Introduction

For the sake of clarity, let me check that you haven't misunderstood me. In many places this book has emphasized the “extra-scientific” skills and the importance of “playing the game” in the business of science, where how many scientific papers you have written, the impact factors of the journals, and your academy memberships do count. There is nothing wrong with this, unless it becomes your one-dimensional view of what science is all about. Doing your work with the dominating purpose of having papers in high-impact journals such as Nature and Science, perhaps more papers than your colleague next door, is empty and has no intrinsic value. It would be trivializing science. So what really counts? Your idealism, your curiosity, your intellectual endeavor. To potentially push forward the frontiers of knowledge or to use this knowledge to the benefit of humankind. Yes, do keep doing this.

So now this book can really draw to a close?

Actually, no, the most critical part is still to come. You used the four web figures to visualize your strengths and weaknesses. Now it is time to set your ambitions for preferred scores in, say, one year from now, and to define the appropriate actions to get there: dream, count, believe, act, and then succeed.