it must have been sometime in 1979 that I first heard the words but James if there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner Hoover would have invented it that was just before I left the first company that had set up I gave up security income and respectability and persuaded an old friend to come in with me on a project that I was developing in
the garage behind my house for 12 years I labored under heavier and heavier debt I tried and failed to interest the major manufacturing companies in my product I fought terrible battles on both sides of the Atlantic to protect my vacuum cleaner and in 1992 13 years later in the cold wet English Countryside I went into production on my own as sole owner of
the machine I had conceived designed built and tested alone after thousands of prototypes and modifications and millions of tests I was in terrible debt but in love with the Cyclone by 2002 to one in four British households owned a Dyson my company was selling a million vacuum cleaners a year and turning over 300 million annually and my products had
achieved total worldwide sales of more than $10 billion finally late last year I fitted the last and most important piece of the jigsaw I entered the biggest most Innovative most exciting Market in the world I came to America this is is the story of how I did it that was an excerpt from the book that I just read for the fourth time and the one that I'm
going to talk to about today which is against the odds and autobiography by James Dyson if you ask me for like a top 10 list of my recommendations of books that I covered on the podcast you should read that is that top 10 list is always changing the number one spot never changes it is this book by far this book was actually published over 25 years ago
he has since written a second autobiography that came out a few years ago if you want to listen to that episode it is Episode 205 for the sequel James Lon is 50 when he publishes this book and he was 74 when he published his second autobiography and so I want to jump into the introduction we'll see right away the reason this is my number
one recommendation is because 90% of this book is about the struggle to build his company and so he says the funny thing about the story of the Dual dys and Cyclone is that I knew it all turn out like this from the beginning despite all the setbacks the lawsuit the cash crisises the ridicule the bad feelings and the doubt I always knew deep down
this is a book about the things that I have made the products the companies the decisions the enemies sometimes and the mistakes often I'm a creator of products a builder of things and my name appears on them that is how I make a living and they are what have made my name at least familiar in a million homes I lay no claim to the epat household word though
I Harbor a secret dream and imagine a Time years from today when Dyson replaces Hoover and becomes a verb out there on its own and detached from me to such an extent that most people will have no idea that there ever was a man called Dyson his person the reason now this is just an incredible story he fast forward to the present day he still owns
100% of Dyson it makes billions of dollars a year in Revenue makes him and his family billions of dollars a year every year in profit he's still working at it he's still inventing new things I think he's like 75 or 76 now but what I love about this in addition to the fact that he doesn't hide he it this shows you the difficulty and pierces the myth
of like the overnight success right but his personality jumps off the page so he's like you know I can't wait till Dyson replaces Hoover and he's just funny he's hilarious so he says I like the idea of a child in the 21st century telling his friends that he can't come out for for a little bit because his mom wants to dice in my room listen to this
and I wrote on the next page After I reread this how could you not love him long after my bones have crumbled and I am no more than a potential clogging irritant for lesser machines and then he goes into why he's taking time away from his company to write this book this is something he shares with a ton of entrepreneurs uh the fact that they are
writing they write their autobiographies for the benefit of future generations of entrepreneurs and he says right straight up I'm writing this book to help other inventors part of this has to do with all the correspondence I receive from other inventors and when I say inventors I do not mean men with workshops and Science degrees and Designs registered
at the patent office I mean Ordinary People who have had an idea believe me there's a lot of them they ask for advice on developing their ideas I cannot offer real advice to all these people individually so to an extent this book represents my attempt to enter a dialogue and answer the questions that are put to me so often I want to go back
to a couple words in that sentence I think is extremely important this is my attempt to enter a dialogue the way I describe when you sit down and whether you read this autobiography or any of the other autobiographies that you and I have talked about on this podcast what what you're doing at that time is you're having a one-sided conversation with one
of History's Greatest entrepreneurs it is one of the highest value ways to spend your time this is also an exposition of a business this is also why I love him too I absolutely love I love his stubbornness I love how difficulty is I love the fact that he knows exactly what he wants to do in life and he does not allow anybody
anybody to to convince him to deviate from that path this is also the exposition of a business philosophy which is very different from anything you might have encountered before the thing about this philosophy is it wasn't conceived by a businessman and it has worked it is said that to be an overnight success takes years of effort
so it is proved with me that's the entire book that is that is why it's so valuable you read this book and you'll think about it two years three years five years from now you're going through an unbelievable difficult part of building your business or your life like James didn't give up all right I got knocked down I'm going I'm getting back
