Maxx Crosby, the Raiders’ star pass rusher, described his approach to his career in a 2024 interview with Sports Illustrated using a metaphor that’s stuck with me. He credits it to two of his former coaches, Rich Bisaccia and Rod Marinelli:
The microscope’s your day-to-day; your 99% of the time, you’re in today. All you’re worried about is my workout today — recovery when I’m done, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The telescope is the far. It’s where I know I’m going. But at the end of the day, you can’t get there without the microscope, being in the day-to-day process, and continuously getting better on a daily basis.
And on what the telescope is for:
I know where I want to go. I’ve said it publicly: I want to be a Hall of Famer. I want to win a Super Bowl; I want to be the best ever to do it, period, and that’s my telescope. But the microscope is what’s most important.
It’s a beautiful framing, partly because it gives you a number. Not “have a vision and also work hard,” but a ratio: 99% microscope, peeks at the telescope. The metaphor does work that abstract advice can’t.
It also turns out to be very well grounded.
This Idea Has a Long Pedigree
Crosby has independently arrived at something many people have circled before.
Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits argued that effective people spend their time on what’s important but not urgent, Crosby’s telescope, while resisting the constant pull of the merely urgent. “Begin with the end in mind” is the telescope; “put first things first” is the microscope. James Clear’s Atomic Habits makes the same move with different vocabulary: set the identity-level goal (“I am becoming a writer”), but live at the level of systems and daily reps. Clear’s line, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, is essentially Crosby’s ratio expressed as an aphorism.
Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You is a book-length argument for the same point: stop asking whether you’re on the right career path and start asking whether you’re getting better at the thing in front of you today. Newport calls this the “craftsman mindset,” and contrasts it with the “passion mindset” that keeps checking the telescope and getting demoralized by what it sees.
The “be present” half of Crosby’s advice has an even older lineage. Marcus Aurelius keeps returning, throughout the Meditations, to the idea that the present moment is the only thing you actually possess and the only thing you can act on. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow gave this a modern empirical form: peak performance and peak satisfaction both happen when attention is fully absorbed in the current task, not split toward outcomes. Sports psychology has spent decades distinguishing process goals from outcome goals and finding, repeatedly, that athletes who focus on process outperform those fixated on outcome, even when outcome is what they ultimately want.
Anders Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice fits cleanly into the same picture. Expertise comes from highly focused work on specific sub-skills. The long-term vision matters mainly because it tells you which sub-skills to grind on. Once you’re at the desk, the vision should recede.
What’s nice about Crosby’s version is that it’s compact, concrete, and comes with a ratio. He’s not telling you something new. He’s telling you something true that’s been said many times, in a form that fits in your head.
Why This Lands So Hard in Mathematics
Mathematics is an unusually clean test case for Crosby’s philosophy, because the gap between the telescope and the microscope is more extreme here than almost anywhere else.
The telescope might be: prove a major conjecture, build a research program in harmonic analysis, become the person people cite when they need this technique. The microscope is: today I am trying to understand why this one lemma fails when I weaken the hypothesis. The two activities don’t feel related in the moment, and that’s exactly where Crosby’s ratio earns its keep.
A working mathematician’s day is reading one paper slowly, computing an example, checking whether a construction actually does what you hoped, fixing an error a referee found, preparing tomorrow’s lecture. None of it looks like “becoming a great mathematician.” It looks like wrestling with a single object. Terence Tao’s career advice hammers this point repeatedly: work hard on concrete problems, and don’t try to attack famous problems before you’ve built the local skills. Bill Thurston, in his essay On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, made a related point, mathematical progress is about increasing human understanding, and that happens one example, one reformulation, one explanation at a time.
Mathematics also has notoriously long feedback loops. A PhD takes five years. A tenure case takes six more. A research program is a career. If you check the telescope too often, you’ll be demoralized constantly, because day-to-day progress is invisible against those timescales. Grothendieck’s rising sea image captures this well: you don’t see the water rising, you just keep adding to it, and one day the obstacle is submerged.
And mathematical research punishes split attention more than almost any other kind of work. The objects are abstract, the chains of reasoning are long, and losing the thread costs you twenty minutes of reconstruction. When you’re at the desk with the problem, the question of whether you’ll get tenure is not just unhelpful — it’s actively destructive to the cognitive state the work requires. Crosby’s just be where you’re at translates directly.
