success factors: [be] thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much.
irrelevant factors: [being] the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas
You can do great work outside a university, be an artist or industrialist, in poverty or in wealth. I love the idea of working in splendid isolation, but (I feel) you need something to push against, to measure yourself against, peers to celebrate or hate you. Each discipline in academia is all that (as are industries and arts). How can you rebel without a cause?
Make an independent university. That's what Moscow mathematicians did in the 1990s, when it became clear that the new democratic Russia no longer cared about fundamental science. http://www.mccme.ru/ium/english/index.html . I studied there for a couple years, fantastic place.
irrelevant factors: [being] the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas
You can do great work outside a university, be an artist or industrialist, in poverty or in wealth. I love the idea of working in splendid isolation, but (I feel) you need something to push against, to measure yourself against, peers to celebrate or hate you. Each discipline in academia is all that (as are industries and arts). How can you rebel without a cause?