Shannon’s Limits: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives

 


 

  1. Ignore more.
    • Inbox zero, be damned.
  2. Big picture first. Details later.
  3. Don’t just find a mentor. Allow yourself to be mentored.
    • Be humble enough to listen.
  4. You don’t have to ship everything.
    • Feel free to dabble & play.
      Not everything you make needs to ship. Some things you do for you.
  5. Chaos is okay.
  6. Time is the soil in which great ideas grow.
    • Stick with it & be willing to put it to the side now and then.
  7. Be mindful of with whom you spend time & at what activity.
  8. Money is a means not the end.
    • Good to have. Bad to chase.
  9. Fancy is easy. Simple is hard.
    • Simplification is an art form: it requires a knack for excising everything from a problem except what makes it interesting.
  10. The less marketing you need, the better your idea or product probably is.
    • Don’t oversell to the doubts and indifferent; put your energy into making something you find interesting.
  11. Value freedom over status.
    • Shannon, pursued projects that might have caused others embarrassment, engaged questions that seemed trivial or minor, then managed to wring the breakthroughs out of them.
  12. Don’t look for inspiration. Look for irritation. Then, do the work.

Source: 10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives

 

Also on this blog, Lessons from Bell Labs’ Heyday

 


 

Take a Hike

 


One pattern I noticed while reading about the physicists and mathematicians who invented quantum mechanics and built the atomic bomb was the number of key insights that came to them while hiking and walking. At first, I thought this might have been a mere cultural coincidence. Many of these scientists were turn-of-the-century central Europeans; perhaps walking was just a common hobby amongst this group?

I have since noticed that (more…)

The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

 


It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for,
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

 

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

 

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow,
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or
have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!

 

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

 

I want to know if (more…)

Twitter Log XIX




TwitterI use Twitter to share brief messages, not more than two per day. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.

Here are my recent tweets (messages):

Inspiration without application is hallucination. –Ernest Holmes

The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. —Viktor Frankl

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it. –James Baldwin

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. –John Quincy Adams

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once. –Calvin Coolidge

Humor is also a way of saying something serious. –T. S. Eliot

At the end of the day, I want to be able to say, “I contributed more than I criticized.” —Brené Brown

 

Prior tweets are here, at Twitter Logs.

 

___

©2011 Tony Mayo




Be the decisive element

 


 

Hiam Ginott

I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.

Haim G. Ginott
Between Teacher and Child

 


 

Twitter Log IV

TwitterI use Twitter to share brief daily messages. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.

Here are my recent tweets (messages):

Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices. — Benjamin Franklin


Men, said the Devil, are good to their brothers: they don’t want to mend their own ways, but each others’. — Piet Hein


Tackle big tasks in small bits: an elephant CAN pass (more…)

Theory at Work

Thomas A. Edison

“Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

–Thomas A. Edison

 

 


 

“If Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where the needle Nikola Teslamight be, but rather would examine every straw, straw after straw like a diligent bee until he found the object of his search. I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of his labor.”

–Nikola Tesla



“That’s fine in practice but what about your theory?”
–Popular tee shirt on
University of Chicago campus


 

Yogi Berra

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.”
–Yogi Berra