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

R3ciprocity.com - Prof David Maslach: Innovation; Research Life; Striving Towards Happiness · Jul 14, 2026 · 9m

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…