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

There are two paths in research.

One where you sit in a room, alone, writing ten pages a day for twenty years—no recognition, no guarantees. You don’t talk to anyone. You just keep going, because that’s what “success” is supposed to look like. And the guilt if you’re not doing it? It’s crushing.

And then there’s the other path.

The one where you still write, but you define impact your own way. Maybe that means building something new. Maybe it means helping others. Maybe it means working a job while trying to stay in the game. Everyone tells you that’s the wrong way. That you’re distracted. That you’ll never make it.

But I’m choosing that second path anyway.

Not because it’s easier. It’s not. It’s messier, lonelier, and it doesn’t come with applause. But it’s mine. And honestly, I’m not trying to be a star. I’m trying to survive. I’m trying to build something that matters to me, even if no one ever calls it “success.”

Because I know I’m not built for that first path. I’ve tried. I’ve failed. And I’ve realized—my only shot is to keep doing my thing. To build R3ciprocity. To show up with care. To be a dad. To create something weird and kind and different.

So if you’re out there, trying to make sense of your own strange, meandering path—maybe this is your reminder: you don’t have to do it their way.

People keep telling me building my own platform is a mistake.

That I look foolish.

That I’m stigmatizing myself.

That this is “not what serious people do.”

And I hear it. It rings in my ears because it usually comes from the same people.

Here’s the thing though.

If there were a better way to build something like R3ciprocity, I would do it.

If there were a shortcut, a cleaner path, a way to pay my way around this, I would have taken it.

I’ve been in school longer than many people have been alive.

I study organizations, learning, innovation, and failure for a living.

You don’t need to be brilliant to see this. You just need to be honest.

The only way this gets built is by showing up.

Out loud.

In public.

One day at a time.

I hear people say, “I don’t care about that kind of thing.”

But you do.

I know you do because you never take the opportunity when it’s right in front of you.

We are the first humans in the history of our species with this level of digital infrastructure.

Anyone. Anywhere. Zero gatekeepers.

And most people freeze.

Why?

Because they’re terrified of looking foolish.

Terrified of being judged.

Terrified someone will say, “Why are you doing this?”

I see it every day in my classes.

I ask someone to stand up and try something small.

Low risk. Low stakes.

And the moment arrives, it shuts down.

“I can’t.”

“That’s uncomfortable.”

“That’s not what I’m supposed to do.”

That’s the point.

I’ve posted 6,200+ videos on YouTube over roughly 10 years.

Every single time, I get nervous.

Every single time, I wonder how I’ll be perceived.

And I still press publish.

Not because I want to be famous.

Not because I think this is easy.

But because no one before us has ever had this opportunity to build, learn, connect, and grow like this.

Why wouldn’t I take it?

Why wouldn’t you?

I struggle with charitable giving. I always have. And I think it’s because of ambiguity.

When you buy a carton of eggs, you get instant feedback. You know what you paid. You know what you got. You crack the eggs the next morning and you know if it was good or bad.

Charity doesn’t work like that.

You give money and it disappears into a system you can’t see. You don’t really know what it bought. Was it food? Was it training? Was it staplers? Was it overhead? And overhead matters. Every real organization is mostly overhead. Even Apple and Google are mostly overhead.

But with charity, we want instant, visible good. And we almost never get it.

Then there’s the deeper problem. Even if the intention is good, we don’t always know if the outcome helps or harms. Does giving cash help? Does it make things worse? We don’t really know. Economists argue about it. Philosophers argue about it. And regular people just feel stuck.

I don’t have a clean answer.

What I do believe is this: charitable giving is less about certainty and more about practicing a bigger heart. Doing something you don’t fully understand. Acting without clear reinforcement.

And that might be the whole point.

One of the strangest things about being public is the split reaction I get.

Half the people say, “Are you okay being this open?”

The other half say, “Oh… I thought it was just me.”

And that second reaction is the whole point.

I’m trying to meet people where they actually are. Not where LinkedIn tells them they should be. Not where podcasts or YouTube thumbnails pretend life exists. But where people really are at 2 a.m., Googling, “Why does this feel so hard?” and wondering if something is wrong with them.

Here’s the truth. Most of life is not a highlight reel. It’s not constant growth or constant joy. Most days are what I call B-land. You wake up a little tired. You do your work. Some things go wrong. Some things go fine. You eat dinner. You decompress. You do it again tomorrow.

That’s not failure. That’s life.

The problem is almost nobody talks you through those middle moments. Everything online is filtered, edited, and framed as if real life is either collapsing or glorious. It’s neither. It’s mostly ordinary, slightly messy, and quietly meaningful.

What actually moves the needle isn’t intensity. It’s tiny adjustments, made repeatedly. Dialing things up a little. Dialing things down a little. Not panicking. Not spiraling. Not letting one bad day define you.

If you can learn to live well in the middle—while still taking one small step forward—you’re doing far better than you think.

That’s what I’m trying to show, out loud, in real time.

There’s one thing I’ve learned that no one really prepares you for in academia:

You can do all the right things. You can follow every step perfectly. And you’ll still be told you’re not good enough.

It doesn’t matter if you publish, get your PhD, get the job. You’ll hit these thresholds—tenure, full professor, whatever—and you’ll realize: none of it actually guarantees you belong. It’s not you. The system just doesn’t know how to make sense of people like you. People like me.

That’s the part that messes with your head.

You keep asking: “Did I earn this?”

You wonder: “Do I actually deserve it?”

And the truth? There’s no rhyme or reason. No strategy. It just feels arbitrary.

The real academic game?

It’s crazy-making.

You walk forward. You get no clear feedback. You wonder if you’re even on the path.

That’s why I started building R3ciprocity—to strip out some of that ambiguity. To make the progress visible. Tangible.

