R3ciprocity.com - Prof David Maslach: Innovation; Research Life; Striving Towards Happiness

When your parents are successful, there is a quiet pressure to be successful in the same way. Not because anyone says it out loud. But because expectations travel through families. Statistically, professions are inherited. If your parents are doctors, lawyers, professors, accountants, your odds of becoming one are unusually high. Not because of conspiracy. Because of exposure, information, and fam...

If you list it out honestly, most of it is terrible. The pay is bad for a long time. The uncertainty is extreme. The grind never really stops. You are constantly told you are not doing enough. Outside academia, people think you don’t work. Inside academia, people imply you don’t work hard enough. Both are wrong. I chose a “lucrative” PhD field on purpose. Business. Strategy. I thought I was being...

I despise most business news, and I say that as a business professor. It teaches the wrong lesson. It trains you to chase fast money, big deals, and quick wins. That is not what real work looks like. Most of business is boring. It is tiny steps. It is dull. It is slow. Most days nothing happens. Value comes from getting up and doing the same thing again, even when it feels pointless. The real prob...

I used to have this fantasy that somebody would come rescue me. A boss would notice. A mentor would step in. Money would get easier. Work would get simpler. Here is the part people do not want to hear. That hero in your mind almost never shows up. And if you wait for them, you stay stuck. You stay needy. You stay quiet. You keep hoping instead of building. What I learned is boring, and it works. I...

We are living in the most opportunity-rich time humans have ever experienced. And so many people are terrified of it. What surprises me most is that researchers and scholars might be the most afraid. We would rather study what’s happening than actually participate in it. Think about what exists right now. With social media alone, if you hit the right message, the right tone, or just do something q...

Anything meaningful is just repetition. The same work. Every day. For years. Sometimes for decades. Look at Wikipedia. Roughly one person contributes for every tens of thousands who read it. One person quietly building something that thousands benefit from. Most people consume. A few people build. The builders usually look strange. Obsessed. Unreasonable. Maybe even a little crazy.

If you’re a senior professor or academic leader, I hope you hear this clearly. Most days, you’re navigating enormous ambiguity. You’re expected to have answers. But the truth is: you’re making a lot of it up as you go. We all are. There are three groups I try to speak to every day: 1. Senior faculty who quietly carry the emotional weight of an entire department. 2. Early-career scholars who are co...

My biggest message with the R3ciprocity Project is simple: Hope matters. And small steps matter even more. If you think you’re behind… If you think you’re not the “right kind of person”… If you think you don’t have the money, the network, the background — I want you to listen to what I’m saying every day. If you show up for 15 minutes… Then tomorrow, 15 minutes again… And you do that for years… Yo...

One of the best autobiographies I’ve read in modern history is Trevor Noah’s book Born a Crime. It’s extraordinary. He grew up in apartheid South Africa with a Swiss father and a South African mother. Which meant his very existence was illegal under apartheid. The stories are wild, heartbreaking, and often hilarious. But what struck me most wasn’t just the adversity. It was how he learned to navig...

I wasn’t trained for greatness. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how strange it feels to be a professor of innovation when I grew up in a tiny town in northern Ontario where none of this was ever expected of me. I was the kid least likely to “make it.” I was in special ed for years. I was bullied. I was the one everyone quietly assumed would end up cutting trees in the bush or working at the...

If you’re listening to this, you probably want a career in something that looks impossibly advanced from the outside — biotechnology, genomics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, fintech, pharmaceuticals, maybe even quantum computing or nanotechnology. All of these areas feel like there’s this strong barrier around them. And it’s true… but the real barrier is psychological. Most people nev...

You have probably met a lot of people in your life that will treat you poorly. This week, or even today, you may experience somebody who is short with you, exasperated when you are around, gives you the eye rolls, gets angry, or suddenly disappears and ghosts you. If you are like me, you internalize this immediately. You think: Is it me? Am I at fault? For a long time, I did this with almost every...

