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

We don’t talk about this enough:

Teams don’t fail because of bad strategy. They fail when someone starts rationalizing their effort.

“I’ve already put in too much time.”

“This isn’t going anywhere.”

“There’s no ROI.”

“I’m not feeling it anymore.”

If you’ve ever heard those words—you know it’s over.

Because what breaks a team isn’t misalignment.

It’s when one person emotionally checks out… and justifies it with logic.

And here’s the harsh truth: you can’t logic someone back in.

You can’t force them to fall in love with a mission again.

Just like marriage—when someone decides the struggle isn’t worth it anymore, it’s already dead.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve lived it.

As a professor. As a founder. As someone who’s tried to build things that mattered.

And I can tell you this:

The best teams aren’t built on convenience.

They’re built on irrational grit.

The kind that says: “This is hard. We’ll keep going anyway.”

Not because it’s efficient.

Not because the spreadsheet says so.

But because something deeper drives them—something unmeasurable.

Call it love. Call it stubbornness.

Call it refusing to quit when you know what you’re doing still matters.

It’s not about psychological safety.

It’s about the act of getting back up, again and again, when things break.

So here’s what I look for now:

Are they going to get back up—no matter what?

Are they responsive when it’s ugly, not just when it’s exciting?

Are they okay with starting over and still pushing forward?

Because if they aren’t, the team’s already broken.

And no ROI calculation will fix that.

You know what makes me most excited about artificial intelligence?

It’s when I see viral posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever platform—people outing others for using AI. Someone includes the wrong kind of prompt in a research paper, and suddenly… it’s a scandal. It’s a rejection. People get really, really upset.

And honestly? That’s the moment I start paying attention.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s weird. But these uncomfortable, weird moments?

They’re almost always signs of a massive shift.

It’s the same feeling people had with Galileo and the telescope. That thing only magnified by 3 to 10 times, and still—he looked at the sky, and people freaked out. He didn’t benefit from it. But the world changed.

I remember when people had to switch from typewriters to WordPerfect.

It made everyone furious. Teachers didn’t want to learn a new system.

It felt like everything was falling apart.

Same thing with Uber and taxis.

With Airbnb and the hotel industry.

With Napster and the entire music business.

People were outraged—until they weren’t.

People got upset about electricity.

They got upset about disposable diapers.

They got upset about the horseless carriage.

They got upset about Spotify, about Google Docs, about Grammarly.

Heck, even the microwave was controversial when it showed up.

We don’t like transition. We like control.

And so here we are again—freaking out over artificial intelligence.

But if you do realize it, you can stop blaming the wrong thing.

You can stop calling AI “cheating” and start asking:

What is this discomfort trying to tell me?

Because this shift we’re going through—it’s bigger than research.

It’s going to hit physicians.

Architects.

Manual laborers.

Construction workers.

Teachers.

Therapists.

Probably even dog groomers.

I’m not saying it’s perfect.

I’m not saying it won’t replace some things.

But here’s what I am saying:

The laws won’t lead us.

They’ll follow.

Just like they always do.

And no—we’re not going back.

We never do.

You don’t un-invent the car.

You don’t un-send the email.

You don’t stop the music once it’s streaming.

So maybe—just maybe—it’s time we stop being afraid.

Maybe we stop calling it cheating and start asking:

What would happen if we embraced this shift?

If we leveraged it?

If we used AI to build things we actually want?

To make our lives a little easier?

To multiply what we already do well?

These moments—the ones that make you uncomfortable, make you hide, make you fight—

they’re just growing pains.

We’ve had them before.

We’ll have them again.

You don’t have to love it.

But you might want to pay attention.

Because we’re not going back.

If you are building some form of software or doing new product development, you will never feel like you have enough time. Lots of people out there have a little startup or they are trying to build something, and that is a big part of what this channel is about. I just want to explain what has happened and why I am talking about this. I try to document all of the things I am going through.

I am a real life professor. My job is normally to do research most of the time, 80 percent of the time, and 20 percent is to teach, plus all the emails and administrative stuff. I am always doing research, and I am building the R3ciprocity Project in between all of these moments. It is foolish to jump into something without a safety net, so you do it on your part-time until you get the damn thing working. But you never have enough time at any given moment.

