While playing chess Shannon would often advance his queen boldly into the fray and say, "I ain't scaird of nothing". I learned to repeat it to myself when stuck, and at times it has enabled me to go on to a success. ... The courage to continue is essential since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragements.
Tinkering Sanctuary
Protected spaces insulated from interference enable breakthroughs.
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But there again, he began to be beset by the bureaucrats who wanted him to be in at a certain time and work till five o’clock and leave. His procedure – and that of many others of us, let me say, not only he, who were really fascinated by the work – would be maybe to come in at midday and work until midnight the next day. And then, the problem being essentially solved, go off and rest up and not come back for 24 hours perhaps … they were getting much more work out of Alan Turing that way.
This free-wheeling “ARPAstyle” of management was radical for 1961, and nothing like the rigidly top-down hierarchy that prevailed elsewhere in the Pentagon. But it worked. Old Washington hands who transferred into the agency could only shake their heads in disbelief: decisions that would take months anywhere else were made at ARPA in a matter of days.
Our relations with the Air Force blue-suiters were love-hate—depending on whose heads Kelly was knocking together at any given time to keep the Skunk Works as free as possible from bureaucratic interlopers or the imperious wills of overbearing generals. To his credit Kelly never wavered in his battle for our independence from outside interference, and although more than one Air Force chief of staff over the years had to act as peacemaker between Kelly and some generals on the Air Staff, the proof of our success was that the airplanes we built operated under tight secrecy for eight to ten years before the government even acknowledged their existence.
The managers had sealed off the team right from the start, telling every recruit not to do so much as mention the name Eagle to anyone outside the group. Although once in a while the pencil supply did grow short, the worst administrative problems never touched the Microkids and Hardy Boys. “We were buried, to the point where we were almost underground,” said one of the Microkids long afterward, adding, with the air of one from whose eyes scales have just fallen, that Rosemarie served them so well they never realized the full extent of what she did for them.
The physicists and chemists and mathematicians were not meant to avoid one another, in other words, and the research people were not meant to evade the development people. By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way.
The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
Withhold quick criticism of teammates' ideas, in order to keep the ideas flowing. Although testing is crucial, few ideas are so dangerous they can't be allowed to live for the few moments it takes to reconsider our initial reaction to them.
Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.
And while this treasure-hunting approach will not ensure reaching any particular objective, what it will do is accumulate stepping stones that lead to unfamiliar places. The treasure hunter is an opportunistic explorer—searching for anything and everything of value, without a care for what might be found. To be a treasure hunter, you have to collect as many stepping stones as you can, because you never know which one might lead somewhere valuable.