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James Dyson

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2021-08-27

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2021-08-27

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1. “That this quote unquote failure, this is what I mean by when a failure is exactly what you need that this failure had precisely the powers he needed to stick the bits of paper in his hymn book. A glue that was sticky but not so sticky that it could not be removed. The following day, Fry obtained some of the glue and started making his bookmarks with it. And I do the exact same thing today for founders. It took another eighteen months to turn the idea into a commercial product. One key problem was solving the paradox of making this not very sticky glue stick permanently to the message paper, but not to anything else. Trial marketing began in 1977. People soon found they couldn't live without them.”

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2. “So, this book brings us all the way up into the year 2000 and just ends. Just a few more ideas from James Dyson. Here's one of them. When failure is exactly what you need, this is about the post-it note.”

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3. “true aero engine. They succeeded in building an engine whose power to weight ratio was as high as a modern day as modern day cars. It was like inventing this is a great way to summarizing it and this shows the beauty of Dyson's mind. It was like inventing the car, wheel, and petrol engine all at once. Most impressive of all, they not only built the first airplane, they also flew it in the face of enormous scientific skepticism. This is another idea that he repeats over and over again. They put their lives on the line in order to learn more about what they were trying to achieve, and the whole project cost less than $1,000, or around $15,000 in today's money.”

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4. “In nineteen oh three he had sold more than twelve million blades. Dason on his love and admiration for the Wright brothers, if you haven't listened to it, it's founders number 28 based on David McCulloch's biography of the Wright brothers. Fantastic book, by the way. Highly recommend to anybody. The Genius of the Wright Brothers. Many people still think the Wright Brothers as a couple of bike mechanics who cobbled together a machine that flew a bit. Yet Wilbur and Orville Wright combined rigorous scientific methods and extraordinary engineering skills to bring success where others had failed. Like Edison, the Wright Brothers systematically studied the many variables involved, building a series of gliders and carrying out empirical tests on a sandy beach with constant winds. In effect, they found a wind tunnel to develop ailerons. So we talked about on the Chuck Yeager podcast. But what is astonishing was what they had to design their... Let me start that over actually. But what is astonishing was that they had to design their own propeller system.”

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5. “Now, with the invention in 1895 of the Razor, the main idea that Dyson's giving us here is invent something people use once and then throw away. That way they keep going back for more. And that's what this person you're going to recognize his last name, King Camp Gillette. Trying to make something both lethally sharp and safe has exercised inventors for centuries in 1771. The French cutler Jean Perre developed a razor designed to minimize cuts, but facial trauma was low down the list of priorities of the most famous man in shaving, and what a name. King Camp Gillette of America. He took the advice of a former employer who made a fortune selling disposable bottle tops, invent something that people use once and then throw away. That way they'll have to keep coming back for more. The story goes that in 1895, Gillette”

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6. “I just love what Dyson did there. He talks about, okay, it starts off, we have an idea, Archimedes 2,000 years ago. And then we have another idea, the variation of this by this guy named James Watt. And then Smith seems Watt's innovation, you know, what's that, 65 years later, and he builds something. He used the same idea to build it with another purpose. And then 15 years after that, Brunel is able to take a variation of Smith's idea. You see how I did a really poor job there. This is a convoluted way of describing that. But you see how he's tracing the same idea used in different applications by different people for different purposes through different times. I think that is a very, very fundamentally powerful human idea.”

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7. “Were just tons of opportunities staring in the face of everybody, maybe even inconveniencing you or frustrating you, but such a small percentage of people doing anything about it. It is simply the reverse of the water raising screw invented by Archimedes more than 2,000 years ago. So that is also featured in the book. I read and reread the section. I still don't even understand what the hell it works. It seems like it's black magic. Again, this idea, the main point here is it's not important for us to know how a water raising screw works. It's just taking an invention that happened 2,000 years ago and realizing that if you change it, in this case, reverse it, it also can produce another invention, which is a propeller. A number of people toyed with the idea of using a screw-like device to propel waters through the air. James Watt seems to be the first to think about using it for ship production in 1770. In 1835,”

