"What was perhaps less usual is the path that led me to mathematics. I didn't go through special schools and olympiads. I came via studying economics and army service. I had a family before paper. As a result, my mind is probably not as quick as it could have been with an early drilling in math. But perhaps I also had some advantages over my younger classmates. I had a broader view of the universe and a better idea about the place of mathematics in it. This helped me form my own opinion about what is important, beautiful, promising, etc.

It also made mathematics less competitive for me. Competition is one of those motors of human society that will always be running. For example, we are having this interview because of the outcome of a certain competition. But I believe it distracts us from the true goal of science, which is to understand the worlds." (Andrei Okounkov, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 54 (2007), no. 3)