up that's so important uh there were 20 years of debt four years ago I came out of the dark and now I had a company turning over hundreds of millions of dollars a year most bizarrely it has all happened rather without anybody noticing and then he tells us why he believes it's all happened it's the Excellence of the product really if you think about
his philosophy he's a very anti-business philosophy it's going to sound very familiar to what we covered last week on the Steve Jobs episode I would say this anti-business philosophy that J James Dyson has it reminds me of Steve Jobs it reminds me of Ivon shanard and it comes down to the fact that these guys are unbelievably obsessed with the quality
of the product that they're making it reminds me of what Henry Ford said one of my favorite quotes from the history of Entrepreneurship money comes naturally as result of service if you focus on making an excellent product and you maintain control you'll wind up with the money anyways Steve Jobs James Dyson Evon chinard these are anti-business
billionaires uh it it has all happened I really believe because of the intrinsic Excellence of the machine because it is a better vacuum cleaner than anything that has gone before and because it looks better than anything like it has ever looked and then he goes into the fact that he was very unlikely that he was the one that was going to do this
because the vacuum cleaner he goes through the history of the vacuum cleaner in the book I'm going to skip over a lot of that but this give you an idea the vacuum cleaner for a hundred years remained essentially unchanged if anyone was going to step in and shake this up a bit it was very unlikely to be me I wasn't even a qualified engineer
and yet that is how it turned out I own it exclusively and with it you might say the key to every household in the developed world and this is the first time he brings up two things that uh he repeats throughout the book first he thinks of himself primarily as a designer design is where his heart is right the second thing is get this idea
out of your mind that you need some kind of formal education to build wonderful products so he says the first thing to forget is any notion that you have to be a qualified engineer to make an impact on engineering I fiddled with wood for a while then I got into plastic and drifted into product design convinced that engineering was no more than a
state of mind and determined to develop the products I was Designing Technology technologically as well as visually I began to Moonlight as a Prof professional the look of the product the intangible style that sets one thing apart from another is still closest to my heart and then he speaks about this really important design principle he
uses his entire life that comes from the fact that James like every single other person that you and I talk about studied the great people and the great work that came before them and we see this here James was the one that introduced me to this guy with a crazy name right who was unbelievably welln and famous in his day just alive you know 150 years ago
whatever it was ismar Kingdom Brunell uh so the last time I covered this book it was episode 200 then reading about James affinity for Brunell I went and found a biography of Brunel and immediately read it so if you want to learn about the guy that James studied I made an episode 2011 where you can you can learn from actually you know what I'm going to read
I'm going to read one of my favorite quotes from that biography in one second so it says it it is only by remaining as close as possible to the pure function of the object that beauty can be achieved my greatest hero was always isard King Kingdom Brunell whose inverted catenary curve was crucial to the structure of his Bridges and gave
them the distinct stylistic power that still Wows onlookers today so you and I are going to talk about ismar Kingdom Bruno a few times today but I need to read this too because uh James when you if you read this book uh should already be obvious we're only a couple pages into the introduction he's unapologetically extreme he has unbelievably high standards for
excellence for the Excellence of the company he's building and the product he's building and Brunell was the same way and so listen to how this is a letter that was published in brunell's biography it was a letter he wrote to one of his employees that was not living up to his unbelievably high standards and so Brunell writes plain gentlemanly
language seems to have no effect upon you I must try stronger language and stronger measures you are a cursed lazy inattentive apathetic Vagabond and if you continue to neglect my instructions and to show such in infernal laziness I shall send you about your business I have frequently told you amongst other absurd untidy habits that that of making
drawings on the back of others was inconvenient by your cursed neglect of that you have again wasted more of my time than your whole life is worth so then James goes back to this idea on the importance of learning by doing my own success has been observing objects in daily use which it was always assumed could not be improved bilateral
thinking which he calls the edone approach so another one of his Heroes and somebody he talks about over and over again in this book is his admiration for Thomas Edison it is possible to arrive empirically at an advance anyone can become an expert in anything in 6 months after the idea there's plenty of time to learn the technology my first psyonic vacuum
cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape long before I understood how it worked and this is funny too because from that time from the first idea that first prototype until until he actually makes money on it it's going to be about 13 years the greatest lesson for aspiring inventors was yet to come the actual making of
