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

I discuss how problem-solving is central to building a business that will thrive over the long run. Do you have to get used to continuously problem-solving day in and day out.

I want you to get into the mindset of thinking that things are going to take several decades by the time you actually do something that’s really meaningful and cool in your life. Just get used to the slow grind day in and day out.

Talk about how my wife and I work together to pay off our mortgage on our house by the time we were 40. I talked about how you have to work together as a team, and trade off different objectives that are dueling with each other.

I talk about the idea that social media is blurring the lines between the front stage and back stage of your life. You get to see the backstage of people’s lives, but social media is really projecting the front stage. And so even if you’re seeing the backstage it becomes a front stage overtime.

I talk about the idea where people strive to have others proud of you. You have to realize that nobody is ever going to be proud of you because of their own insecurities. You have to do it just because you want to do it and you know it’s important.

I talk about my experience of building r3ciprocity.com, and providing new features and have a new product launches of those features. It always is less climactic than you ever think and it’s just a gradual slow grind overtime. You don’t get the big explosion of users and people using it when you get is just this gradual slow growth.

The R3ciprocity project is going to be a beacon for researchers and business in a decade from now, where people will understand how they can balance the desire to provide practical implications with strong research that matters in this world. I also think it’s going to contribute significantly to research and development by funding PhD students and graduate level research far beyond what I can personally do myself.

Having a reasonable understanding of your own personal identity will help you make decisions, and be OK with yourself when you do them. The challenge that most of us face is that we don’t know who we actually are.

I discuss the education versus experience debate. I think it is almost foolhardy to think that education has limited impact in your career performance. What we have to stop doing is having a debate between education versus experience, and start having a debate about what type of experience and what type of education.

I discussed that we should question things in the world that have no technical value. There’s lots of things that we do in this world that are because of legitimacy or it’s just the thing that we do. The sooner we start questioning these things that have a little value the quicker we are too accomplishing new innovations in this world.