel like you have enough.

Dave Evans: Well, it's a fundamental relationship with the nature of growth. It's almost at an existential level. I mean, is your fundamental model of life transactional or process oriented? Are you an outcome person or are you a flow person? In a sense, what I'm saying is that as designers at the end of the day we're really flow people. We really believe that we are building our way forward and we prototype in order to engage the future with the collaborators. You don't just prototype because you haven't got it figured out yet. What you're really saying is these people coming together around this experimental opportunity, trying out this little idea or having this conversation is literally where the future is formed. It's not formed in your head sitting on the couch in agony. Change is inevitable, growth is optional. If I opt for growth and I believe that's a never-ending story, then I'm going to continually get better which means I was worse. 

At some point in your maturity you can see tomorrow's growth today but it's not its time yet. Once you've got your risk-return portfolio figured out, once you've got your asset allocation figured out, of course I want it to get better but I can't ever be done. So tomorrow I'm going to get better. I have to be continually attentive to this thing which is not the same as I'm never there, what it means is never thereness is built in and so there's today's thereness and then tomorrow's thereness and the day after that's thereness. With some wisdom I can see tomorrow and next week's future thereness coming and I have to be fully satisfied with today because today is all today can be. Learning that pacing, discerning the difference between "I'm doing good enough for now" called today versus "I'm mailing it in and I'm not performing adequately." Those are not the same. There's such a thing as falling down on the job and making a poor effort and there's such a thing as that I'm trying to do tomorrow today. There's a huge maturity demand here, if you want to eventually get to where you are continually relentlessly redesigning the well-lived and joyful life, then you got to get a piece of this thing.

Ricky Mulvey: Finding the well-lived joyful life now is in some ways, I don't want to say it's easier or more difficult because that's a generalization for everyone listening and it's not fair to make that.

Dave Evans: There are more tools, there is more resources, there is more accessibility.

Ricky Mulvey: I think one thing that is also tough to figure out is if you're in these things that you describe as a gravity problem, which you exist in your own world now and you can decide what your reality is the way you exist on the internet. You can find these very small places where things seem more real than they're not. I guess my question is, how do you recognize that you're in a, well, maybe we'll describe what a gravity problem is and how to recognize that you're in one, not just I want to be a poet and make a million dollars based on that.

Dave Evans: We define a gravity problem as a problem, and is named Dave's Problem. I'm 68, and as I crossed into my 60 I didn't get the freshman 15 pounds in college but I did get the turn 60 20. I'm a cyclist and what I noticed was that I gained 10 and then 15 pounds I didn't want. My bike slowed down. The problem was going up hills got worse. I went to Bill like, hey Bill, I've got a gravity problem. Gravity is not working for me, can you help me? He goes, no. Gravity is not a problem, it's a circumstance, Dave. A gravity problem is phrased where you're describing your problem as something that is literally impossible, it's just a circumstance or it is so hard, it's not worth trying. Now, that's a judgment call like am I going to solve climate change this afternoon? Well, no. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try. But nonetheless, a gravity problem is something where you really can't do anything about it and our position of a definition of a problem, a problem is an actionable situation that you can change in real time. 

If you cannot act on it, you can't do anything about it, it's not a problem because there's no solution, it's just a circumstance and your only response to that is acceptance. What that acceptance does is frees you to reframe your problem in ways that become actionable. Like, "No Dave, there is no problem called gravity, there's a reality called gravity. Accept it." Now, that frees me to go, "Oh, what else could I do other than gravity? Well, I could buy more gears on [laughs] my bike. I could maybe stop drinking so much beer and drop some weight. I could ride on flat routes and just give in to it. Those are choices I didn't have before. So the acceptance of a gravity problem flips you into what is available and very often people get really stuck on them because they would rather keep not getting what they like wanting than actually getting what in reality is available. I prefer my disappointment of fantasy than the satisfaction available in reality. That's what you've got to watch out for.

Ricky Mulvey: One problem, one place people often feel stuck is the phrase, I feel stuck in my job. You and Bill make the case that before you quit, try to redesign your job at first. I found myself struggling with that because right now in some ways it's easier than ever to quit a job. The switching costs are low. If you want to get a pay raise realistically you're going to get that from switching your job, not staying where you are and possibly reinventing it. I guess in a virtual world where the way you actually change a job is by sitting at your desk at home and shipping in one laptop and getting another laptop, does that still make sense to try to reinvent what you're doing in one place versus just saying, "You know what? I'm going to go on LinkedIn and see what else is out there for me or using my personal connections"?

Dave Evans: The book was written around the idea that first of all, an awful lot of people can't afford to or don't want to go through the incredibly disruptive change of quitting and starting a new job. We're now in the face of the Great Quit, 20 million and counting in a different situation and sure, it is easier to quit now than it ever was. We keep saying we don't should on you, please don't should on yourself. Then we go, hey, you shouldn't quit your job without trying this first, let me say, we just violate our own principle. Well, kind of. What we're really saying is, Bill and I were chatting with us just the other day. We were wondering, if you take all 20 x million people that have recently quit in North America and especially Western Europe, where do they go? 

