My highlights from this book: 

1. Each night he would practice a technique he called “envisioning myself at the next level,” in which he would imagine doing his dives perfectly. In this he would presage the “mental rehearsal” training of Olympic and professional athletes but also invented a mental habit for himself that he would continue to put to use for the rest of his life. 

2. Noyce listened as the founder explained that someday, if the business did well, he would like to move his family into a bigger, nicer house. Noyce looked up at him and said very quietly, “You got a nice family. I screwed up mine. Just stay where you are.” Twenty-five years and a successful company later,the entreprenuer had not moved. 

3. [Steve Jobs on Robert Noyce]: He was one of the giants in this valley who provided the model and inspiration for everything we wanted to become. He was the ultimate inventor. The ultimate rebel. The ultimate entrepreneur.

4. The marketplace wasn’t just confused by the concept of the microprocessor, but was actually frightened by its implications. His solution? “The market had to be educated.” At one point, Intel was conducting more seminars and workshops on how to use the microprocessor than the local junior collage’s total catalog of courses. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove became part of a traveling educational roadshow. Everyone who could walk and talk became educators. It worked. 

5. Studies have shown that having control over their fates, even if they fail, is central to the personalities of entrepreneurs. 

6. “We’re starting another project,” Noyce said with a laugh. Andy Grove later remembered thinking, “Go away, we don’t have time for this. What kind of company started new projects when its very survival was at stake?” The answer is a company that can’t resist a great technological breakthrough. 

7. Rarely discussed in studies of entrepreneurial startups is just how lonely it can be out there with a revolutionary new product, no competition, and a market that doesn’t seem to get what you are doing. You can try to hide in the echo chamber of your own team, but eventually you have to go outside and deal with investors, analysts, and potential customers. And when all of them are skeptical, even dismissive, it becomes increasingly difficult to retain the supreme confidence you need to keep going. That’s why many of the great entrepreners are arrogant and obsessive to the point of megalomania. They sometimes have to be to take their solitary vision and make it real.

8. Noyce made you feel important. Vital things could be accomplished if everybody could just steel their courage, ignore the risks, and move forward together toward a difficult goal. 

9. I have gotten a whole lot more enjoyment out of starting things from scratch than running a large company.

10. It would invent, and then build the most complex products ever mass-produced. It would accomplish this with an almost pathological adherence to a pace of change, established by one of its founders, that had almost no precedent in human history.

Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.