Rabbi Professor

When I was about thirteen years old my dream was to be both a world renowned possek and a nobel prize winning scientist at the same time. At some point it became clear to me that  this was most likely impossible. On the one hand to become a leading possek I would need to devote myself almost entirely to Torah (the Netziv actaully makes this quite clear in his Mashiv Davar) while on the other the demands of developing a leading scientific career are not much different.
In the words of Nobel prize winning Robet Aumann (http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/raumann/publication.htm)

Actually I did a bit of soul-searching when finishing high school, on whether to become a Talmudic scholar, or study secular subjects at a university. For a while I did both. I used to get up in the morning at 6:15, go to the university in uptown New York from Brooklyn—an hour and a quarter on the subway—then study calculus for an hour, then go back to the yeshiva on the lower east side for most of the morning, then go back up to City College at 139th Street and study there until 10 P.M., then go home and do some homework or whatever, and then I would get up again at 6:15. I did this for one semester, and then it became too much for me and I made the hard decision to quit the yeshiva and study mathematics.

Thid does not mean that it is impossible to live a life of Totrah u'maddah - only that it is not trivial.