Motley Fool Money - Designing A More Engaged Work Life

Episode Date: February 13, 2022

The principles of design can improve your life at work. Really. 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. 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 Stocks discussed: PINS, AAPL, HPQ   Host: Ricky Mulvey Guests: Dave Evans Engineers: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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in the app, which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full-service experts. It's a huge issue. A particular post-internet world, are you willing to live with the constraint of your finitude as a mortal being, I mean, 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 opportunity.

I'm Chris Hill, and that was author Dave Evans. He's a lecturer at Stanford University and co-author 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. My guest is Dave Evans, a lecturer at Stanford University and a co-founder of its Life Design Lab. He's also the co-author 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. So maybe a little bit on what a dysfunctional belief is and kind of how you can find them in your life. Yeah, that's a really good question, Ricky. And I'm not sure we need to be, you know, once you've sort of found your first dysfunctional belief or two and go, holy cow, you know, this thing has way more power in my life than I wanted to. You know, you can kind of get nervous about these things lurking. It's sort of the fire swamp, you know, but I don't want to step on a

dysfunctional belief and have a blow up in my face. If you take the bias to action version of the design mindsets, you know, what that relates to is we really are empiricists. We really do live in reality. Often say design thinking has a brutal commitment to reality. You know, it doesn't work in magical thinking space. It doesn't work in the should world. It works in the is world. So if there's a bit of counsel 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. So very often you can just say, okay, be attentive to when I'm getting stuck. Well, I'm getting stuck on this thing. It's getting in my way. It's a barrier. I feel just, 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 thing, kind of go, okay, well, well, what's going on here? What's holding me back? So, like, classic, you know, the, hey, what's your passion? You know, so like, boy, I haven't been my passion. Oh, man, I'm really stuck on this passion thing. Well, why am I stuck on this passion thing? Well, because I'm supposed to find my passion. Oh, I believe I'm supposed to find my passion. Is that this functional belief? Let me take a look at that. And then you start assessing what's the either the idea, and very often the question, she was phrased as a question like, you know, what's your passion, you know, what's your purpose,

or, you know, that kind of stuff, and then say, well, what does that question believe? And then you start interrogating your question's belief system. Well, apparently, you know, what's your passion? Well, what is the assumption built in even asking that question? The assumption is, I have a passion, the assumption that it's 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.

And once I find it, I will be allowed to do it, and I can even make a living at it. And if you're in Silicon Valley, and you think like a venture capitalist, I can make it killing at it, and all five of those happen to not be true at all. So 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. And that's probably where there might be a dysfunctional belief lurking. I think it's also easy to, especially when people are working, you know, more isolated, working from home, by themselves more. It's easier to brood and get bitter. And I think that's where the root of maybe for me personally, a lot of dysfunctional beliefs stem is, okay, is this a place where I've been brood. or bitter. And if the answer is yes to that, then it's probably a dysfunctional belief coming from that.

It could well be. There's more ways to get stuck than one. And we talk a lot about interactivity. We talk a lot about, you know, this life design stuff is a lot easier to do with help. You need to design team. We're talking about design teams and a design team where all of us are doing the project together and we're truly collaborating is sort of, you know, the preferred format. But let's say all you're doing is like, I'm doing a life design, and I just need a place to share that out loud, I need an echo chamber to hear myself, hey, two good friends of mine, would you hang out with me while I'm doing this? And you just meet my feedback loop. Like, 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. So 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. By yourself. Now being in a conversation with yourself with somebody else is fine You know you sit down with that good friend and goodbye really need to talk something through you got some time. Oh yeah Thanks Ricky appreciate it. Yeah and the person talks for 20 minutes you don't say a word and they go boy that was really helpful. Thank you so much like 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 You know, being in a communion context is an entirely different experience than being by myself.

So I think one of the issues you just described is while we've been hybriding, you know, there's part of the conversation we're having just by ourselves too much. So you almost have to, to solve the Zoom problem, you probably have to do a little more. I revitalized the small support group that I formed in 1917. 73, 47 years ago, you know, during college, which 20 years ago started renewing itself on an annual basis. A guy's retreat would disappear up to Woodby 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. That's a good point. And you start this book designing your new work life with the frame, the reframe of good enough for now. Yep. Is that where you initially planned on starting it? because it's an incredibly powerful reframe, which is, you know, when you're by yourself, you feel very, 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 where you originally planned on starting when you and Bill Burnett were writing this book before the pandemic? No. No, but we got there quickly. The actual story of the book is rather odd. So, you know, we have this charmed relationship with Knoff and Penguin Random House. They've been incredibly generous to us, and the world's been incredibly generous to us. We're still just astonished at this whole movement.

