A rather obvious but often overlooked piece of advice is to "read the masters". IMHO it is very easy to waste tonnes of time reading papers / books that are OK

A rather obvious but often overlooked piece of advice is to "read the masters". IMHO it is very easy to waste tonnes of time reading papers / books that are OK but still vastly inferior to an account of a master. Want to learn index theory: read Atiyah and Singer's original papers. Interested in the classification of quadratic forms: read Serre's course in arithmetic. Need to learn about the recent breakthroughs on prime tuples: read Tao! Find time to read Weil, insist on reading Poincare, come up with an excuse to read Scholze etc. Top mathematics literature is often spectacularly well written. See also: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/28268/do-you-read-the-masters https://mathoverflow.net/questions/28268/do-you-read-the-mas...