We started on a project back in May. It is now late October. I was really excited about this feature because I think it is quite revolutionary. You can call it the TikTok of science. It went live today. I planned for so long to be excited about it, but when it went live I realized I cannot tell anybody because I have to get to work. My wife is at home. She is a doctor, a veterinarian, and she gets one day off a week. I cannot stay at home to talk about it, so I have to do it from my car. It feels like this endless sense of not having enough time.

I need to publish a book. I need to put it together. I never have enough time. My work is my priority, my family is my other priority, my health. I am trying to do it in all these moments. When something spectacular happens, people say “just do this,” and you think: I have no time. You have to forgive yourself and realize it is a long journey. It is always going to feel like it is not working out. That is the name of the game. That is what it means to do something entrepreneurial. At any moment you feel like it is falling apart. You feel like you are falling apart. You keep trying to put this thing together until you get the damn thing to actually work.

Everything always feels broken. You always feel broken, but you get back up and do it again and again. If you do not have unlimited funds, it is very different than a job. It is about being embarrassed. The whole thing is feeling like you do not know what you are doing.

There is a difference between grad school and entrepreneurship. In grad school you do not know what you are doing, but entrepreneurship adds the element of doing it in public. People think you should not do things in public, but it will never work unless you do it in public. It is a combination of being nervous and uncertain, but doing it in the public eye at any given moment. You feel embarrassed and wish you could have things put together, but you do not have the right answer.

If you are doing this, just know it is a 30-year commitment of being embarrassed and feeling stupid until you get the damn thing to work. If it works and it takes off, maybe it cuts down to five years. But until then, it is a long commitment where you do not know what you are doing and you keep trying every day. If you have it in you, you realize it is just a journey. The whole thing is fun, exciting, and interesting at any given moment.

All right, take care, and have a wonderful day.

I love building something raw — and letting everyone see the mess.

That’s the point of the R3ciprocity Project.

There’s uncertainty.

There’s embarrassment.

There’s a lot of “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

But I keep going.

Because what I’ve realized — in startups and in academia — is that we have a strong culture of hiding.

Hiding failure.

Hiding doubt.

Hiding how much of this is just making it up as you go.

Here’s the wild part:

I’ve read thousands of articles. I’ve studied innovation for two decades.

I have an engineering degree.

I’m a professor.

And still, I don’t always know what I’m doing.

And that’s the truth no one says out loud.

Instead, we tell people they’re wrong for feeling lost.

Or we pretend it’s easy — that everyone has it figured out.

And that makes it worse.

We don’t talk about how much comes down to connections.

To having a parent who can fund your startup.

To being in the right room at the right time.

To having the “right” people give you a chance.

And when people like us try to do it legitimately, transparently, and slowly…

We feel like failures.

But we’re not.

We’re just playing the game differently.

Building R3ciprocity has been messy.

I’ve spent way too much money.

I feel guilty I can’t pay my team more.

I wish it had worked faster.

But I keep showing up.

Because I know this is what real work looks like.

If you’re struggling —

If you feel like you’re the only one who hasn’t figured it out —

You’re not alone.

You’re just doing the hard thing, honestly.

And that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

People think being a professor is easy.

You sit around, read a few books, teach a few classes, and write the occasional paper.

But that’s not the reality. Not even close.

I’ve talked to Olympic athletes, bankers, folks from construction—and many of them say the same thing after stepping into this profession:

“I had no idea it would be this hard.”

Because here’s what nobody tells you:

Being a professor means spending years creating ideas that no one believes in.

You wake up every day and try to convince some of the smartest, most skeptical people on the planet that your idea is worth hearing.

And you do it alone. Quietly.

For years.

It’s not just intellectually demanding—it’s emotionally brutal.

And every single day, I ask myself:

Should I quit?

The writing.

The reading.

The isolation.

The rejection.

You’re always behind. Always not doing enough.

Ten pages a day? Still not enough.

Hundreds of pages of reading? Still not enough.