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8. “Okay, so now we're in the 1800s. This is Francis Smith, and this is on the propeller. And really, I'm bringing this to your attention because in his autobiography, he talks about reading biographies of people that inspired him and then using their life stories to draw strength. So one of his main influences was this guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. James's autobiography, he talks about periods where he was just, he was like, I'm giving up, this is crazy. I'm going to fail. And then realizing the lessons that he learned from the biography of Brunel that he went through the exact same thing and he kept going, so I'm going to keep going as well. I have a biography of Brunei just haven't got around to reading it for the podcast, but I will, and obviously be on the main founder's feed. So, okay, the propeller is a perfect example of a great idea that has been staring people in the face for centuries. It's that same idea expressed in another way, right?”

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9. “This could work a lot better if somebody actually just improved a few different things on this. And if you think about it, that's the foundation of James Dyson's career when he's like, you know, why are we bag like the Hoover vacuum sucks? Why are we using this? There's got to be a better way to clean our house. And that simple idea pursued with dogged determination and invention and engineering actually built a foundation for James mini empire, or I guess large empire that he has now. And so we're going to see he's going to talk about this idea. Now, this is complex powered machinery. We're in the year 1280 in England. And the section of this, I'm just going to read the main point up front, the note I left myself. A lot of people may think, hey, there must be a better way. Almost no one does anything about it. So he gives an example. I'm only going to read this a longer section, but I'm only going to read”

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10. “In front of the load. So he talks about some of the early. I'm skipping over parts of like the 13th century. They had a wheelbarrows where the wheel was in the back. So he's talking about different cultures came up with different versions of the same invention. Essentially, it's a summary of that part. So he says, I follow the more efficient European design and put the ball in front of the load. When I was, while I was about it, I made other improvements, such as replacing the metal pin with a plastic one because plastic didn't rust. The result was a barrel was a wheelbarrow or ball barrow. I would be happy to work with. And so when I think about that section, it's not important to focus on wheelbarrow, bulb, or anything. The main point is, hey, there's a tool that's been around for a long time used by countless humans. Me, just a normal person realizing there's some deficiency, can actually improve that. That is the main point, that you can apply that idea to whatever is that you use in your daily life. Like, hey,”

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11. “So it says it's difficult to imagine now, but the wheelbarrow was once classified as military hardware. Developed more than 2,000 years ago to allow the Chinese Army to transport heavy or large loads quickly and easily, the wheelbarrow is indeed a clever design. So clever in fact that it can be hard to see beyond it to how it might be improved. It was only after spending days using a wheelbarrow while renovating my house that I became aware that the 2,000-year-old design could use some improvement. And what's more, improvement of the component widely regarded as the greatest of all inventions the wheel. The result was the ballbarrow, this is one of his first inventions that he talks about in his autobiography, which I launched in 1975. It did away with the wheel using a pneumotic ball that didn't sink into the soft ground or damage lawns. In designing the ball barrow, I followed the more efficient European design and put the ball”

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12. “Multiple decades of struggle to get to where he is now, where he owns 100% Dyson's a private company, he's a multi-billionaire. He gets to go to work on engineering problems that he think is interesting. But also, he's very funny. And the book, it's also short too, which I think I've talked about many times where I think more people would read if we could compress ideas down. Books don't have to be seems like the standard book, regardless of the subject, is about three to four hundred pages. Dyson's is maybe, what, 220 in the paperback version, very short, very fast. And he's really, really funny. Now this book is older. It's, I think it was published first in 2000 or 2001, if I'm not mistaken. So it's before he wrote his autobiography, but we'll also see his wit and just a funny ways his mind works. But it also says, I guess I'll tell you this up front because I realized that when I got to the end of the book is that”

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13. “And that was James Dyson writing in the introduction of the book that I hold my hand and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the history of great inventions. It was written by James Dyson and a whole other team of journalists. It is unlike...”

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14. “Pioneer. And finally, the product you make should always be improving. The way you do that is you have to obsess about it. I've mentioned iterative development as part of innovation, and that extends to the workplace. We are never satisfied with the product and are always trying to improve it. We take any complaint very seriously and solve the problem. We are fascinated to the point of obsession with the product. It is this that allows us to maintain ownership of our product, and without it, we don't have a business.”

