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

One of the best autobiographies I’ve read in modern history is Trevor Noah’s book Born a Crime.It’s extraordinary.He grew up in apartheid South Africa with a Swiss father and a South African mother.Which meant his very existence was illegal under apartheid.The stories are wild, heartbreaking, and often hilarious.But what struck me most wasn’t just the adversity.It was how he learned to navigate it.He developed humor, awareness, and an ability to see the absurdity of the world around him.And despite everything he experienced, he still seems like a deeply kind person.That combination is rare.Reading it made me think about something.A lot of the tension we experience in modern life comes from things we simply cannot control.Political systems.Leadership we don’t understand.Movements that sweep through societies.You don’t always get to choose the world you live in.And you can’t just move every time you disagree with the direction things are going.So what do you do?You can spend your life angry.Or you can try to hold onto something else.A light heart.Humor.Perspective.Because the truth is:Most of us don’t actually understand the world as well as we think we do.Even in my own field—after studying it for decades—I often feel like I’m still figuring it out.And then I see people who are incredibly confident about everything.Which tells me something important.Confidence is often just how people cope with uncertainty.For me, the only strategy that seems to work is trying to live with a joyful heart.Not perfectly.Not successfully every day.But consciously.Choosing not to fall down every rabbit hole of anger.Choosing to laugh at the absurdity sometimes.And choosing to move forward anyway.

I wasn’t trained for greatness. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how strange it feels to be a professor of innovation when I grew up in a tiny town in northern Ontario where none of this was ever expected of me.I was the kid least likely to “make it.” I was in special ed for years. I was bullied. I was the one everyone quietly assumed would end up cutting trees in the bush or working at the mill, because that’s what people did in Dryden. No one in my extended family had ever gone away to university. Traveling 24 hours to school felt like moving to another planet.And still, somehow, here I am.Every time I go home, the old identity crashes into the new one. People don’t quite know what to make of me, and honestly, I don’t always know either. But I do know this: I wasn’t groomed for greatness, but I learned to keep going anyway. When nobody supports you, your mind can still support you. You can use the spite. You can use the doubt. You can say “stick it” and walk forward.It might take 20 years. But someday, the same people who doubted you will ask how you did it.

If you’re listening to this, you probably want a career in something that looks impossibly advanced from the outside — biotechnology, genomics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, fintech, pharmaceuticals, maybe even quantum computing or nanotechnology. All of these areas feel like there’s this strong barrier around them.And it’s true… but the real barrier is psychological.Most people never learn the language of these fields long before anyone cares about them. Most people never get comfortable being the “nerdy misfit” who studies earthquake science or virology or DNA sequencing when everyone else thinks it’s irrelevant.That’s the puzzle.These careers are long-term plays. Decades. And they’re filled with people who were ignored for a very long time. But the trick — the real trick — is learning to go deep when nobody is paying attention, learning the weird lingo, and being okay with not fitting in.And once you do that, you realize all the fundamentals borrow from the same basic tools… and it stops being scary.

You have probably met a lot of people in your life that will treat you poorly.This week, or even today, you may experience somebody who is short with you, exasperated when you are around, gives you the eye rolls, gets angry, or suddenly disappears and ghosts you.If you are like me, you internalize this immediately.You think: Is it me? Am I at fault?For a long time, I did this with almost every negative interaction. I still do. I immediately assume there is some flaw in me. I replay what I said. I think I did something wrong.What I have realized over many years is that, very often, it is not my fault.It is somebody else struggling with something deep inside that they cannot or will not process. Their mind is already made up. They did not come into the day wanting to respond to you in a positive way.Psychologists call this kind of inner clash cognitive dissonance. When people feel that ambiguity or tension, they rarely respond with patience and inquiry. Nine times out of ten, they get angry or run away.Some people fight. Some people flee.Some people ghost you.Some people give you that emotional hit that makes you feel inferior.And because our bodies respond much more to negative interactions than positive ones, that one angry moment can erase an entire day of beautiful moments. You will carry that one interaction around and ask: What did I do wrong?Most of the time, you did nothing wrong.You cannot fix them. You cannot be kind enough or generous enough to change a mind that does not want to change.So here is what I want you to internalize: • Your daily interactions are often not about you. • You cannot fix everybody. • You can walk away knowing you are a good person. • You can keep being kind without believing you are the problem.If you are the one who is always angry and aggressive, I hope you stop and reflect and think about how you can change.But I also know that most people who need that message will say it is everybody else.For you, the person who internalizes everything and thinks it is always your fault:It is not you.Keep going.Take care and have a wonderful day.

(The Real Reason I Still Keep Going Even When It Feels Pointless)Real work. The kind that doesn’t show up on social media. The kind that doesn’t get recognized, that feels invisible—until it doesn’t.I come from a family of immigrants. My dad’s family moved from Poland in the 1930s and ended up in the far north of Canada. They were homesteaders—settling into this cold, isolated place that couldn’t have been more different from what they left behind.They didn’t speak the language. They didn’t have money. But they knew how to work. And they knew that if they didn’t figure it out, no one else would do it for them.My dad wasn’t someone who gave advice. He wasn’t the kind of guy to sit you down and say, “Here’s what matters.” He just did it. He just worked.He did shift work—two days on, two days off, three days on, three days off—for decades. And even on his days off, he’d wake up, eat something quick, and go right back outside to work on something. He was always fixing things. Always building something. Always moving.And that was our normal. Nobody in our house paid someone to fix anything. If the car broke down, he’d fix it in the garage. If the dishwasher broke, he’d take it apart. If something needed to be built, we built it. That’s just what you did.Everything in our house was DIY. Because we didn’t have another option.There were six kids. We didn’t have much. But we knew how to work and how to save. That’s what we were taught.And here’s where it gets complicated.Because now—after going through school, getting a PhD, becoming a professor, building this R3ciprocity Project—I see the world so differently. I’m in a totally different space than my parents were. And yet…That mindset is still with me. That constant drive to work. To build. To keep going even when it feels pointless.Day after day. When no one’s watching. When the results aren’t coming in. When you’re not sure it’s ever going to pay off.I’m building something that I can’t fully explain. And every single day I have to remind myself: just show up. Just keep doing the work.You don’t need clarity to keep going. You just need courage.You just need to get up and try again tomorrow.Because here’s what I’ve learned watching my parents, and especially my dad: faith isn’t about having all the answers. Faith is what you do when you don’t have the answers. When the future is completely unclear and you do the work anyway.There’s a kind of quiet resilience in people who just keep going—who don’t wait for permission, or praise, or proof.I still remember how quiet he was. How much he worked. How much he provided for us without ever needing to be seen.And now I get it. Now that I’m a dad, and I’m building something that feels impossible most days—I get it.You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be efficient. You just need to show up.