And so the publisher comes back to us and goes, you know, it's not a book, it's a movement. We've got to keep it going. It's going to go, oh, yeah, can you spell a sequel? And so they said, you know, they said, we really want you guys to keep going. Please send us a list of books you could write next, you know, designing your whatever. We said, well, okay, so we brainstorm a list. We sent them a list of eight book alternatives. I can't even remember them.

It's written down somewhere. and they picked designing your work life, which I totally would have lost the bet. I didn't think that was what they're going to pick at all. So it's actually a spec book. We were sort of told to write the book. And the reason they told us to write the book was, look, our perception anyways,

is anecdotal, but it's intuitively informed by smart people, is that the first book is seen as kind of like the redesign your life in a big inflection moment, coming out of college or in your midlife crisis. Now it's not meant to be that. It can be used in all kinds of stages and seasons of life. But it's sort of like the big change book. They think, and, you know, a lot of people can't afford a big change or don't want a big change.

I'd like it a little better right where I am. Can you bring this sort of down to the ground? And, gee, if I had to pick a place where it might make life a little better, while I spend an awful lot of my energy at work, in fact, we've known for many, many centuries that that's the largest single expression of human energy is the workplace. So, yeah, how about making it better there? So we write the book. And then Bill and I sit down to write the book. This is kind of the long version of the story, but it really was funny.

And I sit down to the 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 haven't been doing, I mean, like, you know, 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, well, you know, we'll figure it out.

We're designers. And I kind of go, okay, okay, what do we do first? He goes, well, I go, I know, we'll do a bug list. Now that's an old terminology in the design world. A bug list is like, well, we'll do. what should I work on? Well, what bugs you? You know, it's kind of like the comedian. Hey, doesn't it bug you? And let's go like. So what's a bug list look like? I said, okay, well,

what's a good bug list at work? You know, and then 20 minutes later, we had the book design. What we forgot was between us, we had 75 years business experience, a lot of it in consulting to other organizations. So we'd seen a lot of workplaces and worked with a lot of people and seeing a lot of people in pain. And the bug list of the worker was very, very, easy to generate. And then we had to cull it down to the book. And 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. And that begat, okay, I think we can help them make it a little better. And then Bill goes, yeah,

but it's not going to be good enough. I go, no, it's never good enough. And they're going to, oh, we have to address that problem. We have to address the good enough problem because it's never going to be good enough. Yeah, except it is. Yeah, and yeah, like, well, now it is for now. That's it. That's it. That's it's good enough for now. So 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 it, which is like, I mean, are you actually willing to be happy? Do you have permission to be happy? That's for the conclusion. It's permission to be happy. So a long answer to

a short question, but it's a really good question. Nobody's asked me. that question yet. You're the absolute first person that's gotten this answer. Because it's a huge issue, a particular to post-internet world, are you willing to live with the constraint of your finitude as a mortal being, I mean, 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 opportunity. And I think one of the reasons it's hard to get to that, you know, things are good enough for now as is the hedonic treadmill, which you describe in detail. And you're right, trust us when we tell you this journey on the treadmill rarely ends well. We're on the internet all day. And especially, you know,

we're talking to investors on this show too. I think you can feel that when you're, when you're saving and you're investing, which is in some ways, you need to be on that treadmill to save more, right? Like, 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. Well, it's a fundamental relationship of the nature of growth. I mean, 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? And in a sense, what I'm saying is that as designers at the end

the day we're really flow people. You know, so we really believe that we're building our way forward and we prototype in order to engage the future with the collaborators, you know, you don't just prototype because you haven't got to figure it out yet. What you're really saying is these people coming together around this experimental opportunity of 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. And so, you know, change is inevitable. Growth is optional. So if I, you know, 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. And at some point, you know, 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, which you've got your asset allocation figured out, you know, of course I wanted to get better, but I can't ever be done. So tomorrow I'm going to get better. You know, 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. And 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. And so 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, you know, doing a poor, making a poor effort. And there's such a thing as that I'm trying to do tomorrow today. So 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've got to get at peace with this thing. And finding the well-lived, joyful life now is, in some ways, in some ways, easy. Like, I don't want to say it's easier or more difficult because that's a generalization for everyone listening. And that's not, it's not fair to make that.

There are more tools. There are more tools. There's more resources. There's more accessibility. 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. Yeah. Which, you know, you exist in your own world now. And you, you can kind of decide what your reality is the way you exist on the internet.

and you can find these very small places where things seem more real than they're not. So I guess the problem is, or 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 off of that. So we define a gravity problem as a problem, you know, and it's named for, for Dave's problem, you know, I'm 68 and as I crossed into my 60. I didn't get the freshman 15 pounds, you know, in college, but I did get this turn 60, 20, you know. And I'm a cyclist, and what I noticed was is I gained, you know, 10 and then 15 pounds I didn't want.

