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