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

I talk about why I am doing the R3ciprocity project. And talk about the personal journey that I’ve been going through, and hopefully bring you on this journey. Talk about the challenges of academia, and life in general, where you do everything right and things just don’t work out despite that.

You simply have to remember that you’re a good person no matter what happens to you. Reminding everybody that they are good people hopefully will matter someday.

There’s no secret to building some sort of skill or capability, or any other thing in your life that matters to you. The secret is to show up when nobody else wants to.

Everything that matters in your life always sucks when you’re actually trying to get it. Once you actually get there, you’ll realize that it’s the act of showing up, and that grind, that allowed you to actually achieve it.

I talked about the right amount of abstraction and research paper. The more abstract the idea is the more it’s gonna account for more things, however the less that is going to be contextual. The problem is is that contextual understanding is a lot easier than extract understanding.

I think the only way that you know what is the correct amount of abstraction is simply through trial and error.

One of the things that I’ve learned with the reciprocity project is realizing that most people are very self-centered. Coming to terms with the fact that people are self-centered is challenging, however I am learning to exploit the fact that most people are self-centered. In other words you work within the domain better self centered and then you figure out a structure such that people will naturally organize based on their self centeredness.

One thing that I’ve learned is that you need to be OK with who you are and not be so caring about other people. You really have to take a step back and just be fine with who you are.

You have to learn how to speak your thoughts, but then if nobody’s willing to listen to you, you have to be OK with that.

We really need to step back, and simply wait until other people are ready to meet you halfway. You can’t force them to like you for listen to your thoughts, and tell their ready.

I talk about using intuition in your decision making. I think we should be incorporating more intuitive thought into our major decisions, and really pay attention to the subtle cues within decision that you make.

I talk about how many times we blame the leaders when there are changes in the macro economy, but it’s often not tied to their actions. I also discuss how consistency is often the best way to create economic growth.

it’s important to focus on the basic idea of what you’re trying to show. Statistical techniques I think I have overrun our literature, and we really need to think about whether we should be using fancier statistical techniques and science or not. In my personal appealing mean, we should be going back to basic plots.

Don’t just stop when you get a negative feedback. Keep working at it and refining it, all ideas are not good when you start.

I think we need to stop putting on as many airs as we put on, and stop pretending.

Just try to be yourself, and ask for help when you need it. It’s an absolute learned skill to do so. This means that you need to stop projecting like you’re somebody, when we know none of us really are.