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15. “He's talking about hiring now, and he does not like people with experience. He wants to train them brand new. He hires a lot of graduates just like Jeremy Fry hired him when he was a graduate or about to be a graduate. And so the main point here is it's better to hire someone who's enthusiastic and inexperienced than have to retrain somebody that has bad habits. The basic reason is they are unsullied. They have not been taught to think by a company with nothing on his mind but short-term profit. We are trying to do things differently from everyone else, so it's easier to teach fresh graduates this new way than we train someone with experience. I began employing graduates because I was so appreciative of the opportunities given to me when I was younger by Jeremy Fry. He gave me carte blanche on the sea truck project and entrusted me with running the business from the start. I enjoyed and benefited from that the responsibility of learning things by doing rather than being taught by superiors. This made me feel that I was”

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16. “More advice from James to be different on conventional, determined, and obtuse goes back to this anti-brilliance campaign that he has. You were just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse. There are billions of people out there thinking in train tracks and thinking what they've been taught to think. If you go in and you be illogical, then half the time people will laugh at you. And half the time you will strike up something interesting because you've stopped everyone else from thinking logically, which up until this point has failed to provide a solution. Be a bit wacko, and you shake people up a bit. And we all need shaking up.”

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17. “This is a reminder that if one distribution channel is not working, you can always find another one. So James, at this point in the story, he tells these odd arrangements for other companies in other countries to sell the Dyson Bacum Cleaner. They do it under a different name. It's not called the Dyson Dual Cyclone. Eventually, he realizes this is a mistake and he stops doing it completely. But at this point in the story, there's a company that's set up in America that is selling a different version of the Dyson, just using a different name. I think it's called like the Phantom or something like that. And they're not doing well with retailers, so they try to go direct. And this is what James said. For a couple of years, it sold unspectacularly. And then the company relaunched it using Infromarsh. It skyrocketed, becoming the most successful product ever launched by television shopping channels, a nauseating method, but productive. So again, exact same product, just one distribution channel they were pursuing wasn't working at all. They try another one, and it takes off like a rocket.”

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18. “And dangerous to know? I have to read that. Are you kidding me? So James, one of James's idea, he believes that companies are built and they're not made. And you do that one brick at a time. And this story is sometimes literal. This is the guy that he winds up hiring to run his Dyson business in Australia. Ross was exactly the sort of dogged, stubborn, achiever that we needed. When I first met him, he'd been in the process of building a house at the bottom of a very steep slope, down which the builders refused to carry the bricks, claiming it was too difficult and dangerous. So Ross, with the help of his two young sons, carried every single brick for his house down the slope himself by hand, working at it steadily every single morning before showing up for work.”

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19. “It says James thought the book was fascinating, and he learned that he and Rand approached work the same way. This is what James says. His approach was so much like my own. He did what he did not by flashes of brilliance, but by working very hard for long periods in the face of great hardship. And the way Rand discovers who James Dyson is, he goes to buy a vacuum cleaner. The sales rep shows him the Dyson. Rand says, no, I don't want a British-made one and there's this whole thing in the book that I've skipped over about the issues with the way certain industries are perceived and the fact that Britons would want German-made stuff or Japanese-made stuff more than their own. But again, that's essentially what Rand is saying here. But going back to James's idea about, hey, take risks under your own name, right? Each vacuum cleaner had a tag with, I think, a picture of James Dyson and the story behind the machine. And Rand reads that.”

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20. “didn't and that they get clogged as soon as you start using them. They didn't know that. And so all vacuum cleaners, like at the time, all vacuum cleaners had bags. So there's no way for the customer to know that the bag was the problem. So James realizes, well, if I start educating customers on the problems with bags, this will lead them to understand the drastic improvement that my product offers, right? compared to the existing products on the market. And so he winds up hiring a brilliant copywriter. And this is the ad that the copywriter came up with. I'm going to read the whole thing. It's amazing how much you can learn in just a few sentences.”

