On the most dangerous age

Scott D. Clary writes in Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/scottdclarypage/posts/pfbid02piEMji3ejm16ZwYhg2rfz7FNoyhUNrEDRcQ6B9g8zDuF2CmCHKjAhX42nmaZ6mJl :

The most dangerous age for a man is 35-45. Too old to start over easily. Too young to give up. Old enough to know better. Not old enough to have fixed it. Every man I know in this window is either building something real or slowly going numb. There's very little in between.

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Well, I was unemployed in Moscow for 4.5 years from the age of 30.5 to 35. Soon after I turned 35, my first official job in Moscow (the researcher position at IITP) started. Soon after I turned 45, I got an official offer of my first semi-permanent position in a civilized country (the researcher position in Prague). I taught for 2.5 years as a docent in Moscow and worked for 2.5 years as a postdoc in Haifa in the meantime. In this sense, it can be argued that I started over twice in this age interval.

Was I building something real? It depends on how real the theories of semialgebras, semiderived categories, contramodules, and contraherent cosheaves are for you. At any rate, I certainly wasn't "slowly going numb". If anything, my sensitivity was only increasing, and continues to increase.

On the simple strategy of successful people

Scott D. Clary writes in Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/scottdclarypage/posts/pfbid02Dhj6jXfgLVJpPejjqsZsc7eYjK1GMvafQdvjMCWkuQTXYTMHbEBD4sSXY4Y6ffn9l :

The most successful people I've met are all slightly embarrassed by how simple their strategy was. They picked one thing. They did it for a decade. They didn't pivot. They didn't optimize. They just didn't quit.

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I am not one of "the most successful people" by any standard. My strategy was very complicated: I changed jobs, moved places, was unemployed, on the brink of survival in various ways, etc. Even so, it can be argued that my name as a mathematician was more widely known in the first half of '90s than it is now. My income was certainly higher in Fall 1994 and in the 1997-98 academic year than it is now.

Nevertheless, I picked one thing and did it for more than three decades. I didn't quit. There is a straight line of thought leading from my 10 page long 1993 undergraduate paper to my 350 page long 2025 preprint. A concept introduced in the 1993 paper plays one of the central roles in the 2025 manuscript, alongside with concepts I introduced in 1999, 2012 etc. I spent some 13 years from 1993 to 2006 teaching myself to write longish pieces of math. research, while publishing almost nothing for many of those years, which caused the unemployment. Then I put that writing skill to good use in the subsequent decades and wrote some 5000 pages of math. research in total. 75 peer-reviewed publications as of today, 6 of them books.