money paper stuff in thick wads which they finally give to you because you've done something good and then we'll wrap up the introduction before we go into his early life and inside the end of the introduction is about a five sentence summary of the book which I'll get to in one second the best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a
high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes for that you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing ones that type of investment is long longterm and highrisk or at least it looks like a high-risk policy in the longer view it is not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's Financial Health as simply
following the herd this is the FI this is the beginning of what I consider a five sentence summary of james' thought process and what he's trying to basically teach you and I difference for the sake of it in everything because it must be better from the moment the idea strikes to the running of the business difference and retention of total
control that last sentence being the most important different to James and I think great advice to you and I difference and retention of total control this is not even a business book it is if anything a book against business against the principles that have filled the world with ugly useless objects and unhappy people we all want to make our Mark we all want to make
beautiful things and a little money we all have our own ideas about how to do it what follows just happens to be my way and then James has exactly one chapter on his early life essentially what he's telling us there is let's skip over all the fluff that you you find in a normal biography he says though writing an autobiography I am not so
terminally Afflicted as to think you want much of my parents' birth and all that kind of crap I have been a misfit through my professional life and that seems to have worked to my advantage Misfits are not born or made they make themselves and a stubborn opinionated child he's describing himself and a stubborn opinionated child desperate to
be different and to be right encounters only smaller refractions of the problems that he will always experience and he carries the weight of that dislocation forever so he chooses just to tell us a handful of stories from his childhood that'll really give you an indication of who he is and why he's doing what he does this is devastating uh on Episode
205 you know he's what 75 76 something like that writing that book his father is going to die from cancer when James is nine right so over 60 years later in his second autography he's still talking about the impact that his father's death had on him and so what I think was like from our vantage point it's a reminder to how important
we are to our kids and to take that job as a father and mother don't take that job lightly because long many decades after you're gone the impact that you have on your children will still be resonating listen to this my my father died of cancer in 1956 I was only nine at the time his death put me at a great disadvantage compared to the other boys it made me
feel like an underdog someone who was always going to have things taken away from him it made me feel that I was alone in this world I had no one to help me through my boyish problems and no one to cite his own useful experiences and as an example to me when I thought I might be troubled by something no one else had ever been through before life
became something I had to make up as I went along and I had to work everything out for myself I suppose it made me a fighter it also made me very competitive and so the great thing about rereading this book so much is not only I get to see my past highlights but I get also get to see my past notes that I have not thought about or maybe even
forgotten and so you get to this point where he's essentially saying hey I I'm going to learn from my dad's experience and I'm going to make a vow to myself to not wait to do work that I love and I'm going to read this to you let me read James's words and then I'll read the note that I left you know two years ago when I read this book at the time of
his death so his dad was a a teacher but what he really wanted to do was be an actor and to produce plays and so it says at the time of his death he had been about to join BBC television but his move to change careers came too late seeing him thed by death in that way having done something else for so long made me determine
that that should never happen to me I would not be dragged into something I didn't want to do I double underline that it's really important not only for the book to understand James but I think as a reminder to you and I I would not be dragged into something I did not want to do and so the note I left myself a few years ago when I read this book it
says it's from the Jim Cary quote that you can fail at what you don't want to do so you might as well take a chance of doing what you love and so just like James is using the example of his father he loved his father but he's like I don't want I want to work on things I want I love and that I want to do right time is which which is extremely
rational if you think about it because all that matters in life is how we spend our time that is literally the ingredient of life and you're going to spend a third of your life doing something you hate and you think you're going to get to the end of your life and think oh look back oh I had a great life no you just wasted a third of it maybe a
half of it considering that we're asleep for a third of it and so Jim carre is giving that speech where he learned he avoided the mistake that his dad made just like James avoided the mistake that his dad made in his life and so Jim Carrey says my father could have been a great comedian but he didn't believe that that was possible for him and so he
made a conservative Choice instead he got a safe job as an accountant and when I was 12 years old he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could to survive I learned many great lessons from my father not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don't want to do so you might as well take a chance on doing
