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.

Here’s what nobody tells you.

Building something truly different

is like flying a plane

while you are building it.

When I first heard that in my PhD program,

I did not fully get it.

Now I do.

Nobody really knows what to do.

Nobody really knows the right course of action.

There is no single correct answer.

There are many plausible worlds.

Many possible truths.

And you have to pick one.

Entrepreneurship research has said this for nearly 100 years.

Entrepreneurs bear uncertainty.

That is the job.

And uncertainty feels awful.

You will be embarrassed.

You will think what you built is glorious.

Others will roll their eyes.

You will spend time.

You will spend money.

You will not have enough of either.

People will judge from the sidelines.

They will offer suggestions.

They will not offer help.

From the outside, it looks simple.

From the inside, it feels torturous.

Good science looks effortless

when you are not the one doing it.

When you are in it, it is art.

And art is painful.

You will want to quit.

You will think you are wrong.

You will think everyone else must know something you do not.

They do not.

Most people never try.

Of those who try, almost all quit.

Because they thought there would be answers.

There are never answers.

There is just standing back up

and doing it again.

It is lonely.

It is embarrassing.

It is uncertain.

And if you are building something new inside academia,

this is the life you signed up for.

That is my life with the R3ciprocity project.

And I am still here.

Many systems—academic, economic, organizational—are built on the belief in rational, cooperative actors. But people often enter interactions:

• Threatened by cooperation

• Pre-committed to not cooperating

• Motivated to harm systems they view as unjust, even at personal cost

This isn’t just “bad behavior.” It’s the norm that too many theories write off as “noise.”

If you’re in the research game, you eventually have this weird shift.

You start discounting highly published people.

Not because you’re bitter. Not because you’re jealous. But because you understand how much work is actually involved. And when you see a massive publication count, you start thinking: there are other effects going on behind the scenes that I can’t observe.

If you talk to the elite of the elite researchers, they often know this. They’re suspect of people that publish too much.

And here’s the part that sounds strange to outsiders: some people that publish less actually get more respect from very elite researchers, because they’re valuing good work and they’re not playing the game.

The problem is the marketplace. Academia rewards a tremendous amount of publications. And that pressure is not really about the individual. It’s often at a higher level of analysis. Institutions push output. So people respond with networking. And networking, in my view, is often somebody with a tremendous amount of power publishing on the backs of people with less power.

Sometimes it’s status. Sometimes it’s armies of junior folks. Sometimes it’s ghost writing. And we often look the other way.

So you end up seeing two worlds:

One world is constant talk about publications, how to publish, and leveraging networks.

The other world is curiosity: that’s a cool idea, let’s make it better.

You can feel the difference in ten seconds.

There’s a term for what happens when the system is fixed and people focus on extracting value instead of growing value: rent seeking.

I wish it didn’t happen. But it does.

And once you see it, you understand a lot of the academic profession.

I’ve been digitizing old photos of myself as a kid.

What hit me was not the haircut.

It was how hard I was on myself even then.

By 13 or 14, I had already decided I needed to be perfect to be liked.

That belief pushed me through engineering, a PhD, and becoming a professor.

It also quietly followed me everywhere.

Academia did not create my anxiety.

It rewarded it.

You learn quickly that you are never quite good enough.

Publish more.

Work harder.

Do better.

Repeat.

If you stay long enough, you start to believe it.

It becomes your normal.

Looking at those old photos, I realized something simple.

I was already doing well.

I was already okay.

Nothing about that kid needed fixing.

Yet I spent years acting like I was a problem to solve.

And here is what scares me.

This is not just academia.

I see it in medicine, law, tech, everywhere.

Smart people slowly absorb the idea that they are never enough.

Like a frog in warming water, you do not notice it happening.

Until it becomes your identity.

So I am reminding myself of something I wish I learned earlier:

You might already be doing better than you think.

You might already be enough.

Do not spend 20 years chasing approval from systems that survive on your doubt.

Protect your mind.

Protect your confidence.

And if needed, distance yourself from voices that only grow by shrinking you.

One day you will look back at photos of yourself right now.

You will realize you were already pretty incredible.

Do not wait that long to believe it.

(The short answer: we get paid every two weeks. The long answer is… complicated.)

I’ve studied research and innovation for almost 20 years.

I live it.

And I teach it.

So I think I’m fairly qualified to answer this one.

There are two broad worlds to understand:

industry and academia.

⸻

🏢 In Industry

The engine that drives economic performance is knowledge — access to it, and the ability to share it.

Every major company has some version of R&D: teams that explore, test, and tinker with new ideas.

They create recipes for future success.

But here’s the trade-off:

R&D is long-term gain at short-term cost.

The first departments to go during financial trouble?

Almost always the R&D teams.

Why? Because sales and operations drive short-term profit.

Research is an investment in a future that may never arrive.

But the paradox is that without R&D, companies erode their future.

The knowledge engine disappears.

And so does long-term prosperity.

That’s the cycle I first saw as a co-op student at the University of Waterloo.

It’s still true today.

⸻

🎓 In Academia

It’s a little messier — and more political.

Research in universities is largely publicly funded.

Governments and provinces set aside money for knowledge creation.

Some of this goes directly to universities; some flows through grants and competitive funding programs.

At its best, this system is a long-term play.

Nations invest in research not for next quarter’s profits, but for discoveries that may take decades to pay off.

It’s also a marketing tool — universities love to say, “We invented that.”

And that’s okay. It attracts talent and resources.

But the real value isn’t bragging rights — it’s the primordial soup that forms when people share ideas openly, encourage each other, and take risks together.

The quickest way to kill innovation?

Fill your labs with self-centered, condescending people.

It works in the short term.

But it destroys creativity in the long term.

⸻

💰 So How Do We Get Paid?

Typically, professors and researchers are paid from budget lines funded by their government, university, or grants.

That salary may be stable — or it may depend on how much grant money you bring in.

Many of us pay out of pocket to keep projects going.

It’s an investment in a career built on uncertainty.

And here’s the hard part:

No one knows which ideas will matter.

We can’t predict what will become valuable — just that some of it will.

Steve Jobs once took a calligraphy class for fun.

Years later, that class inspired fonts on the Macintosh — a small feature that changed the way people used computers.

That’s what research is:

Hundreds of dead ends for one small moment that changes everything.

⸻

🌏 The Future of Research

Barriers to entry are rising.

More education, more competition, more uncertainty.

But I think this will shift.

As countries like Taiwan and the Philippines continue to grow, they’re realizing that innovation capacity is the foundation of prosperity.

And they’ll invest more in it.

It might take decades —

but the world is slowly remembering that research is not a cost.

It’s the only real investment that keeps paying off.

So yes — we get paid every two weeks.

But the truth is, most of us are betting on the long game.

We’re investing in something that may not show up in our lifetime.

And that’s the whole point.

Take care.

#ResearchCareers #Innovation #PhDLife #R3ciprocity #AcademicLife #KnowledgeEconomy #JoyfulResearcher #EducationPolicy

We spend years teaching kids how to solve abstract word problems and memorize sequences. But rarely do we teach them how to handle rejection. Or get back up after failure. Or deal with their parents aging. Or regulate their emotions in a fight. Or understand why they feel what they feel.

Why is math on a pedestal, while human behavior is on the sidelines?