My highlights from the book: 

1. Having one's own shop, working on projects of one’s own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow: These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of entrepreneur and forestalling a return to the servitude of employee.

2. On the night of the fire [at his lab], when the fire had yet to be contained and was still hopping from one building to the next and when the prospects were the bleakest, Edison’s equanimity was put to a test. His immediate reaction? He cracked jokes, laughed, and declared, “Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow.” Nothing could rattle him.

3. “Anything that won’t sell I don’t want to invent, because anything that won’t sell hasn’t reached the acme of success. Its sale is proof of its utility, and utility is success.”

4. Edison was disinclined to drink with his fellows because it would pull him off track, interfering with the greater pleasures: tinkering, learning, problem solving.

5. Bell invented the telephone while tinkering with acoustic telegraphy; Edison invented the phonograph while tinkering with the telephone.

6. Edison did not himself lack for self-confidence and held fast to the conviction that he could remove any technical obstacle that impeded his progress, no matter what field of invention he explored. This conviction would lead him into blind alleys, but it also led to astonishing successes, planned and unplanned. 

7. Edison peppered Ford with questions; Ford sketched out his answers. Then came the moment that Ford would say changed his life: “Young man, that’s the thing!” Edison told him, pounding the table for emphasis. "You have the thing. Keep at it.” With encouragement from the man whom Ford regarded as “the greatest inventive genius in the world” ringing in his ears, Ford returned home with the conviction that he should persevere. 

8. Edison has been so often scoffed at,” the Newark Daily Advertiser observed, “that it has no other effect upon him than to stimulate him to increased study and labor.”

9. Nor did he regard his partial deafness as an impediment. He claimed that the deafness was actually an advantage, freeing him from time-wasting small talk and giving him undisturbed time to “think out my problems.” Late in life he would say that he was fortunate to have been spared “all the foolish conversation and other meaningless sounds that normal people hear.”

10. Edison’s need for autonomy was primal and unvarying; it would determine the course of his career from beginning to end.

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.