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

Whether you eat lobsters or spaghetti dinners has a little impact on your life.

For me, mostly as long as I get to hang out with family and friends, and get to do the small things that I enjoy, such as walking and watching Seinfeld every day, I am perfectly happy no matter how much success or failure that I experience.

How you define yourself is not necessarily based on the outcomes that outsiders view as important.

What matters more is how you feel about yourself, in the activities that you perform on a daily basis.

The rest of how we define #success and #failure is a bunch of nonsense.

Many people misunderstand the tenure process and believe it is a job for life. It is far from the idea that it’s a job for life.

The tenure process is more of a celebration that you’ve put in the work and you’re getting recognition for the work that you’ve actually done. It’s a forecast for the future that you will continue to put in the work.

Purchasing decisions are a critical part of our daily lives, and we often base them on things like status and recognition. However, an alternative approach to making these decisions is to focus on minimizing the amount of failure that a product is likely to experience. This way, we can ensure that we make informed decisions that lead to fewer problems in our lives.

When considering the failure rate of a product, it is essential to be intentional and mindful of the different ways that a product may fail. By doing so, we can better understand the potential drawbacks of a product and make informed decisions that minimize the likelihood of failure. This approach can help us save money in the long run and lead to fewer headaches and frustrations.

Modularity is another critical factor to consider when making purchasing decisions. By having decoupled products that function independently of each other, even if one of them fails, we can reduce the impact of a failure on our overall experience. This concept of modularity applies to a wide range of products, from electronic devices to furniture, and can help us create a more efficient and functional environment. In summary, by considering both the failure rate and modularity of products, we can make better purchasing decisions that lead to a simpler and more fulfilling life.

The only thing that matters is doing incremental, slow, and boring work. You don’t get fast returns in anything, and you should be a little afraid of anything that gets fast returns.

If you’re paying attention to other people’s success, and they were able to get fast returns at some thing, you likely should be wary about the possibility of actually getting those returns.

If you’re expected to get returns in the next few years, be wary.

The only things that actually do net long-term returns consistently is boring, incremental work in one little small area.

Do the work.

much of human progress is about doing incremental, boring work repeatedly. If we think about all of the major human accomplishments, that we know of today, they almost always were about doing some thing that seemed impossible, and involved incremental boring work for extended periods of time.

practice stoicism in your career by removing the outside world. You just trying to be yourself, no matter what the outside world thinks of you. Moreover, practice stoicism, so that you cannot worry about moving up or getting to someplace.

The more that we are living our modest lives, the more we need to realize that much of what happens around us doesn’t matter.

integrity and doing your best every day matters. Just repeat to do your best. A lot of days does not feel like that but that’s the only option that we actually have that wins out in the long run.

Focus on #helping one person, even if it's just yourself. Don't aim for a big impact. This is just dumb.

Who cares about you anyway? Your mom and partner, at best.

Instead, aim for meaningful impact for one individual. On average, we don't affect many people in a day, so don't expect to be different.

If you do an unbelievable amount of work, and you make a difference in just one person's life, it is still worth it.

Don’t get caught up in. the nonsense that you are important.

our favorite burger joint in Tallahassee is vertical burger. It’s bougie, yet not overwhelming. It has the absolute best burgers and fries that are homemade. My favorite is the vertical burger with vertigo sauce.

Most of us manage daily life with a limited understanding of the world around us.

Even experts in a certain field only have a general knowledge in other areas. This highlights the fact that we don't need to know everything and that it would be unrealistic to do so.

What's crucial is that the system in place enables us to function efficiently without a complete understanding of how it operates.

It's interesting to consider how little we know, yet as a collective, we are capable of accomplishing remarkable things.