what you love that's incredible incredible and something I don't want to forget so then James is telling us like what this chapter is all about and we see his personality jump off at the page which I absolutely love some people might feel that you know he's he's a bit arrogant I kind he says he has a line in here he goes sometimes I fancy The
supremely Arrogant genius and I was like yep I kind of feel the same way I should go through a few little EP epiphanies in my childhood that might have contributed to my story which is ultimately about how I took on the big boys at their own game and made them look very silly just by being true to myself and one of these stories is the fact
that James competed in running he ran a bunch of races uh when he was young and especially when he was a teenager and so there's two things that are going on here that he does his whole life is the F fact that he learned from great people that came before them he would read their books and like oh that's a good idea I'll apply it to to my career which
he's about to do here in his running career and he he did in his business career as well and then difference for the sake of it he says that over and over again and he realized oh difference is why I was winning at running difference is why he's going to be winning at business it's the same idea so he says I was 14 years old and went
into the race expecting to come in last but as the race went on all the other chaps started to slow down this puzzled me a bit because I had been jogging along thinking about this and that rather enjoying the running and I wasn't tired at all and suddenly the leading pack was only a few yards in front I gritted my teeth and ground out every
last bit of energy I had to battle past that before we got to the line This success delighted me to no end I was not doing very well at school and suddenly I had something in which I could kick people's asses there this is and this is how he figured it out there was no one he's talking about the death of his father again right there was no one to
teach me how to run there was no dad to tell me how great I was and I it became a very introverted kind of obsession with me herb Elliot was a big name at the time he's a runner so I read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and strengthen the leg muscles was to run up and down sand
dunes so he had been doing this he'd been training himself he's doing something he he found an idea in a book that none of his competitors knew about he starts doing it and he starts kicking their asses I would get up at 6:00 in the morning and run for hours uh he'd also do this so his work eth ethic is also extreme so he's running at 6:00 in
the morning then he'd go back out running uh at 10:00 at night and not reappear back home until after midnight out there alone on the dunes I got a terrific buzz from knowing that I was doing something that no one else was they were all tucked up in bed I knew that I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would do I was out there learning how to do
something and getting a visible result the act of running itself was not something I enjoyed the best you could say was that it was lonely and painful but as I started to win by greater and greater margins I did it more and more he is not talk he's Tech talking about running this is a metaphor for his career though listen to what he's going
to say I started went by greater and greater margin I did it more and more because I knew the reason for My Success was out there on the sand dunes I was doing something that no one else was doing apart from me and Herb no one knew they were all running around and around the track like a herd of sheep and not getting any quicker difference itself
was making me come in first and so this entire story this deade and a half of of struggle is him running into people that are incapable of thinking the equivalent of them running around in tracks is like they think in tracks too and he talks about this it's like they're incapable most people are incapable of having an understanding of anything that's
different from their current environment or their current business or the current idea and James is obviously able to step apart he like hey I have a better idea you guys just can't see it okay I'll just do it myself which is the main theme of the book in so many ways this taught me the most significant lessons of all my youth I was learning about the
physical and Psych ological strength that keeps you competitive I was learning about OBS obstinacy I was learning how to overcome nerves and I grew and as I grew more and more neurotic about being caught from behind I trained harder to stay in front to this day it is the fear of failure more than anything else which makes me keep working at
success okay so we're going to fast forward to when he is an art school he has this idea which I love that you should have a personal Pantheon and so his personal Pantheon uh when he was a college student was is Buck Mr Fuller and isombard Kingdom Brunell and we'll go into what he learned from them and how he like took ideas that they learned
in their career and applied it to his own so he says I wanted to focus my enthusiasm for Designing things on the real rapidly changing World outside so one of his he talks about a handful of people uh mentors teachers that played an unbelievably important role in his development and one of them was his Structural Engineering teacher this guy
named Anthony hunt and why is that important because Anthony Hunt is going to tell James about Buckminster Fuller then came Buckminster Fuller Anthony hunt off often mentioned this American engineer who I was sure I had never encountered I found myself a copy of the book The D maxian World of buck Mister Fuller by Robert Mars Buck Mister had
been described as one of the Century's greatest dreamers an epicat which I first took to be critical so they thought he was they were insulting him and then you realize oh no but I could not have been more wrong Fuller dreamt because his vision was a world was of a world that did not yet exist the value of dreaming was the first thing that I
