> If you are "on your own", then you might just be wrong-minded or maybe just a poor communicator. I would not consider myself as not a poor communicator per s

> If you are "on your own", then you might just be wrong-minded or maybe just a poor communicator. I would not consider myself as not a poor communicator per se - people say my slide presentations are really great. It's rather that I really don't understand how other people work. > Persuasion, communication, and leadership are high value-add skills. It might be prudent to learn about them and practice them. I surely already read a lot more on this topic than most "good leaders" have. Of no avail (?). I try to convince people all the time to join my projects - of no avail. People tell me the way to get better in leadership, communication, ... is tro practise more (IMHO a rather outlandish advice). I try it all the time - of no avail. I often cannot even imagine how other people think (and I am not able to reverse engineer based on their behavior what their inner thoughts might be). I typically have to go completely against my feelings and gut insticts when talking about or understanding feeling. But treating other people how I want to be treated is often a recipe for doom. > I don't know what space you're working in, but there are almost always small neglected spaces in the sciences that will welcome a young no-name to do meaningful gruntwork that no grant-writing professional scientist can afford to do. Do this work, embrace it, and publish it. You will be loved. I already do this in some sense (doing PhD on some very theoretical questions in some area of applied mathematics that few people on the world actually care about - still the questions are very exciting :-) ). The problem is that I have good reasons to believe that my days in science are numbered - and in the meantime I tend to believe that this might actually not be the worst thing, since how science is organized is IMHO broken in far too many ways and I believe I have found a potential secret emergency exit where I might work afterwards.