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

I use the context of academia and PhD in life to explain very real concepts in everybody’s life. I hope that you will resonate with what I’m saying and understand that much of what I’m talking about is not about academic life. It’s about how to live a fulfilled life when there’s pressures from an immediate world.

#Advertising models are changing with the new #digital environment

Most people don’t understand this, but advertising models are dramatically changing with the advent of digital environments.

We think of advertising in the traditional sense of getting people to buy something.

However, in the digital environment, it’s more about building #community and getting people to buy in with what you’re actually doing. It has little to do with getting people to buy something.

So what does that mean? It means that in order to build successful businesses, you have to give a tremendous amount to build that community. You have to realize that community does not happen in the next year, but happens in a decade.

Community is about encouraging people to participate, and be part of the experience. It’s not about selling people, it’s about people feeling so #empowered from the community that they naturally just want to participate by purchasing something.

Honestly, I don’t understand the anti-#woke movement. it just does not make sense to me. Not only are you creating considerable amount of tension and anxiety, but it’s frankly bad for #business.

Being #empathetic, kind and #inclusive is actually good for business. If you look at across the board most of the research in these areas, emphasizing positive traits, almost always correlates with the performance games.

Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a single paper or stream of research that argues that creating anxiety and divisiveness is good for economic performance. There are research papers that focus on the what is the cause of the performance gain, but emphasizing positive traits has #performance benefits.

There’s a significant difference between real life and research life. I discuss what does difference actually means if somebody that does research for a living.

All of us project the uncertainty we face in different ways. Doing the #academic game is very uncertain, and we learn how to process that information.

Some of us learn to #internalize this uncertainty, and become more doubtful and #insecure. (This is me)

However, some of us learn that we can try to control the environment and become more #anxious. These people tend to be viewed as very #controlling of their environment.

The key thing to remember is that both of these are coming from dealing with the challenges of the academic system. they come from the uncertainty that we face.

Take a step back and realize that the challenge is not necessarily you individually, but it’s the #system that you’re dealing with.

Consequently, I think we need to learn how to be more #empathetic with how we deal and project our uncertainties. This is not to say to be overtaken by controlling person, but to learn to deal with yourself within this environment.

learn how to be #patient and #kind as best as you possibly can. I know that this is difficult to do it, and it requires a lifetime of learning. However, you will become much more able to tackle much larger problems in your life.

We need to reassess how we think about managing #research and #innovation in completely different ways that we do right now.

We need to start thinking about how to manage #research and innovation in a far more and #learning oriented manner.

How we currently pursue funding of research and innovation projects is based on stage-gates. We simply cut off the resources when somebody, some project, or #paper performs poorly.

Imagine if that’s how we treated poor performance in #elementary school. If students are not performing well in 3rd grade, we simply remove them from the elementary school. They are underperforming and thus irrelevant to the performance of the #school.

I am sure all of you can think of cases in which somebody underperformed early on, and then became stellar much later on in their elementary school career.

It seems absurd to do this and yet this is how we manage research and innovation projects.

I know that resources are limited, however, we may want to consider modeling after elementary schools and how they actually deal with poor performing assets.

It is not necessarily you that is driving processes in your #environment. you might think that everything is in your control, but it’s hardly the case.

When you create anything, from a new written document, to a new innovation, you often have to think about what are the forces outside of your #control that are driving what is happening.

Consequently, the experiences that you’re having might be pretty universal across many people, and it is likely driven by some #generic process that is outside of your control.

Don’t be discouraged from the things that you experience, it’s likely much more generic than you believe. It has very little to do with you, and evidentially much more to do with the external environment.

It’s important to think that you likely have very little to do with either the #success or #failure that you experience.

As a #professor and in most #careers, you have to learn to detach to figure out how to keep going. Realize that the ups and downs do not matter.

Whether somebody recognizes what you’re doing or doesn’t has a little consequence on who you are as a person.

Your goal is to learn how to detach so you can keep taking steps forward regardless of the #progress that you’re actually making.

I think we incorrectly suggest that making progress means that you’re always going in a linear path. We believe that making progress always has #incremental returns. Instead, what it feels like is that incremental returns never amount.

What happens is that you have very little returns, and then one day you look back after a #decade and understand that what you were doing was worth it.

given the structure of reality, you have to be more detached from any outcomes and what people will suggest. It doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re #failing.

The challenge with most things in life is #waiting to realize outcomes from the actions that you perform today.

Almost all of us finds this difficult, and we go in different directions when we don’t experience with outcomes more immediately.

Some of us get #anxious and start being mean to others and ourselves, some of us quit and give up, some of us turn to substances to take the edge off, and some of us turn to unworldly things that allow us to have faith.

Whatever technique that you use, remember that we just need to keep moving forward. hopefully the substances that you use and the unworldly objects that you turn into allow you to positively move forward, rather than negatively.

Whether it appears #delusional to the outside world or yourself, or you appear to be the hero, just takes time for the outcomes to actually occur or not occur.

Keep walking forward despite the feelings that you have and the anxieties that you’re experiencing.

Good things come when you’re #patient and you work on difficult tasks.

I talk about the challenges balancing being a parent versus doing research. And I also talk about how being in the moment allows you to deal with these multiple tensions.