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21. “I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. May 2nd, nineteen ninety two was my forty fifth birthday. I want to pull out some of his ideas because I like he's got a really gifted mind for marketing and sales too. Something he does here that's really smart was why he talks about why he named the company after himself. And this is a quote from Founders Number 191 from Naval Ravicon. He says, embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage. And so Dyson echoes that idea here. He says the company name was crucial. I was about to go up against these big multinational companies, and my great advantage in a jungle ruled by faceless conglomerates was that I own the product myself and was personally responsible for everything I sold to my customers, and so I made this clear in the name of both the company and the product. Another thing that James believes that people always pay for quality, this reminded me of Ivan Chinard's Peton story.”

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22. “We had nothing to do but deduce our own dream product. There was no market research and there was no focus groups. It was unique. The world just isn't like that. You were not supposed to do things like that. Just go ahead and do it all on your own. It felt almost naughty. And then this is what I was referencing earlier. I finally made it to my point in the notes where his point that is implied when you read the book is like, listen, if you have a product that makes someone's life better, and that is still the best description, that's a quote from Richard Branson that a business is simply an idea that makes other people's lives better. And if you have a product that makes someone else's lives better, then you can learn how to build a business as you go. And so a large part of the book is just James telling you to slow down and think about what you're doing. And if you do that for all parts of your business, you won't make the same mistakes that you see other companies make. So he says, I was following the path of my long cherished dream that designers could lead business from the front.”

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23. “And a lot of them were saying, you know, oh yeah, we'll give you a loan, but you got to hire a professional CEO or whatever the case is. It's like, this is ridiculous. I can run the company. And so we get to his entire point here. A vacuum cleaner designed entirely by me, incorporating innovations up to the very latest point at which my technology had arrived to be produced and marketed and sold under my own exclusive direction was to be frank what this whole thing had been about. So now we finally got to the very early days of Dyson. He takes this little crew, Jeremy Fry decides, hey, I don't want to continue on with this. He's much older. I think he's like in the 70s by then. So James now owns the company 100%. He names it Dyson instead of I think it was like something I forgot the name of the other vacuum cleaner. It's not important vacuum cleaner company that is And you know he's still got a great relationship with Fry completely understood So he went to barring against his house like I said but really I'm reading this section is because when you're reading these biographies in almost all”

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24. “So, this is when he's like, forget licensing, I'm doing this myself. And this is the insane thing. Remember, this company now gives him a net worth of $16, $20 billion. It's a hugely value company, right? He tries to give to sell equity, and no one wants it. He tries to raise money by selling equity, and no one was interested. And this is what he said. So he winds up having to go into debt, and then he winds up barring against his house again. But this is what he says about this. I was tearing my hair out as these doors were slammed in my face for the most obtuse reasons. The poor buggers were so wrong to think that designers knew nothing about business or about marketing or about selling. It is the people who make the things that understand them and understand what the public wants.”

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25. “It's 1991. He started this in 1979, and he's like, I'm 12 years in, forget it. I give up. And just as he's about to quit, a miracle happens. He gets a call from his attorney. He's about to fly back to America again to do another deposition. And he says we've settled with Amway. It is safe to say that this was the greatest turning point in my life since the day I tore the bag off my hoover. Coming at a time when my single largest problem was a sort of funds to produce my own vacuum cleaner, the fact that I would no longer be hemorrhaging thousands into legal fees was like a gift from heaven. That leak in the cash flow had only days before made me consider giving up altogether was now finally plugged.”

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26. “They say you can't. And then they sue him. And so then he counters. And this is where he goes into in the book. He talks multiple times. He hates licenses. Each is unique. The companies love complicating them. And then the lawyer bills just get way too high. So I would describe this entire process. Basically why I'm telling you this section is because it's one step forward, two steps back, two steps forward, one step back at every step back other people quit. Somehow James doesn't, but he feels like it. And so at this point, this is the closest he ever gets to quitting. He's like, all right. And he says, I began to consider forgetting the whole thing and doing something else with my life.”