Well, some went to early retirement, some went to go try gig things, some were just like, I don't even know, I'm taking a sabbatical for six months, ask me later, and a bunch are just going to jump off to a new job. They striate very differently. But nonetheless, our concern is a great number of people who quit saying it's time for something better, I've had all this crap job are going to jump out of the pan into the fire. Because the wonderful meaning-making economy didn't suddenly quadruple in size when you weren't looking and all these fabulous soul-enriching jobs that you are hoping for aren't necessarily just lined all over the floor to be picked up, no. There's lots of openings but are the human beings that are going to become your future bosses much better than the boss you just quit. Most people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. Twenty-five percent of American workers would give you back their last raise if you fire the boss. That's not an encouraging stat. I think relative to, should everybody wait to quit? No, we're not saying that. 

That's why the next chapter is how to quit. We know you're going to quit at some point. We're not anti-quitting, we're anti prematurely quitting. Frankly, if you try these ideas out on redesigning where you are, the worst thing that happens is it tees up your external search much more effectively. It's not a lost effort. The one I'll focus in on my personal favorite is the remodel. We have four redesign strategies, re-enlist and reframe, No. 1, No. 2 remodel, No. 3 relocate, No. 4 reinvent and those are rising in the steepness of their effort. The first two are pretty easy. What is interesting to note is a surprisingly small change in activity and time can have a massive ROI effect on psychic equity. I feel I made a little adjustment in my time and I feel a ton better. Some of those wins are worth looking at and might be more than enough to get to the place you can say it's good enough for now.

Ricky Mulvey: The theme you keep going back to in the book, the drumbeat is engagement.

Is that the fairness? Or I guess one of the themes is don't just look at the job you dislike, look at how engaged you are with your work and your life and fix that first.

Dave Evans: The two primary exercises that we advocate, one of the first book, one of the second book, to get some raw material on how I'm wired well enough so that I would even know what fitting me means. The good time journal, the good work journal. Now, the good time journal is around engagement. I objectively take a couple of weeks and just watch myself, not starting with my oh god, my boss it again, you are right down to your little complaint as opposed to OK during the day, what did I do? When was I engaged? When was I all the way in flow? And let's have some actual objective data about what seems to connect to me, where my energy starts flowing in a meaningful way? Have an objective understanding of yourself. 

Then say, OK, now can I start optimizing both the way I use my time and the way I allocate my work. Every job description has a bunch of "what" in it, what are your deliverables, what are your requirements, but an awful lot of flexibility around the "how." How do I do it? With whom do I do it? In what pace do I do it? Either way, micro management which nobody likes, hyper supervision, took a big hit, thankfully, in the hybrid model post-pandemic, you can't micromanage on Zoom. Doesn't work. Micromanagers went batshit crazy during the pandemic because I can't watch you in the office, where are they; those guys were just having a panic attack. Those are the companies kind of go. OK. Get back in the office. Get back. Six thousand people had to let it go, no we're not coming back. You got to move to accountability and responsibility as the primary management currencies, not supervision and oversight. I think as we do this, we make these moves that will allow people to make some of these adjustments in a significant way.

Ricky Mulvey: You write about this micromanagement and how even investors are looking away from it, specifically, Pinterest paying $90 million to terminate its lease in late 2020, and you make the case: "Market analysts will downgrade the stock of any company whose CEO insists on having her big corner office and all her employees sitting in cubicles where she can watch over them again. It's not likely we will return to that version of normal." Is that a case against hybrid work altogether or is it just the optionality of coming into an office is becoming more important, too?

Dave Evans: The prediction that the micromanager is over, it was an accident. I don't think anybody said, "Gosh, one of the great dividends of the pandemic might be either we can empower people, we can have a sudden shift in trust." No one saw that coming, but that's exactly what happened by force. Our thesis is that empowerment of that nature and scale is pretty irreversible. Good luck sending people back from being trusted to take care of themselves and get their stuff done on time, to being untrusted, but being watched constantly, its just not going to happen. You can force it to some level, and some companies will, but if that's your motivation, expect your revolving door just to speed up. 

One thing we heard from lots of managers at large and small companies alike, was we have figured out that being together physically, being in the same room really matters, sometimes. It's very hard to never do it. There are some totally virtual companies, but that's rare. Most of us, it's really important to be together. What we haven't figured out yet and people are going to be doing a lot of experimentation on this, is when do we need to be together? How often do we need to be together? And for what do we need to be together? I expect that to have a couple of years of experimentation and to be one of the attributes or one of the characterizations of XYZ organization's particular culture. What's our culture around here? What's our style? What's our behavior? What's our hours? What's our language? And what's our together versus remote way of being? People are just learning how to be articulate about that.