(The Real Reason I Still Keep Going Even When It Feels Pointless) Real work. The kind that doesn’t show up on social media. The kind that doesn’t get recognized, that feels invisible—until it doesn’t. I come from a family of immigrants. My dad’s family moved from Poland in the 1930s and ended up in the far north of Canada. They were homesteaders—settling into this cold, isolated place that couldn’...

Here’s what nobody tells you. Building something truly different is like flying a plane while you are building it. When I first heard that in my PhD program, I did not fully get it. Now I do. Nobody really knows what to do. Nobody really knows the right course of action. There is no single correct answer. There are many plausible worlds. Many possible truths. And you have to pick one. Entrepreneur...

Many systems—academic, economic, organizational—are built on the belief in rational, cooperative actors. But people often enter interactions: • Threatened by cooperation • Pre-committed to not cooperating • Motivated to harm systems they view as unjust, even at personal cost This isn’t just “bad behavior.” It’s the norm that too many theories write off as “noise.”

If you’re in the research game, you eventually have this weird shift. You start discounting highly published people. Not because you’re bitter. Not because you’re jealous. But because you understand how much work is actually involved. And when you see a massive publication count, you start thinking: there are other effects going on behind the scenes that I can’t observe. If you talk to the elite o...

I’ve been digitizing old photos of myself as a kid. What hit me was not the haircut. It was how hard I was on myself even then. By 13 or 14, I had already decided I needed to be perfect to be liked. That belief pushed me through engineering, a PhD, and becoming a professor. It also quietly followed me everywhere. Academia did not create my anxiety. It rewarded it. You learn quickly that you are ne...

( The short answer: we get paid every two weeks. The long answer is… complicated.) I’ve studied research and innovation for almost 20 years. I live it. And I teach it. So I think I’m fairly qualified to answer this one. There are two broad worlds to understand: industry and academia. ⸻ 🏢 In Industry The engine that drives economic performance is knowledge — access to it, and the ability to share...

We spend years teaching kids how to solve abstract word problems and memorize sequences. But rarely do we teach them how to handle rejection. Or get back up after failure. Or deal with their parents aging. Or regulate their emotions in a fight. Or understand why they feel what they feel. Why is math on a pedestal, while human behavior is on the sidelines?

I found my old scholarships this weekend. And I felt like I failed them. Not because I did badly. But because I didn’t live up to the story I thought they promised. I’ve always been the type to work. Apply for things others don’t. Say yes to opportunity. First in my family to go to university. Given chances my family never had. So when I opened that folder… I felt grateful. Then strangely sad. Bec...

When I was younger, I believed that most problems could be solved with mathematics, logic, and engineering. I truly thought that if we just worked hard enough, we could design our way out of almost anything. But after years of watching how people actually behave, I have realized that the reasons things succeed or fail rarely have much to do with math. They are usually about emotion. About how peop...

I still do the R3 ciprocity Project because being a research professor is, at its core, a deeply lonely career. It’s not the work itself that makes it lonely—it’s the mental space you’re in all the time. You’re in your head, trying to create something new. You spend most of your day thinking alone, writing alone, editing alone. And if you care about your work, as most researchers do, the isolation...

Artificial intelligence is going to force a major pivot in education. And it’s going to happen extraordinarily quickly. I’ve been using these tools heavily. I’m a pretty advanced user. What I’ve realized is uncomfortable: These tools are far more capable than most humans at this moment. I know that sounds crazy. But I actually default to talking to the AIs now. They can keep pace with me. That’s n...

You are massively underestimating how much the world is about to change. Most people don’t understand the scale of innovation that happens every year. We think it’s linear. Whatever happened last year will be similar to this year. That’s not how this works. If you look at the numbers, the amount of innovation that happens this year is almost equivalent to all of the innovation that happened in mos...

When you were a kid, you got a sticker when you did something right. In school, you got a grade. In a job, maybe a raise. You learned early: “Do the thing, get the reward.” Then you hit graduate school. And suddenly… nothing. You work for months, maybe years. No feedback. No clarity. No prize. Just silence. Sometimes rejection. Often confusion. That’s when the beast in your head wakes up. Not the...