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

Every project that is meaningful to you will result at some point where you lose faith in yourself.

Losing faith is a fundamental and important part of “doing good work.”

Just know that if you are losing faith that it’s natural. It likely means that you’re on the right path.

Keep going when it does not feel fun anymore.

I worry about our lack of understanding of the day-to-day in the business world. We tend to discount things that are ordinary, and that are representative of real people doing real things.

Much of the business scholarship focuses on large multinational, corporations, and we seem to think that, much of the real world is not important. We think things like mergers and acquisitions are more important that wouldn’t means to do business as a homeless person.

We think alliances are more important then how a single parent thinks about how they’re gonna get their kid to achieve in school while they work.

The problem is is getting people interested in these types of problems is a challenge with the incentives we have in academia. People want to default to easy problems, and problems where there is easily accessible data that is already been used before.

unless somebody is waking, they will likely never study these hard problems, and we will ignore much of society.

Take advantage of the little time that you have.

That means taking care of yourself, spending time with family, and looking for moments to work.

My algo is different than most. I try to maximize self-forgiveness.

I know I will be guilty for something every day. I won’t be a good enough scholar, teacher, parent, and husband.

I ask myself to forgive myself each time that I mess up. It will happen.

It helps me get through, so I can try again tomorrow.

Constantly putting in the work often get you further along then thinking about putting in the work.

Where are you end up in life often is dictated more from the actions that you do on a regular basis and your endowments, then your actual strategy and choices that you make.

If you want to change your life, get an education, and keep working regardless of what others tell you.

Ignore that little person in your brain that says to quit.

Put in the work another day.

Our predictions are often very poor, and we have to make do with these poor predictions.

Knowing that we’re not gonna be good at making good predictions of the future, the only thing that you can do is have patience and empathy for others.

Focus on the fact that you’re doing “something,” rather than any of the outcomes that you’re ever going to get from it.

Focusing on “outcomes,” almost always recipes for “crazy making.”

If you focus on your actions, you can control that.

You will be much more at peace, when you realize you’re actually doing the actions you should be doing.

explain some of the challenges of why we often don’t see some businesses being represented in business research. We need to more openly talk about these factors.

Why can’t you? I have learned that most of us talk ourselves out of great things.

Before you start, you say “ that would be a great idea, but…”

Then you never do it.

I spend much of my time telling people to “screw the world.”

Much of the reason is for you to have enough courage in your own mind to be able to say “I can.”

Somebody at some point has discouraged you and got you thinking that you are not good enough.

I just have one simple question: If one silly person has done it before, why can’t you?

Do Cringey Things. It is only after a while that you realize that they are not cringey after all.

I am convinced that there’s zero to negligible correlation between effort in outcomes in academia.

This allows me to focus on other things that give me pleasure, such as spending time with family and wishing people well.