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27. “I am not a quantum leaper. So I'm going to fast forward to figures. In the interim, he winds up signing another few licenses. He's still doing the license route and eventually just he gives up because he realizes other companies are just incompetent. They're not going to do things. He's a very hard nose dude that wants things done his way. And people like that, there's no point in trying to work at other companies because they're not going to be like you. You might as well just do it yourself. So in 1991, things are a little better. He's still in the carriage house, but he can hire a small staff. He's inventing different variations of vacuum cleaners. Again, it's still not his goal. He winds up signing another license, has difficulty working with discompany too, and then another lawsuit. And in the interim, I skipped over this huge issue with him, is that he signs a deal in America with Amway, the giant American company. So they wind up signing an agreement with him. Then they cancel it. Then they copy.”

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28. “People ripping them off in the book, a ton of lawsuits, a ton of distractions. And so that's why he's just like, forget it, man. Just do, if it's important to your business, you got to control it. The main point I want to bring to your attention about this section, though, is that in 1979 he has the initial idea for a bagless vacuum, right? It's 1986 before it goes on sale. And it's still not the main goal of an idea that he owns and sells and controls completely. But just that, that seven years. Remember, we still got another seven to go, seven to eight years to go before he actually gets to his optimal point. But I thought this point was interesting because he's in Japan a lot. And he compares the way that the Japanese approach building up their industry. Remember, this is post-World War II, with the way that Dyson builds up his company. And this is very similar. We learned a lot about this from the founder of Sony, Akeo Marita, who actually influenced Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs in some of his ideas.”

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29. “So he winds up getting some upfront money and then a guarantee minimum of making at least $60,000 a year. So it's a rather small deal, but it comes at the perfect time. He needed a small win. Now, I'm going to just give you like broad strokes here. It winds up selling really well, but his license deal was bad because the business he's doing business with was the company he was doing business with was crooked. So he only ever gets the 60,000 year minimum, even though it's obvious that it's selling more than that. Part of it's like, you know, you're going to sue them in Japan. The upside is probably smaller than how much it would cost you to actually enforce the contract, right? And this is another reason later on why Dyson keeps insisting on total control. He gets away from licensing. So he's got to make mistakes for several years trying to license his invention. Then he's like, I got to build this thing myself. It's like everything else. It's like when anytime I introduce other people, other companies, there's a ton of...”

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30. “In the early weeks of 1985, I was broke, hungry, and oppressed. My doggedness and self belief in the absence of any real evidence that they were justified were beginning to look more and more like insanity. My nerves were fragile enough to be susceptible to doubts. I needed a success to help knock down the doubt, and so at this point he gets this random single inquiry from a company in Japan that wants to license his technology. He says Japan gets the concept right away. And there's another thing that I'm skipping over many parts of the book. The problem with licenses is they're all unique. So there's a ton of, and I think I have more notes on this later, but they're not easy deals to get done. Like, lawyers get rich off of them. They take a long time. He says dealing with this Japanese company was completely different. They got a deal done in three weeks.”

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31. “They waste time, they move slow, and the biggest problem is they never say no. They just don't say yes. That's exactly what James is dealing with over this two-year period. It says in those two years, I plotted around Europe, I survived on a sort of manana attitude. Tomorrow would always be better. You have to think like that, otherwise you just can't go on. But he's running, he's to the end of his line here, and there's many, many, many, many times in the book. It's not just like, oh, I'm going to be persistent. That's it. No, it's like I'm going to quit right now. I'm going to quit soon. If this doesn't happen, I'm going to quit. So this is his state of affairs right before he signs his first license agreement. He is 38 years old.”

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32. “Making cyclone after cyclone never going forwards, never going backwards until I died. So I have three years. He's got an initial prototype. Remember, this is the vacuum cleaner he's going to produce himself 11 years from now is a lot better than the one he has in it here. But he's okay. We got technology. We can patent it. So him and Jeremy are like, hey, we don't want to put any more money into this instead of manufacturing a brand new physical object's going to be extremely expensive. Why don't we says Jeremy Fry and I decided that rather than sell than attempting to produce a thing ourselves, we would try to sell a license for its production. And I'm going to read you the sentence. This is crazy. And so it was that over the next two years, I approached every manufacturer you could think of. And I know that myself was two years trying to sell a license question mark. After three years of development alone. And so there's a saying that popped in my mind when I was reading this part that you don't have to worry about people stealing your idea that if it's any good that you're actually going to have to ram it down their throat.”

