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

Venturing means that you do things that nobody else is done before and as a consequence, you have to feel isolated alone.

By simply changing the conversation from you feel isolated in the alone and scared to. I have courage and I’m doing something that nobody else is done before, you become the hero in your own story.

A simple change in the way that you are communicating. The story makes an enormous difference in how you feel about the activities that you’re doing every day when you venture.

The R3ciprocity Project didn’t come from following a conventional path. It began with an attempt to create a university spinoff in the traditional way, but over time, I realized I needed to abandon the conventional approach entirely. No one was going to do it for me. Few people believed I could succeed. The weight of doubt was heavy, but I decided to build it anyway, staying true to what I believed in—even when it looked crazy and felt completely wrong.

Leaning into the nothingness became the defining aspect of this journey. The trade-offs I made—taking from today to invest in an uncertain tomorrow—felt impossible to justify in the moment. But I kept going because I believed in the project. It became part of who I am, a reflection of the world I wanted to create, even if few understood why I was doing it.

This chapter explores what it means to commit to something that feels like an uphill battle, to embrace the void of uncertainty, and to keep building in the face of doubt. Because ultimately, it’s those choices—made in the nothingness—that define what we create for the future.

Venturing often leaves me emotionally exhausted. The constant trade-off between today and tomorrow, between immediate comfort and uncertain future gains, rarely feels good. At the end of the day, I don’t feel triumphant—I feel drained.

The only way I’ve learned to cope with this exhaustion is to change how I view the work. I treat it as play, refusing to take what I’m doing too seriously. I ignore the weight of my surroundings and approach each step with humor or detachment. I try to see every small action as something that doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme, allowing me to block out the difficulty of the moment and keep moving forward.

There are no right answers. There’s no perfect path. But by reframing the journey as playful and lighthearted, I find the strength to invest in every single step—one after another—without letting the exhaustion defeat me.

The Importance Of Psychological Safety In Academia

Much of the world is ambiguous, and it always will be. You’ll never know the “right” answers until many years down the road. You won’t even know if the choices you’re making now are correct or what your alternatives truly were. Most people feel this uncertainty deeply, and when you venture into something new—whether it’s a project, a career, or a personal challenge—you’ll feel the weight of that ambiguity.

These moments are filled with strong emotions, often negative ones like fear, doubt, or frustration. How do you deal with it?

First, you acknowledge those feelings. They’re real, and it’s okay to have them. Pretending they don’t exist doesn’t help. Second, you focus on what you can control: the repetition of action. Repeating small, deliberate actions is the only way to transform ambiguity into reality. Through these repeated actions, you create something concrete.

It’s only after the fact—sometimes years later—that you’ll be able to look back and say whether your choices were right or wrong. But without taking action, you’ll never know. Ambiguity is inevitable, but learning to act through it is what moves you forward.

We glamorize big life decisions—getting an education, starting a family, launching a venture. These choices are celebrated as bold, exciting, and life-changing. But the truth? Doing them is far different from the stories we’re told.

The reality is small, mundane choices, made over and over again. You repeatedly take away from today to invest in an uncertain tomorrow, unsure if you’re making the right decisions or how much to sacrifice. It doesn’t feel grand or heroic. It feels exhausting, difficult, and sometimes downright empty.

The problem is that the media and society rarely tell us the truth. They show us the highlight reel—moments of excitement, success, and fulfillment—while skipping over the mundane grind it takes to get there. But in the real world, the process is far less glamorous. It’s uncomfortable, repetitive, and filled with doubt.

In this chapter, I challenge the illusion of glamor in big decisions and explore what it really feels like to commit to creating something meaningful—one small, unremarkable choice at a time.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, and even education are often celebrated as inherently positive pursuits—acts of courage, creativity, and vision. At their core, they are simple in theory: taking something away from today to invest in tomorrow. Yet beneath this idealized view lies a far more unsettling reality.

The truth is, we don’t know if we’re taking too much or too little away from today. We don’t know what tomorrow holds, nor do we know what will pay off in the long run. The real outcomes? They’re invisible, sometimes unknowable, for 30 years or more. That uncertainty creates a void—a deep, lingering nothingness—that rarely feels good.

Instead of optimism, these decisions can feel terrifying, negative, and profoundly isolating. You wonder: Am I wasting today? Am I investing in the wrong tomorrow? The answers don’t come right away. And the absence of immediate feedback makes the journey feel aimless, like you’re floating alone in the dark.

But here’s where experience changes everything. The more you practice living in this ambiguity, the more you learn to lean into those uncomfortable feelings instead of running from them. Those feelings—fear, doubt, loneliness—aren’t enemies. They are feedback. Not the kind you get from a mentor, colleague, or customer, but the truest feedback of all: the nothingness that forces you to listen to yourself.

This silence, this void, is where the process reveals itself. It teaches you to pay attention to the subtle signs, the quiet whispers of your instincts. Learning to deal with this nothingness—this emotional uncertainty—is what allows you to make wise choices in the face of ambiguity.

The real work of entrepreneurship and innovation lies here: balancing today’s sacrifices with tomorrow’s possibilities, trusting yourself when no one else is watching, and accepting that you won’t know whether your decisions were right for a very, very long time. It’s not a process that always feels good. In fact, it rarely does. But it’s in learning to sit with those emotions that you grow strong enough to keep going—and to choose wisely.

Research, especially at a high level, can feel like a deeply thankless job. You work alone, face endless struggles, and rarely get recognition. But over the years, I’ve learned to push through by reflecting on how fortunate I truly am.

I come from an immigrant family. My parents didn’t finish high school. My grandmother, an orphan, raised her family in the harsh conditions of Northern Ontario just to survive. When I think about this—about the sacrifices that led to where I am—I feel a deep sense of privilege and responsibility to change the world for the better.

What keeps me going is knowing that the work I do has meaning. I’m building something—through the R3ciprocity Project—that helps others push forward with their own research. Knowing that I can improve people’s lives and support their journey has changed who I am. It’s no longer about impressing anyone; it’s about leaving something behind that matters.

Remembering where I came from gives me pride, purpose, and the drive to keep building. The struggles of research are real, but so is the impact we can make. For me, that’s enough to keep going.

Most people won’t take the time to truly understand what you’re about. They only see a few words, a few actions, and then get angry or frustrated when it doesn’t fit their expectations. What they miss is this: you do things with good intentions, because they matter to you—not always because they’re rational or about success.

Loving what you do often lacks rationality, and that can make others uncomfortable. But the real challenge is finding balance—doing work that matters to you while also navigating the realities of financial and personal success. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

To make significant change, you must first believe that the world can be changed. Change isn’t instant—it’s like waves wearing down rocks on the beach. Over centuries, those rough, jagged rocks are transformed into smooth stones, not because it was easy, but because the waves were persistent and resilient against physical limits.

The lesson? Be like the waves. Keep showing up. Be resilient enough to wear down the rough edges of a problem, slowly and steadily. Change happens not through force, but through persistence, patience, and the belief that even the hardest, most unmovable things can eventually shift.