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

How can you make a positive change in your life? Much of the world is not fair, but you have to work within those confines How do you improve yourself and what is that improvement look like? That improvement is generally 1% per year. if you make an improvement that is one percent prettier you’re doing OK.

it never gets any easier. What changes is that? You get better at it. The feeling of constantly pushing forward never goes away. You do get better at what you’re doing. But that feeling of pushing forward is the same. That’s where you have to try to embrace that feeling.

if you’re having doubts about things in your life, just embrace it. Sure you can do it.

How many times have you spent years revising and tweaking every little word of your paper, just to have it rejected? Much time and effort in the research process are lost navigating ambiguous reviews that often highlight issues but offer no solutions. Typically, out of three reviews for a paper, only one may provide constructive feedback while the others simply point out flaws. Contrary to the ide...

some people are more successful than others, because of their natural gifts, and other people are successful because of their environment. Ultimately what drives success is your ability to get back up into stick with some thing for a long time, regardless of your individual traits.

You cannot convince anybody that you are making a wise choice. The only thing that you can do is to live your life, regardless of what other people will say about it. Many people cannot see very far in the future, and they’re not gonna understand what you’re doing. Best thing that you can do is to just walk in your determination.

longevity is about how long we will actually live. The current movement thinking about our health holistically is likely to add up in compound overtime. However, there are new things that creep up, such as drug abuse, that make it difficult for everyone to perform at their potential.

People often wonder why some succeed while others don't. I believe a big part of this is a marketing problem that sells us the idea that the world is unfair. While it's true that life isn't always fair, thinking that someone like you has succeeded means you can too. The misleading part comes from the belief that you can achieve your goals quickly. That's just not the case. Reaching your goals can...

We talk about leadership, what it means to be a business, professor, and technology start ups. We also talk about what it means to lead when you feel like you’re the smallest in the room.

The more I learn about myself, the more I realize that I do not fit that mold at typical #professor. This uniqueness drives a lot of benefits in my life, and it helps me get a lot of perspective. However, I also recognize that I’m not much different than anybody else. There’s things that you are experiencing that many other people have felt the same way. It’s this balance of recognizing your indiv...

Getting level of abstraction right in the research paper is the hardest part. It’s about getting people to see both ends of what you’re actually looking at. It’s about making sure that you have some thing that is generalizable, but also very specific to what you’re exploring. I give some tips and thoughts on how to navigate this problem of getting the level of abstraction correct.

Most things that are worthwhile require a great deal of effort. This means that on a daily basis you’re not gonna feel good actually doing it.? How do you will some thing to happen? You find those things that don’t make you feel good inside, and you addressed them by substituting other things. Finding things that are light hearted and allow you to get up every day.

is there money to be made? The answer is there’s always money to be made, you just have to figure out the right combination to generate this economic value. If you can find the right combination, you can actually do well in almost every industry.

What’s the supply and demand of research topics I talk about how supply and demand research topics often does not match up. I also talk about how some research topics become hot topics. Moreover, I talk about how the funding for research and development ideas is often lower than one would like.

We need to detach from this idea of “being perfect” all the time. most days, I am a giant mess, and much of the things that I’ve worked on in my life have resulted in not so good outcomes. However, here is what I learned: No matter what happens to you, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get perfect results that you intended. Having not so good results should be your standard way of measuring what...

It has little to do with motivation about wine people don’t do well. In my view it’s more of the sociology behind what is going on. Thinking about how do we remove the barriers to failure and making it feel not like a failure is the best course of action.

A key aspects much of life is just showing up. It’s not necessarily about having good performance at any given moment, but it’s just showing up and being part of the zeitgeist. The concept of "presence" can significantly influence organizational outcomes. Presence is defined as the consistent physical or virtual participation in activities or events within a specific context. In organizational set...

The world tends to eat you up if you don’t create a solid base for yourself. Actively manage how you feel about the world, and figure out the way that you are a positive person every day. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you will feel like a positive person every day, but it means you are pushing back and trying to be a positive person every day. There’s a difference.

Is private school better than public school? The answer isn't straightforward because it depends on the individual student. Private schools often come with a certain prestige, but that reputation comes with a higher price tag. For some, the extra cost might be worth it if the school offers specialized programs or networking opportunities that align with the student's goals. However, whether a scho...

Go ahead and discount me all you want. You’re giving me more fuel for the fire. Often when you feel the darkest, it’s all the more reason to get going and show everybody else what you can actually do. Everybody will be watching. I’m thinking that there’s a simple rule, you don’t know what the secret is, you’ll just keep working at it, while everybody else keeps watching.

I have been working on being OK with who I am, no matter who I perceive I’m interacting with. I often feel very insecure with those that I perceived from as higher status than me, and the way that I am learning how to deal with this is by realizing that I don’t have a lot of flaws. Rather is things that I perceive as flaws are actually gifts and traits that are uniquely me. They’re my traits that...

There are many unspoken myths in Academia, and it’s your job to ignore them. It’s your job to live a healthy life that fits for you.

I repeatedly suggest that you need to develop a view of yourself where you are just “good” inside. The #research game is full of #negativity, and you’ll start to question who you are as a person. Remember, it is not you that are putting these poor images of yourself in your head. It’s the research game that is doing that. It’s a few people that don’t understand what you were about. Screw ‘em. Deve...

You’ll never get everyone to like you. Often there are people in your life that will not like you for whatever reason. And you likely did not do anything wrong, and there’s likely nothing you can change about yourself to fix that. What you have to get used to is to say, “bless your heart,” which is a southern saying that means I can’t change you, and I will go on my merry way. It means you have to...

What is serendipity? I talk to Professor Christian Busch from University of South California about serendipity, and how we might enhance our ability to take advantage of serendipity.