S4E10 - Dave Evans on discernment and ways of knowing

Season 4

Jun. 27

In all my years of teaching about decision making, no topic generates more angst than the need to know. But how do you know what you know? How do you know when you know what you know? And how do you integrate this knowing into some of the most important decisions of your life?

In this episode, I invited Dave Evans onto the show to talk all about these topics of knowing and discernment. Dave is the co-author of Designing Your Life and Designing Your New Work Life. He co-founded the Stanford Life Design lab and holds the title of discernment lead for a social impact accelerator.

He shares a number of things he's learned from sitting with thousands of lives via the Designing Your Life programs, including how to go beyond cognitive knowing, the important distinction between certainty and faith, how to approach when things go wrong, and exercises for honing your discernment.

Topics Covered

1:01 A story of how Dave ran smack up against this discernment topic
2:27 It's ok to not have it all figured out
4:40 Defining discernment
5:58 You're not just a brain on a transport system
7:36 Overcoming resistance to tapping into the emotional center of knowing
10:11 The peak-knowing and trough-knowing exercise
10:59 Your brain announced it, but your brain didn't do it
12:21 The importance of articulating and reflecting on what's happening
12:54 Surrogation vs. analysis
14:47 We are humans, not robots
15:26 There is no knowing. Simply give it your best possible shot.
17:40 But what about when things go wrong?
21:16 Where the bias toward causality gets us in trouble
22:46 The falsehood of knowing and distinction between certainty and faith
24:55 The philosophical underpinnings of human-centered design
26:05 Faith and acceptance
28:41 How growth and collaboration factors into this
30:50 Most big decisions are a bet on your future self
33:48 Improve decision making by using multiple ways of knowing
34:10 The Odyssey plan as a tool for tapping into how various futures feel
36:01 In hard decision making, it's not about deciding the right thing
38:19 There's no elimination of risk, just reduction of risk. Know your threshold.
41:14 How to tune into other ways of knowing
42:51 Three levels of discernment: transaction, practice, and formation
45:08 The be-do-become cycle

Guest Bio

From saving the seals to solving the energy crisis, from imagining mice to redefining software — Dave’s been on a mission, including helping others to find theirs.

Starting at Stanford in the 70’s with dreams of following Jacques Cousteau as a marine biologist, Dave realized (a bit late) that he was lousy at it and shifted to mechanical engineering with an eye on the energy problem. After four years in alternative energy, it was clear that this idea’s time hadn’t come yet. So while en route to biomedical engineering, Dave accepted an invitation to work for Apple, where he led the mouse team and introduced laser printing to the masses. When Dave’s boss at Apple left to start Electronic Arts, Dave joined as the company’s first VP of Talent, dedicated to making “software worthy of the minds that use it.”

Having participated in forming the corporate cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided his best work was in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and love doing it. So he went out on his own working with start-up teams, large corporate executives, non-profit leaders, and countless young adults. They were all asking the same question. “What should I do with my life?” Helping people get traction on that question finally took Dave first to Cal and then Stanford, where Dave is co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab in the Stanford Design Program.

Dave and his partner Bill Burnett made their popular Stanford course Designing Your Life into a New York Times #1 Bestselling book of the same name, released in September 2016, followed by Designing Your Work Life in February 2020 and Designing Your New Work Life in October 2021.

Dave holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a graduate diploma in Contemplative Spirituality from San Francisco Theological Seminary.

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— Michelle Florendo