You know, my bike slowed down. And the problem was particularly going up hills got worse. And so I went to Bill, I go, hey, Bill, I got a gravity problem. Gravity's not working for me. Can you help me? He kind of goes, no. Gravity is not a problem. It's a circumstance, Dave.

So 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 as not worth trying. Now, that's a judgment call. Like, you know, am I going to solve, you know, 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 for 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. And what that acceptance does is freeze 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 my bike. I could maybe stop drinking so much beer and drop some weight.

I could ride on flat routes and just give into 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. And that's what you got to watch out for. One problem, one place people often feel stuck is, you know, the phrase, I feel stuck in my job. And you and Bill make the case that before you quit, try to redesign your job at first. And I found myself struggling with that

because right now, in some ways, it's easier than ever to quit a job. You know, the switch. You 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. So 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. Yeah. The, um, I mean, 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.

And we are now in the face of the grade quit, 20 million and counting, in a different situation. And sure, it is easier to quit now that it ever was. So, I mean, we keep saying, we don't should on you. Please don't shoot on yourself. And then we go, hey, you shouldn't quit your job without trying this first. I mean, so did we just violate our own principle? Well, kind of. What we're really saying is, Bill and I were chatting with this just the other day.

You know, we're wondering, I mean, you know, if you take all 20x million people that have recently quit in North America, especially Western Europe, where did they go? Well, I mean, someone went to early retirement, you know, somebody to go try a gig thing, somewhere 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. So 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 it with this crap job, are going to jump out of the pan and into the fire.

I mean, because the wonderful meaning-making economy didn't suddenly quadruple in size when you weren't looking, and all these fabulous, you know, soul-enriching jobs that you're hoping for aren't necessarily just lying all over the floor to be picked up. Now, there's lots of openings, but, you know, are the human beings that are going to become your future bosses much better than the boss who just quit? And most people don't quit jobs. They quit bosses, right? 25% of American workers would give you.

back their last raise if you fire their boss. That's not an encouraging stat. So I think relative to, you know, that 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. So we're not anti-quitting. We're anti-prematurally quitting. And 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. So it's not a lost effort. And the one I'll focus in on, my personal favorites are, my personal favorites is the remodel. We have four redesign strategies, you know, re-enlist and reframe, number one, number two, remodel, number three, relocate, number four, 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. You know, 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. The theme you keep going back to in the book, the drumbeat, is engagement. So 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 in your life and fix that first. Yeah, you know, the two primary exercises that we advocate, one in the first book, one in 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 are the Good Time Journal and the Good Work Journal. You know, the Good Time Journal is around engagement, you know, and I objectively take a couple of weeks and just watch myself, not starting with my opera, oh God, my boss did it again, you know, and you write down your little complaint. as opposed to like, okay, during the day, what did I do? When was I engaged? When was out 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.

You know, have an objective understanding of yourself. And then say, okay, 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. You know, how do I do it? With whom do I do it? And what pace do I do it? You know, I mean, you know, either way, micromanagement, which nobody likes, you know, hyper-supervision, took a big hit, thankfully, in the hybrid model post-pandemic.

I mean, you can't micromanage on Zoom. Doesn't work. Micromanagers went that shit crazy during the pandemic. Because, you know, I can't watch you in the office. Where are they? When those guys were just having a panic attack. You know, and those are the companies kind of go, okay, okay, get back in the office. office, get back, get back, get back, you know, and then 6,000 people were out of a letter go, no, we're not going back. So you've got to move to accountability and responsibility as the primary management currencies, not supervision and oversight. So I think as we do this, we make these moves that will allow people to make some of these adjustments in a significant way.

And 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 20,000. 20, and you make the case, quote, 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'll 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 to you? The prediction that the micromanager is over, first of all, I think it was an accident.

I don't think anybody said, gosh, one of the great dividends of the pandemic might be that we could empower people. We could have a sudden shift in trust. No one saw that coming, but that's exactly what happened by force. And so the point being our thesis is that empowerment of that nature and scale is pretty irreversible. I mean, good luck sending people back from being trusted to take care of themselves and get their stuff done on time. to being untrusted by being watched constantly. It's just not going to happen. So, I mean, you can force it to some level and some companies will.

But if that's your motivation, you know, expect your revolving door just to speed up. Now, one thing we heard from lots of managers of large and small companies alike was we have figured out that being together physically, being in the same room, really matters. Sometimes. We can't. 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 organizations' particular culture. You know, what's our culture around here? You know, 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. And it's incredibly difficult to kind of have in creative fields that kind of radical collaboration. Steve Jobs famously put the bathroom at 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.