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33. “We used up all the money that had been borrowed and our mortgage group steadily grew bigger and bigger. And so during these three years, this is where he's doing the empirical testing. He's using the Edisonian process or experimentation process. And he just, I'm going to just bring you the highlights because this is one of my favorite things he says. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence. And then the end, you make it look like a quantum leap. And this might be the most important thing to remember in this entire book. While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it's all you need to succeed, the truth is that it would demoralize me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day in the coach house, exhausted and depressed, because that day's cyclone had not worked. There were times when I thought it would never work, that I would keep on.”

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34. “And over again. The fact that many times no one would give money, so he winds up borrowing and putting his, you know, risking the house that his family's in to chase after this dream. It's really wild. And the crazy thing is this is the start of the struggle, the start. It is now going to be 14 years from this point before Dyson, he has his actual vacuum cleaner that he owns of his design that he owns completely. And so he talks about this. This is going to be three years, the first three years of toiling with really nothing to show for it. He's trying to make prototypes, trying to prove that his idea, that his concept actually works. All the while I was making cyclones. For three years, I did this alone. I could not afford anyone to help me. When you start out, you just don't think it's going to take that long. Sam, his youngest kid, grew up and started walking, then talking all the while I made cyclones. Over the next three years,”

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35. “almost all I told you he built 5,127 prototypes. Almost all of them happen in this carriage house. And the first three years he has no money, so he's got to work alone at doing this. So he says before I went into production with the dual cyclone, I had built 5,127 prototypes. So far, you only know about one. Well, this little room in the coach house is where I built most of the other 5,000 and 26.”

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36. “Okay, so let me fast forward. Let me go ahead and start. I'm going to go to the start of the vacuum business. This is the first vacuum business. This is not Dyson. A lot of the stuff he's going to do here. He obviously uses when he builds his company. And he's just like, you know what? The ball barrow, he's kicked out of the company at this point. Right before he gets kicked out, he goes to the board. They're like, your invention's stupid. If it was possible to make a better vacuum cleaner, Hoover would have already done that. He hears that saying, oh, you know, Hoover would have done this if it was possible over and over again. And so he goes back to Jeremy Fry. And he starts in an old shed. They're called like carriage houses. I actually looked up what this was. For horse-drawn carriages, they're like a garage with no water, no electricity. That's where he's going to start his vacuum cleaner company. And this is he builds.”

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37. “During her sickness, my wife had been pregnant with Sam, who was born just before she died, and I will always remember her cuddling him. The death of my last parent was a terrible blow, and outweighed all my own personal disasters. And that is one of the powers of a biography of a book where you see the person as the whole person and not just their work. And I had to like pause when I got to that point because I went through this a few years ago. My mother died of breast cancer. And that line, he says, to be deprived and only heard mid fifties of seeing her children and grandchildren mature was very cruel. And that's how exactly I feel. My daughter was five and my niece was three when my mom died. It's completely devastating that she didn't get to see them grow up and they didn't get to know her.”

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38. “And this is why it's so important to read biographies and not business books, because you see the entire spectrum of the human experience, not just work. And just the lowest of low points in his career and his mother dies, this is his last surviving parent. And I'm going to read this section to you. And he says, I was very low at this point, but business traumas were put in their proper perspective by the sad death of my mother. She had been suffering from cancer of the liver, a disease who discovery whose discovery in her own body had seemed a bitter twist of fate after the death of my father from it twenty years before. To be deprived, and this is the part that just kills me right here. To be deprived in only her mid fifties of seeing her children and grandchildren mature was very cruel.”

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39. “It's always about maintaining control. One of the strains of this book is about control. If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, I have been trying to say, then you will be the better able to sell it. And then to go back to it and improve it. From there, you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness and to inspire others to give their very best efforts to developing it, and to remain true to it, and to see it through all the way to its optimum point, to total fruition if you like. This is more about the struggle where he's not doing well. He's getting kicked out of his own company. And then he's going through a terrible, terrible time in his business. And then his mother dies young from cancer.”

