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

I just wanted to remind you to be kind to yourself as you’re going through buying gifts in the holiday season. We are remarkably predictable in our purchasing behaviors, and remember to be kind when you’re making these decisions. Try your best.

It’s important for us to think about what failure actually means to human beings. The notion of learning as being simply reinforcement Has a tendency to deemphasize emotional meaning of failure. I talk about how we need to change strategy and organizational theory.

If you needed this today, I just wanted to pass on some positivity because I’m feeling pretty good at this moment. Remember that you’re an awesome person in the world is not great, and the one good thing in this world is you.

I get you to think about what you can and cannot change in your life as a researcher. Remember that there’s many things in Academia and the Research Career that just plain suck. However, you can’t change those things because that they’re part of the larger institution. The only thing that you can truly change is how you feel about the situation. Be a good person, and actually care about yourself and be a positive influence in the academic arena.

I talk about citation counts and how to measure your self-worth in academia. Talk about how it’s important for you to do things simply because it’s the right thing to do rather than to measure it based on some performance indicators. Remember citation counts are lagging indicator of doing the right thing. Even still, you may never get those citation counts.

I talk about the challenges of being an academic when other people don’t understand. It’s a difficult field to understand, however it is very competitive and challenging. Many people do not understand how competitive and challenging it actually is. You have to actually do it to figure out how challenging it actually is.

You have to be willing to have respect for yourself and others. It’s really important for you to have those moments where you just change your mind and you start being a good person. Really just have to stop fighting things that are good in your life and except it for what it is. Becoming accepting challenging, but I really change who you are for the better.

I talk about how you can get work to feel like play. I also talk about how you can easily confused one task to feel like work and the other one to feel like play. It’s often matter of just how you feel about that work.

I talk about how making a new product better requires continuous improvement. There’s continuously new problems and issues that you have to work out.