Ricky Mulvey: It's incredibly difficult to have creative fields, that radical collaboration. Steve Jobs famously put the bathroom, in Pixar in the center of the lobby just so people would run into each other. You've described in the past him just showing up in one of your engineering meetings in which you promptly kicked him out and told him off. Where I'm going with this.

Dave Evans: No, I didn't kick him out but afterwards I told him off. He could not be kicked out very well. Yeah.

Ricky Mulvey: You can't have those moments in the virtual spaces much.

Dave Evans: It goes way back. Hewlett Packard, back in the very first generation of Silicon Valley companies they're famous before you even had the phrase corporate culture, had, MBWA, Management By Walking Around. Management by walking around was just hanging out. People bump into what's really going on. Yes, you can't do MBWA. You can't walk around and you can't bump into, there're no water coolers anymore. You can't have a water cooler or the espresso machine conversation, not in person. This is where strategic versus tactical becomes a real issue. I feel like even though we figure out "OK we really should be together for the following things. We all get together for that, and that's really important and it's highly directed." How we make space for serendipity? But one thing I still teaching seriously in Stanford, the DCI, the Distinguished Career Institute, which is the gap year for grownups, maybe 45-85-year-old people taken a year off and thinking deeply about their life, mostly people near what we used to call retirement, think about their encore. I help them come up with their wayfinding innovation ideas to design their fellowship year. 

One of my strong admonitions to allocate time to is whitespace. Whitespace is unscheduled margin that allows that thing I didn't know I was looking for to be tripped over. What do you do with whitespace and where do you go? Where do you wonder in the woods to trip over that thing you didn't know where you're looking for? Companies have to find ways to create that whitespace, which is serendipitous. The reason the water cooler, and the bathroom, in the hallway, and the lunchroom work, is while I'm there I'm not intentional about solving XYZ problem in this meeting. I'm not at the board coming up with the new product road map, I'm just like, hey Ricky how is it going, you look a little upset. "Well we thought we had the alpha down and now... Tell me more about that" and off we go to a conversation we wouldn't have had the context we're sitting in, called a meeting, had an intention. You need some unintentional space, and creating that online is a little difficult, we're not all done here. There are both positive and negative consequences and side effects of this change in the workspace that we've a long way to go to learn our way into it.

Ricky Mulvey: Have you seen any successful prototypes, people creating that whitespace in the hybrid world?

Dave Evans: We can't be sure. I'll only give a shout out to Kathy Davies. The lovely Kathy Davies is the managing director of the Stanford Life Design Lab. The woman Bill brought in some years ago to start replacing us, succession plan, which has been fabulously successful. She just killing it. We run these things called studios, which we cross-train other universities. We've done like 1,000 people. These are big groups so when they are upwards of 70-odd people all over the world. We do quarterly gatherings of the learning community and they've gotten pretty good at creating conversation space using Miro boards. This actually an online whiteboard thing where people can look stuff around a real-time and then boom I bumped into your post and noted in real time. I can see that kind of cool then we jump off onto aside chat and have a conversation. Is sort of like milling around in a room. That has worked surprisingly well. 

There are ways you can get there from here. They aren't the same. It doesn't feel the same as bumping into you in the hall. Another quick example of our own, we do coach certification trainings. The coaching world came to the billing-day shows and said, "Oh we love what you're doing, please train us" and so we've been doing that for a while. When the pandemic hit, we canceled it because we really believe in in-person community formation and we just can't do it. They complained bitterly and Bill finally goes, we got to try this online and I go "I don't want to do this" I know. We forced ourselves. The NPS scores on the online version were far better than the in-person. Wow. What happened there? The leading feature-wise better is because now it's super international and you don't pay $5,000 to get California from Thailand. That's the leading future. The second leading feature is it does community development better. What? Yeah, we have better community formation online than in person. How's that work? Here's how it works. 

Normally you come to these trainings and there's 45 people in the room, they're all sitting in tables of six and they get to know those six people pretty well. Then during the break you see each other. Online, what happens is we made a tactical decision. Let the chat column run completely unfettered. The whole time we're talking, or the groups having Q&A, or we doing an exercise, anybody can say anything to anyone or everyone in the chat column and will download and send to everybody. That thing is roaring the whole time. What happens is everybody gets to hear from everybody. Rather than I meet six people in my table and the person both in front of and behind me in the bagel line during the break and that's it. I really met about eight people. I can actually bump into all 45, and like man, that thing that person said that really turns me on and I said come, we've heard and what have you. All these ideas are flowing. The general chatter noise which is really the on-ramp to community, suddenly became much broader and much more interesting and way more available, may more egalitarian. Then LinkedIn groups and Facebook Groups start forming on the side like crazy and off they go. We're still can't hug them and we missed that terribly, [laughs] more friendly people. There are things that being a person that we still lose, but you've got to look to where the benefits may be.

Ricky Mulvey: My guest Dave Evans, author of Designing Your New Work Life. Dave, appreciate you spending some time with us.

Dave Evans: Good to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Ricky Mulvey: That's all for today, but coming up tomorrow, we've got a good old fashioned bull versus bear debate. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.