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40. “Growing slower than you wanted to. So, anyways, he actually offers them. And what's fascinating is he comes up, he realizes he doesn't know what the hell a cyclone is. And he's trying to fix a problem with the production line on the ball barrow that has to do with filtering dust in the manufacturing process that would actually have them close the assembly line every hour. And so they lose. And he's like, well, if we can fix this, the assembly line never has to close and we can produce more. And he winds up realizing another company that has a similar problem to him. It's like filtering out this dust area would use like a giant cyclone. And so he makes a giant cyclone for the ball barrow and then realizes at the same time, hey, wait a minute, why can't I use this for this crappy Hoover vacuum cleaner that I've been using in my house? So we'll get there in a little bit, but he's going to get kicked out. And this is where he arrives at the main idea and why he owns his entire company to this day.”

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41. “Sees a sad, had seen one of our ads and called up asking if he could see one. So James gives him, lets him demo the product. This guy loves it. So that's going to lead to a lot more sales. And this is something that James talks about over and over again. He's like, listen, actually, let me just read it to you. So he's talking about the editorial produced so many more sales than even his ads did. And he says the editorials are the very best way of convincing the public. One decent editorial counts for a thousand advertisements from that point on and throughout my struggles to launch the dual cyclone I made editorial the basis of all my thinking about publicity one thing he talks about over and over again it's like a lot easier to have people write about first you're like don't ever try to control what they write about your product right that's not a good idea and two”

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42. “And what do you know? The checks start rolling in. I was astonished. This was the same object that had been rejected completely by builders and retailers who had been able to see it in the flesh, and it was being bought by the members of the public who were sending off checks to accompany no one had ever heard of all on the strength of a little drawing in a tiny newspaper advertisement. It was fantastic, and the business began to gradually show a profit we were producing up to thirty a day, and from here on here on things snowballed. Now this is hilarious because, again, you have a profitable business, rather simple, and as it grows, they bring in quote unquote experts and business people and they destroy this business through sheer incompetence. I'm not there yet, but the business began gradually showing profit from here things snowballed. The gardening correspondent of the same newspaper actually”

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43. “Sell perfectly fine. Like, you don't need to improve it. And he's like, this is madness. Like, I have a better product. It's very obviously better than what's on the market. He's going to have the same thought when he does a vacuum cleaner. Like, why am I running into such resistance? And he just realizes, I'm just going to go direct to the customer. And when he starts going direct to the customer, he starts making sales. And so he says, it was an interest. This is such an important sentence in this book. And I'm going to pull it out for you. It was an interesting lesson in psychology, teaching me that the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. That is so important. And how does he learn that? Tries, you know, for a long time. They're not buying the better product. He's like, I'm desperate. What am I going to do? In desperation, I turn to the newspaper. So he talks about like, I'm just going to do a direct response ad. It's in the book, the picture of it. It's hilarious. Tiny little drawing just says what it does. Says, and I slapped down some direct response ads.”

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44. “Here I was kissing goodbye to the best job in the world, a $10,000 a year salary, and a company car driven only by my desire to do something on my own. I had seen that most of my efforts go to my efforts went to rewarding the shareholders, and I just thought it was time to start. I started doing it for myself. It was, in retrospect, a stupid decision. Not least because my mortgage was large and my two children were small. And so this desire, this realization that, hey, if I don't have any ownership, I'm not going to get to enjoy the fruits of my labor, right? The benefits are going to accrue to other people. This was like the main theme of that book, How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis. He took it to the extreme. He own 100% of all his companies. And he would not give out equity at all, no matter what. And that's podcast number 2129. If you haven't listened to it yet, terrible title of the book, but fantastic book. I mean, it's a cringy title. I think on the podcast.”

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45. “I'm not there yet. At the time, I guess I got to back up. So James is living in a farmhouse, which is wild. That's over 300 years old. And so they're doing a bunch of home improvement work when he's on his days off and when he's not working with Fry. And he found himself spending a lot of time using a wheelbarrow. And he comes up with this quote. He says, in all the thousands of years since its first conception, no one has ever stopped to say and said, I can design this thing better. I set my mind to possible improvements. So he realizes it's getting stuck. He's like, well, it shouldn't have a wheel. It should have a ball. And so this is one of his first inventions. It's called the ball barrow. And the same way he makes these mistakes on the sea truck, a lot of the mistakes he makes in building this company. What I'm trying to convey to you is like he had to go through all these experiences because it taught him. All these failures taught him how to do it the right way once he has his vacuum cleaner company. And so this is where we get into the James the Misfit because he's leaving the best, what he describes as the best job in the world to make a bit better.”

