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

David Maslach

Professor David Maslach talks about graduate school, research, science, Innovation, and entrepreneurship. The R3ciprocity project is my way to give back as much as I possibly can. I seek to provide insights and tools to change how we understand science, and make it more democratic.

  1. 1d ago

    Why Playfulness Might Save Academic Careers

    I fell in love with researching business strategy and innovation because it felt serious. It felt rational. It felt like it mattered. But when I entered the profession, I realized something uncomfortable. The conversation is almost always about how to get ahead. How to get the next publication. How to rationalize performance. How to land the mythical job. That seriousness becomes problematic. We become fixated. We lose sight of what it means to live a good life. Over the last five years, I have become convinced that we need more play. Less seriousness in a healthy way. Not less rigor, but less fixation. There are two ways to escape the cycle. You can get angry and leave. Or you can make fun of it in a healthy way. Laugh at the farcical nature of the front stage. Recognize the backstage. Add play. When I do that, research becomes sustainable. It becomes joyful. And suddenly, I see the world differently.

  2. 4d ago

    Why the People Who Study Entrepreneurship Are Terrified of It

    Why do so many academics not do the thing they actually study? One of the most fascinating things I find about being in academia and research life is the number of people that just don’t believe in the thing they study. If you pick a topic and look at the people studying it—and then ask whether they would actually do it themselves—the odds are staggeringly low. In my field, the people most terrified of entrepreneurship are often the ones studying it. They wouldn’t do it themselves. They wouldn’t recommend it to a colleague or a friend. They’ll tell you it’s harmful for your career. I’ve heard that so many times it’s mind blowing. The same thing happens with innovation and strategy. People study it, advise it, but will never go through the process. And if you haven’t gone through it, you have no idea what it actually feels like. It’s not just one field. It’s everywhere. Organizational psychology, personal finance, even basic things like not sending emails after hours or taking breaks—we know these things are poor for your health and erode culture, and yet the number of academics that do the opposite is staggeringly high. I once had someone tell my class to take on student loans and start investing. I almost fell over. They would never do that themselves. It’s fascinating how poorly informed we often are, precisely because we don’t actually do the thing. And in social science, it’s even more baffling, because you can do it. But it’s often the most frowned upon thing—to do something practical in a field that studies practice. So what’s the point of all of this? Things always look easier from the outside in. Unless you experience it, you have a very poor understanding of what it means. And the moment you actually step into it, you realize you are just as screwed up and messed up as the person you were judging. That’s the lesson I keep coming back to. Just have a little bit of understanding. Have a little bit of empathy. It’s harder than it looks, and no one is as good at it as they think they are.

  3. 4d ago

    Why Can’t I Let People Dislike Me?

    Just stop caring. I think one of the biggest lessons I have ever learned, and I continue to learn, is how to become a better teacher and educator so that other people can do amazing things in their lives. I have thought tremendous a lot about this. I care too much. I care what people think of me. I care about their success. I care about whether the material is actually being learned. I care about the world. I care about just a lot of things. But after 20 years of experience, I have learned that the most effective thing, compared to any other thing I have tried, is just not caring. I know that sounds like the worst thing from the outside, but it is not about not caring about people. It is about not caring so deeply that it harms you. You do your thing. Provide what you provide. Try to do your best and provide support. Then it is up to the other person on the other side to do their part. Sometimes people are just not up to it. Sometimes they are not capable. Sometimes there are other things going on in their life. Sometimes this is just a bad time. Sometimes they resonate and capture what you are saying and what you are about. But you cannot predict any of those things. You cannot force people. You cannot candy your way into it. I tried that one semester. Total disaster. It felt transactional and gross. And in any given population, some people are just going to be unkind to you because of the nature of who you actually are. You cannot fix that. You will never be able to fix that. So the only thing I can do, and one of the most important lessons of my life, is to learn how not to care. Not to care so deeply that it is going to harm me. The better I have gotten is because I just do not care in that way anymore. Why? Because then I can be more of my natural self. I can not let other people push me around. I can learn how to display my inner self in a more open and free way. It is still the hardest lesson. It is deeply part of who I am. I will probably never fully escape it. But I can remind myself every day. And maybe that is enough. Maybe that is how we become better educators, better people, and help other people do amazing things in their lives.

  4. 6d ago

    Why Academia Talks About Community but Rewards Isolation

    Conversations about family, about community, about looking out for each other. But often that talk is meaningless. It is impression management. It is signaling. And when you look at the rewards, they are for isolation. What I have learned is to stop listening to the cheap talk and pay attention to how I actually feel around people. Go to the moments where you feel whole and complete. Ignore the moments where you feel like a problem, like you are behind, like something is wrong with you. Real community is not something you engineer or talk about. It just happens. Often quietly. Sometimes it is just you. And that is fine. Listen to your intuition. Your Spidey sense. Be genuine. Be warm. Walk your walk and forget the rest.

  5. Jul 21

    Why Thinking I Am Exceptional Was Hurting Me

    One of the most profound lessons I have learned as a professor after decades of studying human performance is simple: I am no better than average. When I internalize this, everything changes. When I think I am really smart, I recalibrate and remind myself I am no better than average. When I think I have some special skill, I remind myself I am no better than average. This protects me from stupid mistakes. I stop thinking I can beat the market. I stop believing I will be spectacular overnight. I assume I will suck at first. And that assumption is powerful. Most performance follows a trend line. Incremental improvement over time. Not genius. Not hacks. If I follow the average trend line and do the tried and true things consistently, I do spectacularly well. Not because I am exceptional. Because I accepted that I am ordinary.

