You need to realize that the only thing a career academic can really teach you is how to be a career academic. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.

We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.

God made mathematics so you can tell me where I am wrong; the fragility of a derivation is transparent for all to see. Formalism allows the slightest nonsense to show. Some econs/psychs produce obscure equations to hide nonsense. They get caught: you can debunk using math!