A comprehensive manual for sabotaging your own mathematical career
Every game has a metagame, the game about the game, the optimal strategies for winning at a specific point in time. Academic mathematics is no exception. While most career advice tells you how to succeed, I’m going to do something different: show you exactly how to fail, and even more, fail spectacularly.
Why? Because understanding failure modes often reveals success strategies more clearly than positive advice ever could. Plus, if you’re already doing some of these things, this might serve as a helpful wake-up call.
The Early Career Catastrophe Kit
Choose Your Advisor Like You’re Picking a Restaurant
Pick your PhD advisor based purely on shared research interests. Ignore their terrible track record of students who never finish, never get jobs, or take eight years to graduate. Who cares if they’re about to retire and won’t be around for your job search? Who cares if none of their recent students landed tenure-track positions? Romance is all that matters in mathematics.
Bonus points: Choose someone brilliant but completely disconnected from the mathematical community. Extra bonus points if they’re known for keeping students indefinitely while providing minimal guidance.
Master the Art of Research Self-Sabotage
Dive deep into extremely narrow, technical problems that only three people worldwide care about. When someone suggests your area might be too specialized, double down. After all, you’re not trying to communicate with anyone, you’re pursuing pure truth in isolation.
Alternatively, jump into the trendiest field possible just as it’s becoming overcrowded. Machine learning applications to topology? Perfect timing to enter in 2025 when everyone else already has a five-year head start.
Pro tip: Refuse to learn any computational tools. Insist on doing everything by hand, even when software could accelerate your research by orders of magnitude. Computers are for people who aren’t real mathematicians.
Publication and Visibility Failures
The Journal Submission Anti-Strategy
Submit only to the most prestigious journals and refuse to revise based on referee feedback. Those referees clearly don’t understand your revolutionary insights. When they suggest clarifications or corrections, ignore them entirely. Resubmit the exact same paper to an even more prestigious venue.
Never post preprints. Keep all your work secret until formal publication, ensuring that others working on similar problems will scoop you while you wait 18 months for peer review.
Conference Catastrophes
Give terrible, unprepared talks that run over time. Include 47 slides of dense calculations with no motivation or intuition. When the moderator signals that time is up, just talk faster.
Better yet, never attend conferences at all. They’re expensive, and you don’t want to waste time “networking” when you could be doing real mathematics. When you do attend, spend the entire time alone or only with people you already know.
Advanced technique: During question periods, argue aggressively with senior mathematicians. Make sure everyone remembers you as “that person who was completely wrong but wouldn’t admit it.”
Networking and Collaboration Disasters
Social Skills Meltdown
Be arrogant about your research and dismissive of others’ work. When someone presents their results, immediately point out why your approach is superior. Never ask questions that might help you understand their perspective, only ask questions designed to showcase your own cleverness.
Never respond to emails, or respond weeks late with curt, unhelpful replies. When people invite you to collaborate, decline because you want sole credit for everything.
Remember: Burning bridges is efficient. Why maintain relationships when you could spend that time solving equations?
Geographic Isolation Excellence
Never leave your home institution for visits, conferences, or sabbaticals. Decline postdoc offers at better institutions because you’re “comfortable where you are.” Avoid international collaborations due to “communication barriers,” why deal with accents when you can work alone?
When your advisor suggests spending a semester at another university, explain that you don’t see the point. You have everything you need right here in your windowless office.
Career Management Failures
The Tenure Track Disaster
Focus exclusively on research while completely neglecting teaching and service. Alternatively, focus so much on teaching and service that you publish nothing significant for three years.
Time your job applications perfectly, submit them right before your major results come out, ensuring that hiring committees see none of your best work.
Apply only to jobs in the most expensive cities where your spouse can’t find work and you’ll be financially stressed forever.
Professional Development Neglect
Never learn to write grants. When forced to apply for funding, submit proposals that read like technical papers with no motivation or broader impact. Wonder why you keep getting rejected while less “brilliant” colleagues get funded.
Avoid all administrative responsibilities, then wonder why you have no influence in departmental decisions. Refuse to mentor students because it’s “not your job,” then complain that the next generation isn’t properly trained.
Modern Era Specific Failures
Digital Presence Disasters
Maintain no online presence whatsoever. Be completely ungoogleable. When people search for your work, they should find nothing except a decade-old faculty page with a broken CV link.
Alternatively, create a toxic online presence by engaging in Twitter flame wars about politics, getting into public disputes with colleagues, or posting controversial takes about mathematics that make you unemployable.
Communication Failures
Never practice explaining your work to non-experts. Write grants and papers in the most incomprehensible jargon possible. When asked to give a colloquium talk, present your most technical work with no motivation or context.
Be contemptuous of “popular mathematics” or outreach efforts. Make it clear that anyone who cares about applications or accessibility isn’t a serious mathematician.
