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

I discuss how you deal with complex interpersonal situations and management. I like to think of myself in the third person, so that I can detach myself from the emotional situation.

Thinking of myself and the third person allows me to better walk-through went outcomes that one would expect to see in the future.

The goal is to not to necessarily win in the short term, but I think of better long-term outcomes for everyone

keep building, and keep persisting. It’s gonna take you a heck of a lot longer than you think it will, but if you keep persisting at something things to get better.

You have to remember that you need to constantly feel like a failure to get better at something.

it’s absolutely fascinating to me that I have very strong emotions about corporations, and other made up entities. Emotions I feel are just as strong as if they are real people.

I talk about dealing with crashing in the afternoon, and how I deal with it. The afternoon crash is real depending on what you eat.

I talk about pushing against the outside world, so that you can have the time to do your work. It’s always just work, and you don’t have to worry about what other people are thinking of you. Just do the work and keep going.

I talk about whether we should be focusing on creating unified theories of this world. Talk about the complex thing that we face within this world, and the difficulty and challenges that you’re going to face of coming up with a unified theory. The question then become should we actually be creating unified theories? Or should we just be pondering stuff?

You are absolutely privileged.

If you’d simply just look at any category of your life and compared it to one it was even a few decades ago, you’ll quickly realize that you are doing better than most people I have ever done in the past.

This goes for almost everybody in society today.

Don’t let the cynicism and negative news get into your mind. We are doing way better than we have ever been.

Keep moving forward and keep a positive mind every day.

Please push against the outside world. The objective is to do the thing that you’re interested in, and to do better work within that particular area.

In order to do better work and to see greater improvements, you have to slow down every single time. From research to piano to swimming, you have to slow down to get better, not speed up.

It’s about the focus on specific areas, not about focusing on breadth, that gives you the greatest gain.

Important lesson that I’ve learned is to remove me out of the situation, and view myself as a third-party. It almost always allows me to collectively think about complicated and emotional decisions. It helps me figure out how much I should actually care in the moment.