learned from him here's a second thing that's going to Dyson was just telling us in the introduction Fuller had no Technical Training at all Fuller was an Ardent admirer of Henry Ford who also had no formal Technical Training see how these ideas are echoing like the he's describing Fuller he's describing Ford but he's really describing himself few
pages later that continues he's describing Fuller and so what I wrote in the margin is who does this sound like mocked in the early stages of his career Fuller knew full well that the only way to make a genuine breakthrough was to pursue a vision with single-minded determination in the face of criticism that is James Dyson all day long if you
try to change things then you upset the upset the establishment when James goes and tries to sell at first he's like hey I invented this let me license it it makes sense go and license it to to the existing vacuum cleaner manufacturers and then he runs into an unchangeable aspect of human nature you invented a vacuum cleaner that doesn't need bags
and you're trying to sell it to a company that makes $500 million a year selling bags what do you think is that company's response is says if you try to change things and you upset the establishments which is why invention and vilification have always gone hand inand I saw then that to do what Fuller did to make real progress in the way we
live it was not enough to be just a designer you had to be an engineer as well but remember this entire thing is about having a personal Pantheon right so we lead he he leads us into his second and most important person on that personal Pantheon uh while Buck Minster Fuller inspired my first idealistic design dreams he takes ultimately second
place in the pantheon of my personal Gods this is this is so uh this is these two paragraphs uh these three paragraphs really uh it's an indic of you know the why behind why Founders podcasts exist but also is what convinced me to read James you know uh sold me on reading about Brunell and how could you not listen to what he says about him uh
isard Kingdom Brunell was unable to think small and nothing was a barrier to him the mere fact that something had never been done before presented to Brunell no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible he was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless AG while I could never lay claim to the
genius of a man like that I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was and this is the sentence that made me jot down like this is the why right like we the why behind what you and I getting together every week and having these conversations we're sitting at the feet of Masters and learning from them and what happens is like these ideas get
into your brain like we're brain we're positively brainwashing ourselves and then like they're just going to fire you on like it is inevitable that you and I are going to run into all kinds of problems roadblocks whatever even when things are going really really well eventually something's going to happen over a long term right and just like a
young James Dyson it's like man knowing brunell's story fired me up it gave me the fuel to persevere through a decade and a half of terrible like just straight Agony I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was and at times in my life when I've encountered difficulty in self doubt I have looked to his example to fire me on when I was
deeply in debt and the Dual Cyclone looked as if it might remain a drawing board dream I thought of his father Mark brunau who spent time in debtor's prison and seemed destined for failure when I have considered relinquishing total control remember his whole thing about the book I'm going to pause right here because it's really important difference
and retention of Total Control he's going to tell you it's like you can make a product you can sell it you can manufacture yourself just control it you don't need other people's opinions in many cases he you know he's not at all polite about the opinions that he was getting for the decade of half his struggle he's like these people are
idiots and I'm going to prove that they're idiots so he says um when I have considered relinquishing total control and taking a backseat Consultants role and there have been fantastic buyout offers I have remembered how Brunell never accepted such a position in his life I have tried in my own way to draw on brunell's dream of applying emerging
technology in ways as yet unimed ined he was never afraid to be different or shocking he never shered the battles with the moneymen and he had to overcome the most incredible resistance to his ideas when he applied the system of the screw propeller to a transatlantic steamship he actually filled a he actually filled a boat with people and sent them across the sea I have
asked people only to push my inventions around not get inside of them and try to float and so I have sought out a originality for its own sake and modified it into a philosophy which demands difference from what exists I have modified it into a philosophy which demands difference from what it exists or what Jeff Bezos to you and I and his
very last shareholder as Amazon CEO differentiation is survival demand difference from what exists and I have told myself when people try to make me modify my ideas that the Great Western Railway which is what brell was building that the Great Western Railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man pursued with dogged
determination that was nothing less than Obsession throughout my story I will try to return to Brunell and to other designers and Engineers to show how identifying with them and seeing par parallels with every stage of my own life enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has what is the value to James's career
in discovering Buckminster and Brunell and building a relationship with Jeremiah Fri we're about to get to billions that is not hyperbolic that those ideas the fact that it that this idea that inserted into his mind that caused him not to quit and so if this idea or just like him discovering these ideas and using this as fuel and he
