#428 How Claude Shannon Worked

0:00The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction.

0:05Not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction, but rather a constructive dissatisfaction, or a slight irritation when things don't look quite right.

0:14A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated.

0:18A genius must delight in finding solutions.

0:21Genius must derive joy from applications of intellect.

0:26Claude Shannon once said, I get a big kick out of seeing a clever way of doing some engineering problem, a clever design for a circuit which uses a very small amount of equipment and gets a great deal of results out of it.

0:37For Shannon, there was no substitute for the pleasure of seeing net results.

0:43So how would such a person go about solving a problem?

0:46Shannon proposed six strategies.

0:49Strategy number one, you might, he said, start by simplifying.

0:54Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another.