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

Perfectionism is the death to creativity in accomplishing work. Just put your work out there and see what happens. Perfectionism is your way of saying that you’re afraid of what other people are gonna say about the thing that you’re working on.

I have come to realize is that it’s very important to have conversations about aspects of your life that emphasize performance versus those that emphasize morality, and try to think about how we can balance the two. Over the past few years I’ve noticed a considerable amount of division in culture, and we need to come back and start thinking about how could we bridge these gaps and encourage more inclusivity.

It is important to teach about probability, and have it deeply embedded within the scientific structure. I think a lot of scientist understand probability quite well, however there is a lack of understanding in the general elementary, high school, and college education about probability in science. We need to emphasize a lot more probabilistic understanding, such that people will understand that diversity is important.

Leaning into your nervousness and anxiety when you’re doing anything that’s entrepreneurial or innovative is very important. By leaning in and owning what you’re doing you’re giving legitimacy to yourself in the project that you’re working on. Don’t be afraid to be damn proud of what you were doing.

Teaching is an important part of a professors job. And my beliefs on how to teach have changed considerably over the years. My belief now is that I’m not trying to prove my point when I teach, but rather be an earworm where people are annoyed enough where they will look up the ideas themselves.

and talk about the delusion and performance metrics that we use in business, science, and education. I talk about how rather than focusing on performance metrics we should focus on the things that matter, and these things that matter are inevitably difficult to measure. And if we do measure those things, we will do such a poor job measuring the things that matter that we will likely get poor insights.

I talk about because our expectations of the future are almost always off, to do entrepreneurial or innovative things you have to account for that. And make your life as easy as possible around any potential venture.

I talk about how you are part of a bigger system and to give yourself some grace if you don’t accomplish everything throughout the day. Know that when you go to bed you tried and then that’s all that matters.

I talk about the challenge of building some entrepreneurial venture. Most things that you’ve built will end in a complete flop, however if you can get to the moment where you’ve built a community and people care and understand what you’re doing, that’s when you can actually build a entrepreneurial venture that changes this world.

I discuss how sometimes you might get tunnel vision in your career choice. I discussed that you have options in this world, and it’s important to think about these options. I also discuss how to move towards what you actually want to do and gradually do so overtime.