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

If you are entrepreneurial, or that are innovative, you will rarely fit in with the world. You have to get used to feeling like an outsider, or that you don’t necessarily belong. Your job is to always feel like an Outcast, and get used to that feeling as you do, innovative things.

We often find ourselves in paradoxes, which we can’t resolve. Nor, should we.

One important paradox is striving to be the top in your domain, but realizing statistical probabilities almost always suggest that being the top is either fleeting or unrealistic.

But, to become the top, you have to dream it.

Balancing the dream of being the top, and coming to terms with reality that you’re not is one of the hardest things that you have to deal with in life.

Understand that performance and productivity is often outside of your control, yet we have to continually strive towards long-term productivity and performance.

We often have to balance the dream of success, with the reality of contentment.

My only solution to balance this is to simply say the boyscout motto “do your best.”

Eriselda Danaj talk about her experiences as a talented scholar, in making hard decisions in her life. She talks about how there’s often never right answer with these hard decisions.

Key insights to get traction on major social platforms.

I’m on a lot of platforms and I’ve learned a lot about social creation. The only major platforms that I have not tried for content is Twitch and OnlyFans. (By the way, the number of users on these two platforms is unbelievable - these are not fringe parts of society).

Here are important lessons that will help you:

1. #LinkedIn rewards achievement, and anything to do with achievement. Information is downplayed, but achievement and recognition will get extra algorithm boosts.

2. #YouTube rewards audience retention and high click-through-rate. If you treat YouTube as if you’re a data scientist, you’ll actually do quite well on the platform.

3. #TikTok rewards authenticity, and either very short or very long content. However, TikTok is more about being part of a larger community, and you’re likely not going to garner attention for you individually.

4. #Facebook in general has been feeling content creators for sometime. They’re making an active attempt to make it a better experience for content creators (in particular Facebook reels), but it’s still is considerably inferior to the other options. I would not recommend building an audience on Facebook. It will reward family and friends content, but nothing else.

5. #Podcasting rewards storytelling, and having multiple guests. Podcasting is relatively easy to do because you don’t need to look at anybody and you could do it at any time. Highly recommend, but it will take a long time to build an audience.

6. #Twitter / X has been lagging for quite some time. I’m optimistic that this may change, but it has not been very rewarding for content creation and would not recommend.

Overall, I would recommend LinkedIn and YouTube as top picks, BUT, YouTube is lagging in content creation experience.

I expect platforms like TikTok to become more significant players and put more pressure on YouTube.

OnlyFans may become more important, but I suspect it will be very difficult to shake its stigma and move more mainstream.

One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learnt as a #professor is empathy. I’ve learned to meet people where they are.

What do I mean by that? It means that I no longer try to convince people, but get them to bring themselves into the conversation.

The idea is that you are joint problem-solving, where both of you might not necessarily know what the right answer is, but you begin with acknowledging other people, and how they’re feeling.

You begin by thinking about the stresses and anxieties that others feel, and then you approach the problem by thinking about how you can resolve the stresses and anxieties for somebody else.

The idea is to connect with somebody first, rather than go to convincing.

I’ve learnt this repeatedly, while writing my own research papers, that continuously get #rejected. You have to stand a line between what you know, and what other people are willing to accept.

Sometimes what you know is just not ready for others, and you have to go to the line where other people are willing to accept.

It often doesn’t feel great when you do this, but you have to acknowledge how other people are feeling so that you can tackle the larger problem.

You win the war by losing the battle.

I post content everywhere, not necessarily to benefit you, but to help me deal with the problems, that one experiences on day-to-day.

I hope that you benefit from this content, but it’s been very therapeutic to allow me to speak openly and honest.

we have so many of easy opportunities because we lived today, how are you actually getting to advantage of your friend?

What active steps are you going to do to live happy and healthy life within this amazing world that we have? Are you going to spend some time working, sometime, enjoying, and sometime preparing for the future?

Remember to recognize that we live in an amazing world, and you have to take advantage of it.

Can you make a rational choice in education? The truth is you can’t.

You don’t really know whether you are going to gain all of the benefits that you expected. You also don’t really understand what’s true cost are. The only time you have a pretty good understanding is with educational choices that are fairly standard.

If you go outside of those fairly standard educational choices, your guess is as good as mine.

What we do and perhaps encourage people to do is to allow them to make this rational choice and see the cost of benefits, very explicitly, but then as well think about how we can encourage people to not make explicit choices.

Having the information to make rational choices is one thing, allowing people to explore and pursue their passions is another.

collectively, we matter, individually, we may not matter as much as we would like.

Conversion rate optimization, while theoretically promising, often demands significant resources that many people may not be willing to invest. It becomes particularly challenging for beginners who lack a clear roadmap and are uncertain about its worth.

Instead, consider a more relaxed approach – experiment and enjoy the process without taking yourself too seriously. Concentrate on sustainability over time rather than obsessing over finding the ultimate method.