12 Lessons Learned, Over Five Years Writing "A Mind at Play" By Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni
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. 5) Chaos is okay. 6) Time is the soil in which great ideas grow. 7) Consider the content of your friendships. 8) Put money in its place. 9) Fancy is easy. Simple is hard. 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. As Shannon told his fellow Bell Labs engineers, the defining mark of a great scientific mind is not some ethereal capacity for inspiration, but rather a quality of “motivation…some kind of desire to find out the answer, the desire to find out what makes things tick.” That fundamental drive was indispensable: “If you don’t have that, you may have all the training and intelligence in the world, [but] you don’t have the questions and you won’t just find the answers.” Where does that fundamental drive come from? 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. And that useful irritation doesn’t come until, somewhere in the midst of the work, you stumble onto something that troubles you, pulls at you, doesn’t look quite right. Don’t run away from those moments. Hold on to them at all costs.