And the reward? Often a silent desk and another anonymous review that dismantles your work in a paragraph.

The truth is, this job messes with your head.

The data proves it: doctoral students and faculty have some of the highest rates of depression of any professional group.

Because we are wrestling—not just with ideas—but with ourselves.

And you can’t fake it.

If you care about truth, if you work with real data, the job gets even lonelier.

Because you see the mess. You see the complexity.

And you know that what’s “publishable” isn’t always what’s true.

So why do I stay?

I’m still figuring that out.

But I think it has something to do with making peace with the grind.

Trying—somehow—to turn the isolation into something quiet and sacred.

And finding ways to detach from the metrics, from the pressure, from the impossible standards we set for ourselves.

Because if I don’t…

This job will eat me alive.

If you’re in it too—if you’re trying to do good work, trying to hold onto some joy, trying to stay kind in a career that often doesn’t reward it—then this one’s for you.

You’re not alone.

And yes, it’s this hard for all of us.

I’ve hit every milestone I was supposed to hit.

I got the degrees.

I earned tenure.

I published the research.

I’m raising a family.

I even built a platform to help other researchers.

And still—most days, I feel like I’m failing.

Not because I’ve failed.

But because perfection culture has trained people like us to believe we’re never enough.

In academia, in parenting, in life—we are constantly being measured, ranked, judged, and compared.

We’re told that if we just optimize one more thing, maybe then we’ll finally feel successful.

But it never works.

In this video, I’m sharing what it feels like to finally admit that I’m not perfect—and why that may be the only thing keeping me sane.

If you’re exhausted from pretending you’re okay…

If you feel like you’re doing everything “right” and still feeling empty…

This one’s for you.

This isn’t about giving up.

It’s about letting go of the illusion that success means you have to be flawless.

Let’s talk about what really matters.

I think about mental health a lot—especially mental health at work.

Most of us were never taught how to manage the invisible stuff. Not in school. Not in research. Not even in our families. It’s only in the last 20–30 years that people even started talking about mental health outside of medical journals. And even now, most of what we see is snapshots. Clean. Marketable. Sanitized.

But life doesn’t feel like a snapshot.

It feels like managing thoughts late at night.

Trying to nudge yourself from the bottom quartile to feeling just okay.

Wrestling with who you are when everything looks fine on paper.

Doing all the tricks—music, walking, not oversharing, trying not to fall apart.

I talk about this stuff not because I have answers. But because I’ve lived it.

Because I think we need more real, human-generated data—not just survey stats.

Because this is what research life actually feels like.

Take care. And if you’re struggling, you’re not broken.

You’re just alive.

Not the pitch decks. Not the TED Talks. Not the LinkedIn wins.

But the quiet moments of anxiety. The constant doubt. The deep embarrassment of putting something out into the world before it’s ready—and maybe before you are.

In this podcast, Professor David Maslach (creator of R3ciprocity) shares a brutally honest take on what it actually feels like to build something real—when you have no funding, no roadmap, and no clue if it will work.

This is for the people in the middle of the mess, trying to build anyway.

simple:

1. Generate knowledge

2. Turn it into real-world solutions

3. Repeat—with joy

But instead of pretending that this happens in a perfectly rational system, I want to remind people: it’s allowed to be fun.

Serious progress can come from play.

Deep insight can come from silliness.

The point is to keep going, and keep trying—even when it feels pointless.

Most days, I feel like I’m failing at everything.

I’m trying to be a good dad.

A good husband.

A good son.

A good professor.

A good person.

And most days—I feel like I’m not doing enough in any of those roles.

Like I’m stretched so thin, I barely exist in any of them.

But I still show up.

Not because I have it figured out. Not because I’m successful.

But because I believe there are people out there who feel the exact same way—and think they’re the only ones.

You’re not.

I talk about what it’s really like to live in that space where you’re trying hard, giving what you can, and still wondering if it matters.

I also talk about what it’s like to build something—like the Reciprocity Project—when you’re not confident, not famous, and not sure anyone’s listening.

This isn’t a success story. It’s a survival story.

And if you’re in that place right now, this is for you.