Advanced Self-Sabotage Strategies
The Perfectionist Trap
Spend decades polishing one paper instead of building a research program. Set impossibly high standards that prevent you from ever finishing anything. Constantly switch research areas instead of building deep expertise in any particular direction.
When collaborators suggest submitting a good-enough result, insist on solving the most general possible version first. Why publish three papers when you could spend five years on one perfect paper that might never get finished?
The Anti-Collaboration Approach
Insist on working alone on problems that clearly require collaboration. When forced to work with others, be difficult about authorship, credit, and acknowledgments. Hoard your techniques, insights, data, and computational resources.
Remember: sharing knowledge only helps your competitors. Guard your secrets jealously.
Institutional Suicide
Constantly complain about your department, university, and the field in general. Refuse reasonable teaching assignments and service requests. Engage enthusiastically in petty departmental politics and personal feuds.
Never participate in hiring committees, then complain loudly about all hiring decisions. Make sure your colleagues see you as someone who only takes from the institution without giving back.
The Ultimate Meta-Losing Strategy
Complete Strategic Unawareness
Never read about career advice or professional development. Assume that mathematical brilliance alone will carry you through any career challenge. Remain completely ignorant of economic realities in academia, funding cuts, job market changes, evolving expectations for researchers.
Be genuinely surprised when talented colleagues get better positions than you. Attribute all professional setbacks to politics, bias, or bad luck, never to your own strategic choices.
The Isolation Trifecta
- Intellectual isolation: Work on problems no one cares about
- Social isolation: Avoid all professional relationships
- Geographic isolation: Stay in one place and never expand your horizons
Perfect this combination and you’ll achieve complete irrelevance.
Why Smart People Follow These Anti-Strategies
The tragic irony is that many brilliant mathematicians accidentally follow these failure patterns because:
- Cultural myths: The “lone genius” narrative suggests that networking and career management are somehow beneath pure mathematics
- Impostor syndrome: Fear of being “found out” leads to avoiding opportunities and relationships
- Perfectionism: Waiting for perfect results instead of sharing incremental progress
- Naivety: Believing that merit alone determines success in academic systems
Academia is a social system with its own rules and dynamics. The surest way to lose is to remain willfully ignorant that there’s a game being played at all.
If You’re Recognizing Yourself
If you’re a graduate student or postdoc reading this and recognizing yourself in these patterns, take a breath. Awareness is not failure, it’s the first step toward making different choices. You’re not doomed because you chose an advisor based on research interests or because you’ve been perfectionist about publishing. Most successful mathematicians have done several things on this list at some point. The difference is they eventually recognized the patterns and adjusted to the dynamics.
The metagame can be learned. Strategic thinking is a skill, not a personality trait. And recognizing that the game exists doesn’t require abandoning your love of mathematics or your intellectual integrity, it just means acknowledging that mathematics happens in a social, economic, and institutional context.
If You’re a Mentor
If you’re reading this as an advisor or senior colleague, ask yourself: are you helping your students avoid these traps, or are you perpetuating the mythology?
Good mentorship means explicitly discussing the things the system doesn’t volunteer. Tell your students where your recent graduates landed, names and institutions. Talk about publication strategy: when to aim high, when to cut losses and resubmit elsewhere, why preprints matter. Introduce them to your network. Explain what makes a strong job application in your field. Help them understand the economics of academia: where funding comes from, why certain research areas attract more support, how institutional prestige affects opportunities.
The landscape has changed dramatically even in the last decade. What worked for you, the timing of your job search, the publication norms in your subfield, the role of digital presence, may not map onto your students’ reality. The metagame evolves, and part of good mentorship is staying aware of those shifts rather than assuming your path is the only path.
Most importantly: treat professional development as part of your mentorship responsibility, not as a distraction from “real” mathematics. Helping brilliant students navigate the professional landscape is itself valuable intellectual work. The mathematics community loses too much talent to preventable strategic mistakes.
The Inversion Insight
Mathematics is beautiful. Elegant proofs matter. Deep intellectual work is essential and valuable. None of that is in question.
But mathematics doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in departments, at conferences, through collaborations, within funding structures, via career pathways that have their own logic and dynamics. You can be brilliant and strategic. In fact, in today’s competitive academic environment, you probably need to be both.
The mathematicians who thrive aren’t playing a different game, they’re just aware that there’s a game being played. They choose advisors strategically while pursuing problems they love. They communicate their work effectively without dumbing it down. They build genuine relationships within the mathematical community while maintaining intellectual independence. They balance the immediate and the long-term, the social and the solitary, the strategic and the passionate.
Take everything negative in this post and do the opposite. Your future self, the one who gets to spend their life doing mathematics rather than cobbling together adjunct positions, will thank you.