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

Education makes a dangerous assumption: that people want to learn. They don’t. Most people don’t want to improve, cooperate, or even engage when it would clearly benefit them. This isn’t a moral failure. It’s human nature. Kindergarten teachers understand this better than professors. With kids, every emotion is visible. As adults, we don’t lose those emotions, we just learn how to hide them, manag...

Most mature PhD students think they suck the moment they start. That is the default experience. You usually come in as someone who was doing spectacularly well. Top of your profession. Respected. Competent. You go back to school because you think, “I’m already good. I can advance.” Maybe it’s for research. Maybe it’s for a career pivot. Maybe it’s because you want to do something that actually mat...

I’ll be the first to say it: academic awards are political. Best paper, rising scholar, senior scholar… endowments, honors, “recognition.” None of it is as objective as it looks. It’s not about the best ideas. It’s about pedigree, politics, and inference. Here’s the hard truth: • Most of these systems are just people making guesses about your value. • Those guesses are often wrong. • And if you do...

There are two kinds of people in this world: • the ones who create barriers, say “you can’t do this,” and keep you stuck in the norms… • and the ones who say, “sure, go for it—let’s see what you can do.” I want to be the second kind. Because sometimes all it takes is hearing, “you can do this.” Maybe only one in a million will carry it with them, but for that one person—it changes everything. I st...

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is this: feeling good about yourself and the world has very little to do with “feeling” at all. Happiness is not something that arrives one day and stays. It’s something you have to manage—every single day. For me, the hardest trigger is social comparison. I look at others racing ahead with publications or chasing prestige. They look like hummingbirds—always...

This is something I’ve wrestled with for years: How do you tell if someone is actually serious? I’ve spent decades in research. Every idea takes years—sometimes a decade—of grinding, failure, rejection, and getting back up. And yet most people don’t understand what that commitment really means. The problem is cheap talk. Most people say they’re passionate. They say they’ll do the work. But when th...

My wife and I are both professionals. I am a business professor and she is a veterinarian. We have two teens. The hard part is not planning. It is that life gets interrupted, nonstop, by sick kids, appointments, and surprises. Two career parents means you must learn to roll with it. Modern parenting adds pressure to be “on” all the time, and social judgment makes it worse. We try to share the load...

We’re sold a story every day—by schools, employers, businesses, and even “in-crowds.” They all want us to buy in completely. But here’s the hard truth: if you drink the Kool-Aid and lose yourself in the hype, you risk getting hurt. Organizations—no matter how noble they look—are just groups of people with motives. Education says it will change your life. Employers say you’re “family.” Businesses s...

I know how easy it is to get distracted by the newest idea, the latest tip, or what others say you should be doing. I fall into that trap too. But after years of trying different “hacks,” I’ve learned something painfully simple: The only thing that works is showing up, every single day. Not in big leaps. Not in flashy breakthroughs. Just one small step—again and again. It doesn’t matter how tiny t...

Almost every problem in life comes down to ego. People genuinely believe they’re better than you—deep down, to their core. It’s not a guess, not an impression—they actually believe it. And when someone thinks they’re better, they stop listening. They stop learning. They make your life harder. The only way to cut through the cheap talk? Get them to do something. Action exposes the truth—most people...

I used to wake up excited to do research. I chased goals. I loved the climb. I believed in the system. But years of rejection change you. You start to see the game for what it is. If you’re at the right school, with the right team, and the right editor, you can make it work. If not—you’re on your own. I’ve been on my own for a long time. The mentors I had during my PhD—brilliant, supportive, chall...

Most people think buying property is automatically a good investment. As a business professor, I’m going to say something unpopular: most of the time, it probably isn’t. When I think about investing, I always come back to one basic question: What is the best return for the risk I’m actually bearing? We know this pretty well by now. The best long-run returns usually come from owning the best compan...

I strongly believe that working harder reduces research quality. And I know that sounds wrong in academia. But 95% of the advice I hear is either: • “You just need to work harder,” or • Some kind of anxious humble-brag about late nights, weekends, and exhaustion. And every time I hear it, it makes people feel terrible. Behind. Like they’re not doing enough. Like they’re the problem. That advice is...

The longer I’ve been a parent, scholar, and human being, the less faith I have in the neat, clean economic logic I once believed in. Those tidy models—pick only the “best” people, copy best practices, dial up the traits that matter—work on paper, but they often fall apart when you’re dealing with real people. In reality, human progress looks a lot less like optimization and a lot more like kinderg...

I swim a lot. And almost every week at the pool, I see someone in their 70s—sometimes even in their 80s—learning how to swim for the first time. They’re out there, kicking slowly, trying to float, listening to the lifeguard’s instructions. And every time, I think: They still believe they’re in the game. That belief—staying in the game—is far more important than any technical skill you’ll ever lear...

I strongly believe the way we teach fitness and athleticism is completely wrong. We start with competition. We teach that the goal is to win, to maximize, to go as hard as possible. And then we wonder why most adults stop. Once you are past 30, the number of people doing athletic activities is spectacularly low. I do not think this is about sedentary lifestyle. I think it is about how we frame fit...

I’m probably too open about my inner life. What I’m thinking. What I’m struggling with. What I don’t understand yet. I don’t know many people in academia who are that public. I do it because I hope it helps someone else feel normal. But I also know it comes with a cost. Because I don’t like strategic behavior. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And here’s the thing I’ve learned with age: When some...

I’ve always been a crusty old man. Now I just admit it in public. Here’s the thing that drives me a little crazy: almost nobody has a long-term vision anymore. The internet is full of quick wins, instant credit, and absolute nonsense. Even in my own profession. Especially in my own profession. I built an internationally recognized conference from nothing. I was a nobody. A PhD student. No money. I...

I honestly think that a lot of what we call “financial problems” are not really financial at all. I think money, most of the time, is just an indicator. A symptom. It points to something else that is deeper and far more important going on inside someone’s life. And I see two sides to this all the time. On one side, people cannot save anything. No cushion. No margin. Always behind. On the other sid...

When you follow something like the R3cipr ocity Project—or any long, hard project—you need to understand something: recognition might never come. And if it does, it won’t feel the way you imagined. By the time it arrives, you’ll be too tired, too changed, or too bored to care. In year one, people cheer you on. “Great idea!” they say. You’re excited, they’re excited. But by year five or six, the mo...

century ago, most of us wouldn’t have lived past 30—especially young men, lost to war and hardship. Today, we face a new challenge: living long enough to feel the grind. That means normalizing the slow, often frustrating reality of progress. In business, even the best companies—growing at 10% a year—take seven years to double your money. The same is true for life’s big goals: every day requires sh...

I study as a business professor is how badly we infer causes from surfaces. We walk into a classroom, a gym, Walmart, a town meeting, and we instantly start telling ourselves stories. Who looks successful. Who looks competent. Who looks like they have it together. We infer all of this from watches, cars, clothes, houses, how someone talks, how confident they sound, how firm their handshake is. And...

When I started this project, I had about 80 followers. On YouTube, my first follower for six months was the developer. That’s the truth. At any moment, I could have said, this is impossible, I should give up. Nobody is following me. The platform doesn’t have users. Everything about this feels like failure. It feels like guilt. Like I’m screwing something up. And until you actually do something lik...

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned in science is this: No amount of convincing will ever change people’s minds. No amount of work. No amount of data. No perfectly designed study. Strongly held beliefs don’t move because you argue better. In my field, it’s almost understood that ideas don’t win by persuasion. They win when people move on. You can complement existing ideas. You can chal...

I don’t believe in the success games of research.