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posicScott 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.
***
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.
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.
***
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.
