Saturday, July 22, 2017

Advice from Claude Shannon

10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives:
https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f

Excerpts from the above article:

1) Cull your inputs.
2) Big picture first. Details later.
3) Don’t just find a mentor. Allow yourself to be mentored.
4) You don’t have to ship everything you make.
Vannevar Bush left his imprint on Shannon in another way: he defended the value of generalizing over specializing. As he told a group of MIT professors:
“In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin. Men of our profession — we teachers — are bound to be impressed with the tendency of youths of strikingly capable minds to become interested in one small corner of science and uninterested in the rest of the world. . . . It is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a modern monastic cell.”
Bush encouraged Shannon to avoid cells of all kinds
5) Chaos is okay.
6) Time is the soil in which great ideas grow.
7) Consider the the content of your friendships.
8) Put money in its place.
9) Fancy is easy. Simple is hard.
“Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another,” Shannon said, “and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do.”
10) The less marketing you need, the better your idea or product probably is.
11) Value freedom over status.
12) Don’t look for inspiration. Look for irritation.
Shannon’s most evocative formulation of that elusive quality put it like this: it was “a slight irritation when things don’t look quite right,” or a “constructive dissatisfaction.” In the end, Shannon’s account of genius was a refreshingly unsentimental one: A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated. 
 

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