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

When you become an associate #professor, many things change in your life that you didn’t think would change.

The biggest thing that changed for me was my perspective about the world.

When I realized was “nobody cared.”And why should they? It only matters to you.

What I realized was that I can’t convince other people to care.

I became #bitter with the rest of the world. But, I think this bitterness is a very positive thing.

What I realized was that the only person that mattered about what I actually thought about myself was me. Who I am has nothing to do with others, say about it.

Some might think I am a slacker, some think I’m doing nothing, and some think that I am more harm than good.

What I realized that this validation that I was seeking was never going to come.

Others will still undervalue who I am.

When I realized that I don’t need to pay attention to the outside world, I literally shut it off.

What I focus on is “how can I do good for myself and maybe a few other people in this world.”

That’s all that matters, and that’s the only question that I pursue.

It’s not the publications, the notoriety, and everything else, but “how can I do good.”

Nobody will recognize that, but that’s OK.

Screw ‘em.

That’s the only thing I’m going to focus on: “how can I do good?”

The rest of it is simply noise, games, and antics. If you wanna play by those games, that is fine with me.

But, I’m gonna be good enough, and I’m going to pursue how can I do good.

I encourage you to pursue your dreams. Nobody is going to make those dreams happen except for yourself.

The only way that you make them happen if you start. I realize that many of you don’t come for much, and it’s going to take a long journey to get to where you want to be.

But, the only way that I know how to get there as you start and you repeat every day.

You make it happen through grinding work.

It never feels fine, and people will make fun of you. You will feel bad about yourself.

But, if you wanna make something happen, that is truly amazing, you start today.

We need to vastly embrace artificial intelligence. The interesting part of artificial intelligence is it ability to replace things that nobody really likes to do at this moment. It’s very much an extension of who we are as individuals by it accelerates our capabilities by magnitudes.

You don’t get to someplace by focusing on the BIG reward that you’re going to get.

You focus on the little tiny steps that it takes to get there.

It seems silly to focus on the big reward. I often ask question “how do you build #Walmart?”

We all likely want to be the Waltons, but how did that happen?

Nobody knows how to actually connect between where you are right now and that BIG reward in the future.

But, we can certainly understand what we should do today.

I encourage you to keep trying today.

One more step.

One more day.

I can’t change the scientific profession. However, I can speak to the one person that was like me and struggling to get a job. The scientific endeavor is never easy and it’s not gonna come easy. For those that are fortunate now, maybe things will work out for you, but for the rest of us, we realize that it’s a struggle.

It’s one day at a time.

All of us believe that we need resources to do some thing. We need more #resources to be more efficient at work, we need more resources to be better parents, and we need more resources to have more fun.

if only I had more money, my life would be better off.

To heck with having more resources.

Just make do with what you have. If it looks shoddy, just make a fun of the fact that it’s actually shoddy. You might even create a new genre based on the fact of the limitations you have.

Name a music style, food, or business that does not revolve around the lack of some thing. It all starts with not having enough.

Listen, you’ll never have enough, and those that realize this are the ones that actually accomplish a lot in their life.

You can only do what you can.

Your #expectations for your performance are often not set by your employer. The expectations for your performance are often set by the market.

But, who the heck knows what the “market” is?

How you perceive your reference that in the market is often distorted with your own personal biases.

Your best expectations for your performance is to look at what you actually “do” in a given day, accounting for the possibility that what you’re doing today is likely wrong for tomorrow.

In other words, don’t trust your perceptions on what you’re expected to do, look at what you actually do and work from there.

We have to think about the experiences that people get, and also the non-experiences that they are not exposed to. I believe that not getting access to opportunities and experiences are more important than the experiences that you actually do have in what happens in your own life.

The problem is you’ll never know what is, these non-experiences that we should have gotten in that would have made an important impact on our life.

Just do little incremental things every day. Remember you’re good enough you don’t really need to improve anything.