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

When you feel like a failure in your career, you’re exactly where you should be. It means that you’re actually trying and you’re doing well.

You will never have enough time in any given day to make much of a difference. However, your goal is not to move the dial in a day, your goal is to move the dial over a decade.

You’ll be surprised and what you can do over a long period of time, but you’ll be certainly disappointed in a short period of time.

I could tell you all of the successful things that are going on in my life and emphasize all of these beautiful things, but that’s not real life. I can tell you about how the rest of the world is toxic, and things are falling apart, but that’s not the real story. We live in a very mundane world that continuously gets better every single day.

The world we live in today is phenomenally better than what it was, and yet we have to practice a lot of humility and acceptance of the fact that a lot of things that we do are very mundane .

But you also have to get a lot of joy from the small moments. They are the things that actually matter.

are you willing to take productivity steroids so that you can reach past. Or are you more interested and just living your life?

if you’re looking for the answer to whether you should do some thing or not, that will never appear. No amount of rationalizing and thinking about something will change the answer. Raph, you either know or you don’t know, and that just depends on how you’re thinking about it.

You will have to make up the answers and questions as you go.

I talk about the reality of trying to disassociate yourself from perception, so you can live a healthy life as a researcher. When you realize is that you will never live up to market expectations, and so it’s up to you to define yourself and that you can live healthy life outside of research.

Often define ourselves by the outcomes we achieve. But here's a tough reality: most of life is about not receiving those expected outcomes. You can put in the same effort every single day and never reach the 'success' as defined by popular culture. You can follow all the right steps, lead a healthy routine, and still be just an ordinary person.

The key is to find happiness in the daily actions themselves, rather than constantly chasing an elusive definition of success.

figure out what allows you to take, rather than focusing on being an enormous success focus on figuring out how you can connect with just even a few people.

When I was little my mom used to talk to everybody, and now she’s made a habit to knit socks and just give them out to random strangers. This likely does not affect most people, the odd person. It greatly affects.

Figure out how you can create your own socks because you never know who it will be that will need the socks.

Ever felt like you're either insane or a visionary when pursuing something entrepreneurial? You're not alone. The entrepreneurial journey is filled with confusion, uncertainty, and moments of feeling like you're screwing everything up. There are no clear-cut answers, and it often seems like you don't know what you're doing, even when things are going well.