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

We talk about academic life, what it means to be a creative, and how are you fit in when you feel like you never fit in.

We talk about the courage it takes to do creative endeavors, an internal strength to tell the world you’re doing something that is completely different and perhaps can be upsetting.

We touch upon the importance of having a sense of humor and playfulness when you are working on hard problems that could not be taken in the right way. The goal is to help people walk through challenging problems that allow them to feel good about themselves when you’re tackling something that makes people feel uncomfortable.

Just as long as you’re working at it, I think that’s all that really matters.

Most people will rather sit on the sidelines and think about how the perfect play would exist, rather than try to get out there, and realize that there’s no “perfect play.”

When you’re trying, you will never feel like you’re doing things right.

There is no perfect way.

You’ll always feel that you’re a mess.

But, you have to remember that you’re actually doing it.

Sitting on the sidelines watching is far different than actually getting out there and making it happen.

This is true of going to school, working, parenting, and all major categories of life.

Learn the important skill of not taking anything to seriously, and forgiving those who do.

Make it happen.

Doing large projects requires a conscious effort, and the only way that you can accomplish things is just to make it happen.

I don’t know any other way.

I often think that the scientific literature is just wrong because it is not talking about the average person. The average person doesn’t have the resources that is often talked about in the scientific literature.

You don’t have access to venture capital, you don’t have access to large companies, you don’t have all of the things that people think are important.

The only thing that you can do in your life is choose to make it happen.

It’s a choice.

You decide that you’re going to make this happen and carry it through to turn it into something.

The only thing that you can do in your life is choose to make it happen. It’s a choice for you to decide that you’re going to make this happen and carry it through to turn it into something.

Almost all of the self-help and financial management pop-culture books, and even the academic literature, assumes people are far more motivated than what they truly are.

Rather than focusing on the top performers, in my view, we should be focusing on the bottom, which is a far larger percentage of the population. It will also move the needle a lot more.

How do we get people excited?

How do we tackle the problem of encouraging people to want to do something?

These are bigger questions than how do we get the top performing companies to perform a little better.

In my view, rather than focusing on the end-goal and numbers that people just simply can’t imagine, we should focus on simple things, like encouragement, or getting people to take a simple step.

These are far more easier to do, and they’re more likely to get people to feel that they can accomplish things in their life.

I talk about a new feature that we are building into the R3ciprocity platform that will hopefully aid people in their classrooms and as well as conference organizing.

we need to be careful not to use external characteristics that are easy to observe, and use characteristics that are much more deeper and more align with what we are actually trying to seek.

Age doesn’t necessarily mean, wisdom, and use doesn’t necessarily mean beauty. We need to understand, what it is that we are actually striving for.

You get up and you do it anyways. No matter how it feels and what you’re going through, you put in the work to actually get to where you’re going to go.

Nobody feels like they want to actually do it and there’s no reason for why you actually do it, but you do it because you know it is good for yourself and for the world. Why is it good? You don’t know.

Just get up and do it anyways.

The performance mindset, that many of us abide by often results in a great deal of negative emotion. The one thing that I can recommend is to take a step back and feel how fortunate that we actually are at this given moment.

Practice do not focus on performance, and focus on what it means to be a fortunate human being today.

Once you deconstruct what most people do on a daily basis, you realize that there is a lot of humanity across all of us.

What does it mean to be successful?

Really, nothing.

You are projecting and playing success.

The actions that a CEO will take are often very similar to somebody else in an organization.

You get up, brush your teeth, have some breakfast, you go off to work, and then you come home.

You eat, drink, and talk like anyone else.

The more I live life, the more I realize that who you are, and where you become is more to do with circumstance, than your own efforts.

Other words, success is manufactured.

Once you realize this humanness, it often strips away all of the crap that people believe what it means to live a good life.

Instead, there is a lot of humility that comes by looking at our humanity, rather than focusing on the rules that you take.

You don’t need to impress anybody. o anybody.

How do you fix the competitive culture in academia? How do you ensure that people don’t get lost and they feel rewarded?

The only way that I know is to build selflessness into the culture.