[slededit]

A life tip: Always 50/50. Talent is great, politics helps you direct it to where it will maximize impact. If nobody thinks what your working on is important you may be an unrecognized genius, but its also perfectly possible you are on the wrong track.

If you can't convince anyone what your doing is important it should make you stop and reconsider your efforts.

[dnautics]

I'm in a position where I succeed by not playing politics. Since i'm not playing politics (which others in the company are doing), i am spending my time doing development work. I am now building a team, and my only concern is to deliver results on time. My CEO thinks I'm competent and has expressed interest in helping fund me a startup, when the time comes. I'm not going to say that I didn't strategize the a politics "meta game" (picking a place to work where I would be visible, choosing to work on projects where I can have an impact) but the amount of time or effort I am spending on it is vanishingly small.

In any case my point about science is that playing politics is MORE important than delivering quality results. In my lab as a grad student, there was a grad student who delivered extremely sketchy data and then won the grad student of the year award and now he's a tenured professor at a top 50 US research institute.