doesn't hide the struggle like he's there's going to be Parts in this this book where he is laying in bed crying his eyes out thinking that he is destined to be a failure what is the value what did he just say throughout my story I will return to Brunell to show how identifying with them and seeing parallels with every stage of my own
life enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it'll all turn out the way it has I am led to the belief that in the case for inventors for vision one might equally as well read stubbornness and so at any stage of my story where I talk of my vision and arrogance seems to have gotten the better of me remember that I am only
celebrating I celebrating only my stubbornness I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule and then he ties us back to his father's death my father was dead external figures had to count for a father it is why a man called Jeremiah fry became so important to me if I was to push further there had to be new fathers there had to be book Mr Fuller and Brunell and
Fry and so during college he's doing a bunch of design work and he realizes like listen I don't want to put icing on other people's Creations I want to make things so he's trying to make this thing called a triod desic dome or Triad desc theater don't worry about this it's when he's trying to pitch people on this that the other people he's trying to pitch
actually introduce him to Jeremiah fry which is going to be one of I would say his main mentor and a friend and in the the biography that uh James writes when he's an older man he talks about fry over and over again that you know ideas that he learned from fry when James was you know 22 21 he's still using 50 years later and he sees that you know Jeremiah
is an inventor but he's also like getting his handser he's in there doing the actual work and he says in those days multi-millionaire businessmen simply did not wear jeans and pull their own roofs up with ropes it just it just wasn't done and so I was impressed I found a modern-day Brunell so he winds up cold calling he initially he's like
hey maybe this guy will fund this project I don't have any funding and then what BR what Fry's going to do is actually give him a job which is even more important so he calls him up says hey you know I'm James it's going to sound a lot like when a young Steve Jobs called uh bill huet you know I'm a young enthusiastic person I like your products
I like the way you think I'd like to get to you know like to come talk to you so Jeremiah fry invites James Dyson who he's never met to his house and they just have like this long conversation over dinner and that one decision changes the entire trajectory of of James's uh James's life because he's 21 when he's doing this so my association
with German R fry a mentor as important to me as any of those engineering Heroes of the past with the great advantage of being alive and Keen to nurture such talents that I possessed I was really very much in need of a teacher outside of college and the reason he talks about that is because in the design school they're all he says they were all being
encouraged to produce something essentially the same but with an odd little variation and then they you know they start doing this for maybe like a lamp and then they try to do it for like a washing machine he's like this is the very antithesis of Buck Mr Fuller and ismar Kingdom Brunell I don't want to do this and he realized oh fry is like a
fry is the way I can access people doing something different and so he undoubtedly learns more from Jeremiah fry than he did in all of his formal education as a novice anything you like a sponge looking to soak up mentors and models and in Fry I had an ocean of experience to absorb like Brunell he operated empirically he had no regard
for experts from other fields always teaching himself whatever he needed to know as he went along and he was an engineer interested in building things that not only Excellence from their design but Elegance as well and so then he realized even though fry is older than him that they both want to do like they're both want to do the same things
in life I wanted to change the world by building extraordinary things here was a man who was not interested in experts he meets me he thinks to himself here's a bright kid let's employ him and he does he risk little with the possibility of gaining much it is exactly it is exactly what I now do at Dyson this attitude to employment extended to thinking in
everything including engineering like Brunell he did not when an idea came to him sit down and process it through pages of calculations he didn't argue it through with anyone he just went out and built it when I came to him and I said hey I have an idea he would offer no more advice than to say you know where the workshop is go and do it but we'll
need to go weld this thing I would I would protest 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 L Rover is over there take a plank of wood down to the lake tow it behind the boat and look what happens now this was not a modus operandi that I had
encountered before College had taught me to rever experts and expertise fry ridiculed all that as follows as far as he was concerned with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible it was mindblowing no research no workings no preliminary sketches if it didn't work one way he would just try it another way until it did and as we
proceeded I could see that we were getting along extremely quickly the root principle was to do things your way it didn't matter how other people did it it didn't matter if it could be done better as long as it works and it is exciting people will follow you I'm going to pause right there because this is something that comes up in a lot of
conversations with entrepreneurs they're looking for like the right way and it this is so important the root principle was to do things your way the person ity of the founders is embedded into the company lean into that apple with Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives the root principle was to do things your way as long as it works and is and it is exciting people will follow