But the 99/1 ratio plays out differently at different career stages, and it’s worth being specific.
Graduate Students
The graduate student trap is the opposite of what you’d expect. New PhD students often think they’re supposed to be all telescope, picking a grand problem, choosing a field that will define them, identifying the conjecture they’ll spend their life on. This is almost always paralyzing, and almost always wrong.
The first two years are microscope years. You’re filling in the foundations: learning the standard tools of your area, working exercises until certain manipulations become reflexive, sitting in seminars and slowly building the map of what’s known. The telescope, at this stage, is mostly about taste, figuring out which kinds of problems and which kinds of arguments you find beautiful, because that’s what will sustain you later. But taste is built by doing many small things, not by staring at the horizon.
The thesis-problem moment is the rare exception: a genuine telescope decision, and one worth weeks of deliberate thought, conversations with your advisor, and reading across nearby areas. Once the problem is chosen, the ratio should snap back. Students who keep re-evaluating their thesis problem every six months almost never finish; students who commit and grind almost always do, even when the original problem turns out to be harder or different than they thought.
One specific failure mode: comparing your trajectory to other students’. This is the telescope used badly, not “where am I going” but “where am I relative to them.” It produces no useful information and a lot of misery. The microscope doesn’t care about other people’s microscopes.
Postdocs
Postdocs are where the ratio gets harder, because the stakes of the telescope rise sharply. You have, realistically, three to six years to establish a research identity that will get you a permanent job. You need a coherent story. You need letters from people who can speak to what you do. You need to be visibly someone in a subfield.
And yet, the work that produces all of that is still microscope work. The postdoc who spends a year worrying about their job-market narrative produces less than the one who spends that year proving theorems. The narrative, in the end, is constructed from the theorems, not the other way around.
The telescope peek that matters most at this stage is strategic, not motivational: is this project actually building toward something coherent, or am I just doing whatever comes up? Postdocs accumulate collaborations easily, and not all of them serve the larger arc. Saying no to a tempting side project because it doesn’t fit the program is a legitimate use of the telescope. Saying no because you’re anxious about the job market is not.
The other postdoc-specific use of the telescope is choosing where to push for visibility, which conferences to travel to, which seminars to ask to speak at, which preprints to send to which people. These are real decisions, and they reward thought. But they’re decisions made occasionally, not the texture of daily work.
Early Career Faculty
Pre-tenure faculty face a version of the problem that’s mostly about defending the microscope from everything else. Teaching, committee work, advising students, refereeing, writing grants, responding to email, every one of these is urgent in a way research is not, and all of them combined can eat the day completely. The telescope here is partly the tenure case, but more usefully it’s: what is the research program I want to be known for, and what does this week need to contain for that to keep moving?
The discipline at this stage is protecting research time as if it were a class you teach. Two uninterrupted mornings a week is more productive than five fragmented days. Crosby’s near-total microscope focus, for an early-career mathematician, often means devoting almost all of the time you actually have for research, which might only be ten hours a week during the semester, to the work itself, not to anxiety about how it’s going. Those ten hours need to be deep.
There’s also a specific telescope failure pattern here, which is starting too many new directions because each one feels like a fresh chance to be exciting. Early-career mathematicians are often rewarded for breadth and visibility in ways that pull against the depth that actually produces lasting work. The telescope’s job at this stage is partly to say no, to defend a focused program against the centrifugal force of opportunity.
One Honest Caveat
The 99/1 ratio has a failure mode worth naming: grinding productively on technical problems that don’t add up to anything. Mathematics has a particular susceptibility to this, because the work is intrinsically interesting at every scale and you can spend years happily inside a problem that, viewed from any distance, was a dead end.
So the telescope peek is not optional, it’s just supposed to be brief and infrequent. I know where I want to go. That’s my telescope. But the microscope is what’s most important. Then back to the microscope.
The advice, in the end, is balanced in a way that’s easy to miss: it’s not “ignore the future,” it’s “trust that the future is built from what you do today, and then do today well.” For mathematicians, whose today is often invisible from a distance and whose future is often invisible from up close, that turns out to be exactly the framing the work needs.
Crosby’s quotes are from Hondo S. Carpenter, “For Maxx Crosby, Mental Preparation is Just as Critical as Physical Preparation,” Sports Illustrated / Raiders On SI, April 16, 2024.