I'm going with this. No, I didn't kick him out, but afterward I told him off. He could not be kicked out very well. You can't have those moments in the virtual space as much. Right. Yeah, it goes way back. I mean, so Hewlett-Packard, you know, back in the very first generation of Silicon Valley companies, you know, their famous, before we even had the phrase corporate culture,

had MBWA, management by walking around. And management by walking around was just hang out with people bump into what's really going on. So yeah, you can't do NBWA. You can't walk around, you can't bump into you. There are no watercoolers anymore, but you can't have the water cooler, you know, or the espresso machine conversation, not in person. So that's where some of this hanging out. And this is where, you know, strategic versus tactical becomes a real issue. You kind of like, even if we figure out, okay, we really should be together for the following things, you know,

when we all get together for that and that's really important and it's highly directed, how do we make space for serendipity? The one thing I still teach in seriously at Stanford is called the DCI, the Distinguished Career Institute, which is the gap year for grownups. I mean, 45 to 85 year old people taking a year off and thinking deeply about their life. Mostly people near what we used to call retirement and thinking about their encore. And I helped them come up with their wayfinding innovation ideas to design their fellowship year.

and one of my strong admonitions is to, one of the things, to allocate time to is white space. And white space is unscheduled margin that allows that thing I didn't know I was looking for to be tripped over. Now, and what do you do with white space and where do you go? Where do you wander in the woods to trip over that thing you didn't know what you're looking for? And companies have to find ways to create that white space, which is serendipitous. And so there's got, you know, the reason the water cooler in the bathroom and the hallway and the lunchroom work is while I'm there, I'm not intentional. I'm not solving XYZ problem in this meeting. I'm not, you know, at the board coming up with the new product roadmap.

I'm just like, hey, Ricky, how's it going? You know, you look a little upset. Well, yeah, you know, we thought we had the alpha done and I'll go. Oh, you don't know, tell me what I'm about that. And off we go to a conversation we wouldn't have had, had the context we're sitting in called a meeting, had an intention. So you need some unintentional space, and creating that online is a little difficult. So, you know, we're not all done here. There are both positive and negative consequences and side effects of this change in the workspace

that we have a way to go to learn our way into it. Have you seen any successful prototypes of people creating that white space in the hybrid world? Well, yeah, I mean, kind of so let me give a shout out to, you know, so Kathy Davies, the lovely Kathy Davies is the managing director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, the woman Bill brought in, you know, some years ago to start replacing us. I mean, you know, succession plan, which has been fabulously successful. She's just killing it. And we run these things called studios, which are, we cross-trained other universities.

We've done that like a thousand people now. And these are big groups. And they're 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 Mero boards. There's actually an online whiteboard thing where people can move stuff around in real time. and then, ooh, I bumped into your post-it note in real time. I can see that and that kind of look kind of cool.

And then we jump off onto a side chat and have a conversation. It's sort of like milling around in a room. And that has worked surprisingly well. So 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, our own. We do coach certification trainings.

You know, the coaching world came to the Bill and Day show 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. And they complain bitterly and complain bitterly. And Bill finally goes, we got to try this online.

I don't want to do this. I know, I know. And we forced ourselves. The NPS scores on the online version were far better than the in-person. Whoa, what happened there? And then the leading feature of why it's better is because it's now super international and you don't have to pay $5,000 to get to California from Thailand. That's the leading feature.

But 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 and they're all sitting at tables of six and they get to know those six people pretty well and then, you know, during the break you'd see each other.

And online what happens is we made a tactical decision. to let the chat column run completely unfettered. The whole time we're talking, the group's having Q&A, or are we doing an exercise? Anybody can say anything to anyone or everyone in the chat column, and we'll download it and send it to everybody. And that thing is roaring the whole time. And what happens is everybody gets to hear from everybody. So rather than I meet six people at my table and the person both in front of and behind me

in the bagel line during the break, and that's it. I mean, I really only met about it. eight people I can actually bump into all 45 and like man that thing that Hortense said that really turns me on and I side column with her or what have you and all these ideas are flowing so the the general chatter noise which was the which is really the the the on-ramp to community suddenly became much broader much more interesting and way more available made more egalitarian and then LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups start forming on the side like crazy and off they

go. So now we're, you know, you still can't hug them and we miss that terribly. We're friendly people. There are things about being in person that we still lose, but you've got to look where the benefits may be. My guest, Dave Evans, author of designing your new work life, Dave, appreciate you spending some time with us. Good to be here. Thanks for the invitation. 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 and 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.