  6. Jul 16

    You Are the Problem. I Finally Accepted That.

    You Are the Problem. I Am Too. This took me a long time to accept. I look at the world and I see chaos. Cruelty. People hurting other people. People who don’t care. And I get angry. Frustrated. Discouraged. I want to fix it. I want to change it. I want people to be kinder, more cooperative, more decent. But here’s the hard truth I finally had to internalize: Most of this is outside my control. Some people are selfish. Some people are mean. Some people are calculated. Some people don’t care about anyone but themselves. That reality isn’t the problem. My reaction to it is. I can’t boil the ocean. I can’t fix the world. I can’t force people to be better. What I can do is accept the world as it is, not as I wish it were. There are asymptotes in life. Things you can work toward forever and never fully change. So the work becomes smaller. Harder. More humbling. Control your tiny world. Yourself first. Then one, two, maybe four people around you. Learn to go to bed calmly. Learn to sleep deeply. Even when the world is messy and unfair. If you are tearing yourself apart trying to change what you cannot control, that pain is yours to own. You are the only one who can change. And that is both the burden and the freedom.

  7. Jul 14

    I Saw a Group of Grown Men Racing RC Cars and It Changed How I Think About PhDs

    I have not talked about PhD motivation much on this channel because I thought it was obvious that this entire channel was about that. Everything about PhD life is motivation. But for a long time, I did not like that term because it did not really capture the phenomenon. That changed when I started talking to regular people. The easiest way to explain the central issue is motivation. There are only so many people. For every ten million people that exist, only one of them is going to be intrinsically motivated to do something like this. This past weekend, we went to a park. There is a radio control club there. These are forty year olds with their families. Kids running around. Wives sitting nearby. They camp out for the entire weekend racing radio controlled cars. These cars are not inexpensive. You can spend five to ten thousand dollars a year fixing them. God awful amounts of time whittling away at them. At first I thought it was a weird world. Then I realized it was the perfect analogy for PhD life. In a city with half a million people, maybe ten love RC cars enough to do this. The rest come from across Florida. From millions of people, only a handful care enough to grind away at something that honestly kind of sucks at first. That is intrinsic motivation. You try it once, you run it around, and you realize it sucks. It is the same with becoming a chef. You play around in your kitchen, take a course, and then realize it is really hard. Most people stop. PhD life is the same. It sucks to do anything on your own. That is why people do not start businesses. That is why people do not read books. That is why we do not lose weight. For a long time, I thought this was obvious. Now I realize most people do not understand that a PhD is just an extension of life. You have to motivate yourself. And that is the part people do not see. My work has been about making what is usually implicit much more explicit. Intrinsic motivation is invisible. That creates weird dynamics. Some people are motivated by the greater good. Many are motivated by less healthy things. When motivation is hidden, bad behavior is hard to call out. When motivation is explicit, you can see it. That is why I have spent ten years building my platform. The goal is to shorten the learning cycle. You perform an action. You wait for an outcome. You get feedback. In PhD life, that cycle can take years. Sometimes decades. I have been focused on shortening that cycle. Making feedback immediate. Making motivation visible. Using bells and whistles. Gamification. Clear signals. The problem is not intelligence. The problem is motivation. If we make motivation explicit and visible, the story changes. My question is simple: how do we fundamentally transform science and research by making motivation come to the front?

  8. Jul 11

    Are We Overestimating How Logical Humans Really Are?

    The longer I study social science, the less I believe we’re “rational.” That’s uncomfortable to say as a business professor. Because so much of what we do is built on: • clean models • statistical logic • the idea that people process information and make decisions It’s elegant. It’s persuasive. It gets respect. But I’ve always had this unease. ⸻ The models are neat. Reality isn’t. They rely on assumptions: • that we process information cleanly • that more data leads to better decisions • that behavior is explainable if we just measure it well enough But in my own life… that’s not how it works. ⸻ Over time, I’ve started to see something very different. We’re not rational adults making clean decisions. We’re closer to children. Not in a negative way. In a real way. ⸻ We’re all carrying: • habits we learned early • environments that shaped us • strengths in some areas and gaps in others And a lot of what drives behavior… isn’t logic. It’s: • emotion • pattern • instinct • things we don’t fully understand ⸻ If you look at the world through that lens… things start to make more sense. Why smart people make strange decisions. Why leaders act in ways that don’t add up. Why entire systems behave unpredictably. ⸻ And it also explains something important about AI. We assume that more computation will solve everything. But if humans aren’t just “information processors”… then more computation won’t fix the problem. It will just create a different version of it. ⸻ You’ll still see: • blind spots • strange outputs • things that don’t quite make sense Because the problem isn’t just information. It’s how beings develop. ⸻ So I’ve started to think about people differently. Less as rational actors. More as developing systems. ⸻ We’re all a mix of: • insight • confusion • strength • limitation Sometimes those traits fit the environment. Sometimes they don’t. ⸻ And maybe that’s the point. Not to “fix” people into rational models. But to understand them as they are: complicated, emotional, inconsistent… and sometimes surprisingly beautiful. ⸻ The models help. But they don’t explain everything. ⸻ What do you think—are we really rational… or just very good at explaining our behavior after the fact?

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Professor David Maslach talks about graduate school, research, science, Innovation, and entrepreneurship. The R3ciprocity project is my way to give back as much as I possibly can. I seek to provide insights and tools to change how we understand science, and make it more democratic.

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