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46. “Constantness book. And as we proceeded, I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. So think about this. That's how you know it's a good idea, right? This Edisonian principle used by Thomas Edison, used by James Dyson, Jews by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, it's used by Jeremy Fry. And he gets to, this is a part I actually missed the first time, the first two times I read the book. This actually blew my mind. The fact that the mind-blowing part for me was your way is greater than the optimum way. which is like a really bizarre way to think, right? The root principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it. It didn't, this is the mind-blowing part, it didn't matter if it could be done better. Remember, difference for the sake of it and retention of total control. That's James' motto, his thesis, right? As long as it works and it is exciting, people will follow you.”

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47. “Said, I have an idea he would offer no advice, no more advice than to say, well, you know where the workshop is. Go and do it. And then I would say, but we'll need to weld this thing. And he would say, well, then get a welder and weld it. When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, say, hydrodynamics, he would say, the lake is down there. The Land Rover is over there. Grab a piece of wood down to the lake and tow it behind a boat and see what happens. It's so wild rereading these words because this is exactly how James works, right? Now this is not a modus operandi that I had encountered before. College had taught me to revere experts and expertise, for I ridiculed all that. As far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence, anything was possible. It was mind blowing, no research, no workings, no preliminary sketches. If it didn't work one way, he would just try another way until it did. This is the Edisonian principle, right? That he references.”

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48. “To work. And really when I thought about this when I'm reading this, this is an asymmetric bet. There's limited downside if it doesn't work out and unlimited potential if James turns out to be competent. And Dyson actually steals this idea. He says in the book, this is exactly what I now do at Dyson. I hire bright young people that are enthusiastic and I let them work, see what they can do. So it says this is Dyson describing Fry. Here was a man who was not interested in experts. He meets me. He thinks to himself, he's a bright kid. Let's employ him. And he does. He risks little with the possibility of gaining much. It is exactly what I do now at Dyson. I kind of just summarize that whole point. This attitude to employment extended to Fry's thinking and everything. Including engineering. Like Brunel, he did not, remember, he refers to Fry as a modern Brunel, right? Like Brunel, he did not win an idea came to him, sit down, and process it through pages of calculations. He didn't argue with anyone. He just went out and built it. When I came to him,”

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49. “Fry, I think it's about two decades older than James at this point, or he's always two decades older. He's obviously passed away now, unfortunately. But he says, like Brunel, he operated empirically. He had no regard for experts from other fields, and he was always teaching himself whatever he needs to know as he went along. And he was an engineer interested in building things that derive not only excellence from their design, but elegance as well. So this is where he's really learning how to work from Jeremy Fry. And a lot of things that he's learning as a young person here, he keeps for his whole career. And one of the fact that he repeats over and over again to the reader of this book, like, listen, you don't need to be an expert. You need intelligence and enthusiasm. And then another thing about Jeremy Fry and about James Dyson, there's no work about work. I don't want to sit in meetings and you write me memos. Just work. And then the very act of what Fry is doing here. Think about what Fry. So from Fry's perspective, he meets Dyson and he's thinking, well, okay, here's a bright kid. Why don't I try to put...”

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50. “Steve Jobs and Bill Hewitt and James Stason and Jeremy Fry. So it began my association with Jeremy Fry, a mentor as important to me as any of the engineering heroes of the past with the great advantage of being alive and keen to nurture such talents that I possess. So Jeremy winds up making money. He made his fortune inventing motorized valve actuators for pipelines, but he was involved in all kinds of businesses. He would start new businesses, and he winds up him and James are going to invent something called the C truck. And he puts James, who's just this young kid in charge of the whole business. And it was like the best learning experience of his life. And I'm going to talk to you a lot about that, about all the lessons that he learned that he did wrong in the C truck that he fixed when he did Dyson, which was really interesting. So he says, as a novice, anything, you were like a sponge looking to soak up mentor.”

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