But honestly? I still struggle.

I still ask, “Should I even be doing this?”

I still don’t know the answer.

All I know is this:

I’ve been doing this long enough to realize it never feels right.

And that’s okay.

Because the only thing that works is this:

• Keep walking forward. Even when nothing makes sense.

• Stop waiting for the system to tell you you’re good enough. It won’t.

• Make meaning from your steps, not their signals.

This is the lesson. It’s brutal. But it’s the only one I know that holds.

I don’t talk about this much, but my grandpa was a severe alcoholic. And I mean severe. He would disappear for days on benders. As a kid, I never saw it directly, but I lived with the fallout. It shaped my family in ways that are still raw decades later.

He was also a World War II veteran. He saw heavy fighting. He came home injured. And he came home to a world that told him to man up and never talk about it. Drinking became his way of surviving what he couldn’t process.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned with time. I would not be who I am without that experience. Not because it was good, but because I was lucky enough to have parents who were steady, square, and deeply values-driven. They didn’t hide what was happening. They talked about it. They taught me that someone else’s failure is not your fault.

That’s why I study learning from failure. That’s why I believe people can change. And that’s why I believe small steps matter. If you’re struggling, one less drink. One honest conversation. One boundary. One tiny step sustained over time.

You are not broken. You are not evil. You are responding to pain the best way you know how. And you can choose a different path, one small step at a time.

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: this is how nice people get taken advantage of.

I’m a management professor. I study innovation and failure. But this pattern shows up everywhere. Academia. Hospitals. Small businesses. Big corporations.

If you put a grumpy, irritable, forceful person next to a kind, laid-back, empathetic person, most people will work harder for the grumpy one. Not because they’re better. Because pressure feels decisive. It creates urgency. People respond to it.

The nice person feels safe. Comfortable. Human. And that’s exactly the problem.

Deadlines slip. Effort shifts elsewhere. And eventually, the nice person gets avoided. Not because they did anything wrong, but because guilt creeps in. And people don’t like being reminded of where they fell short.

If you’re that nice person, you will miss out unless you build boundaries.

Not anger. Not becoming grumpy. That kills your soul.

Boundaries.

You say: this is what I give. This is what I don’t. And the world can adjust.

I choose to be kind, gentle, generous, and respectful. But I protect myself. If someone doesn’t respond in kind, I walk away.

The goal isn’t power. Or status. Or money.

It’s a peaceful life. With a big heart. And self-respect.

Take care.

gotta say the single most important thing that gives me joy today is this puzzle of trying to make my life more fun and more exciting. That’s what the whole Reciprocity Project actually is.

For decades, research has never been as fun as people think it is. If you want to test this, go write a research paper on the weekend. You’ll realize instantly: “oh my gosh, I hate this.”

That’s been my life for as long as I can remember—writing under extreme pressure.

So I’ve been trying to solve one thing:

How do you create a nearly non-rejectable research paper that is fun, interesting, your own flair—and actually exciting to do?

And here’s the real puzzle: absolutely nobody cares right now. Maybe a handful of people are paying attention, but most don’t. And yet this puzzle gives me joy. Trying things. Building things. Playing around with ideas. Seeing what moves the needle. Even as I burn up time and resources.

I’m ten years in and feel like I’m just starting.

And I keep thinking about the reality so many researchers live in: chronic anxiety, stress, depression, tunnel vision. Most people never seek out anything that might make this life easier. And search engines bury anything that doesn’t benefit them anyway.

So the puzzle remains:

How do we make research fun?

How do we make it interesting?

How do we democratize it—not just for elites?

It’s not just AI. It’s about making our lives easier and more enjoyable. It’s about treating research as something worth playing with, not something that destroys us.

I know nobody’s riding in on a white horse to fix any of this. So I’m building it myself. Slowly. Messily. Joyfully. One puzzle at a time.

When I was about seven years old, I realized I just think differently than everybody else.

I didn’t think like my parents.

I didn’t think like my friends.

I didn’t think like the people in my church.

For decades, even now as a business professor, I’ve puzzled over why I see the world in such a different way.

I’ve always felt a little strange.

I don’t follow conversations when there’s noise.

I struggle to put things together quickly.

Group discussions with more than three or four people overwhelm me.

Later in life I realized I have ADHD — and probably mild dyslexia — and that explained part of it.

But there’s another side:

I can persist far longer than most people.

I see patterns in research seminars that others can’t see.

My mind works in quirky, unusual ways that make sense to me even when they confuse other people.

Many of us look at ADHD, dyslexia, or high intelligence as “problems,”

but they often shape the very abilities that make us who we are.

There is no normal template.

There never was.

We all have something unusual — and that unusual thing is often the gift.

I just get so sick of the strategic behavior that happens in science. Everybody’s smart—maybe too smart. They try to outthink the system, outthink each other. It becomes this game of “how do I win?” instead of “how do I learn?”

That’s not how I grew up. That’s not how I was taught to live.

The truth is, nothing we build in research—or life—is perfect the first time. But there’s this illusion that you can create something flawless from the beginning. That’s why startups fail. That’s why academics flame out. People give up because their plan didn’t work.

The reality? You just have to keep whittling away. Keep showing up. There is no recipe. No one knows what the right answer is. Not really.

What makes it worse is that this behavior is taught. It’s expected. You start thinking it’s normal. But when you have values—when you’re trying to be real—it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

There’s so much strategizing, so much ego, and so little honesty. The hardest part is learning who to trust in a market like this.

So here I am. Just trying to figure it out like you. Maybe I’m smart enough to see the games, but not smart enough to win at them. I don’t know. What I do know is this: the only way through is to keep going. Keep building. Keep being you.