you so James is still in college when he's doing all this and he he this is very interesting something that that people there's no really you know right answer to this either something people have been struggling with for you know it comes up in in these books over last two centuries is you know I was the son of a poor man now I'm rich and you know
my son is the the son of a rich man kind of thing and he's talking about the difference between his work ethic I mean obviously you're not going to Own 100% of a multi multi multi-billion dollar company without being driven and disciplined and ambitious right but we see that these traits James had these traits when he was a young man and he's
just talking about you know he worked all the time so therefore he kind of missed the the normal college experience and his son got a chance to to actually like he basically had to live that experience vicariously to his son I had been by no means your typical 60s Wild Child I didn't smoke and I didn't do drugs and I drank very very little I was
pretty well organized and I was disciplined and I worked late at night and on holidays maybe it was my own unusual home life or the lack of money that made me behave so deadly seriously during my own education maybe it was just a desire to be rich and successful that motivated me for for I was motivated in an almost devilish way compared to the other
students and so he says I regret that now in a way I saw my own son having a whale of time at college going out clubbing drinking never seeing daylight and doing all of his work at the last minute it is perhaps the only thing that I actually regret not not having conformed with and so the great thing about this autobiography is the fact
that it's filled not only his life story but he's got just like he'll randomly hit you with hey this is a good idea to learn for my career and there's there's no fluff on it so there's this idea that he's he's working on with Jeremy fry there's there's a bunch of inventions that he has before uh the cyclonic vacuum cleaner and so you can actually
take a look at these they're available online uh so like James Dyson SE truck James Dyson ballbarrow if you want to see what what he's been making or what he was making but I want to skip over part of that like the actual like story and just get to some of the crucial business lessons that he repeats over and over again and then if you want more
detail you can obviously read the book and so he says first don't try to sell a half finished product um they kind of skimped on the beginning of the sea truck which looks kind of like this like flatbed like lowprofile boat and he's like we need to put a cabin on this thing and they wouldn't invest the money in in putting on a cabin until he sells
a bunch but he can't sell a bunch because he doesn't have a cabin and so he has he's like it just took him a lot longer to get where he's going he's like you should have just if you just put the cabin on like don't stint on investment at the very beginning stages of your your your product especially if it's going to help sell more of that product
and so I'm just cutting right to the the punchline here I learned then one of the most crucial business lessons of my life to stint on investment in the early stages to try is to try to sell a half-finished product is to Doom you from the start of any project you embark on so don't stint un investment in early stages once he finally convinces them to
put on the cabin which he's been telling for a long time his sales wind up taking off it's like think about how much missed opportunity we had trying to sell these things and use that money and like just essentially don't sell a half- finished product the second crucial business lesson that he uses later on in his career is that
people do not want allpurpose they want high-tech specificity so you could make the sea truck or the seat truck for all kinds of things people use them in war people use them in construction people use them all kinds of stuff and so this is the mistake he he made my big mistake had been presenting the same craft to each customer and telling him this can
be adapted to suit your needs if someone wanted a diving boat I would explain that it could be fitted with compressors and heated and have a diesel engine and all that other stuff if an oil company wanted a crew bus I would tell them that suitable seating and a faster engine could be fitted etc etc to the military I said we could bulletproof it on and on
and so this is the problem I convince not a single one of them people do not want allpurpose they want high-tech specificity so out with the universal modular craft he was pitching a universal modular craft and his sales reflected this the that was not a successful path and then he changes if he's talking to a dive boat he doesn't
even talk about all the other stuff he could do he says listen I have just a boat for you my dear sir a purpose built diving boat third lesson from this figure out what is the main value proposition you're offering to the customer and only talk about that just because your thing can do four or five different things just say what's the
most important thing and only focus on that you simply cannot mix me your messages when selling something new a consumer can barely handle one great idea let alone two or even several so his dual Cyclone uh vacuum cleaner right it's actually works phenomenally well as a dry dry cleaning tool he never mention that and this is why how could I expect
the public to believe that this was not only the best vacuum cleaner ever made but also something completely different number four learn to sell your own product he did this with the seat truck he did this with the ballbarrow and he had phenomenal success this is the only thing that kept uh him from giving up on on the vacuum cleaner is learn you have
you have to learn to sell your own product you were in the best position to tell other people its value so he says I set up around the world to to start selling it properly it he's talking about the seat truck that he designed right the designer of the product knows this product better than anybody else I set off around the world to start
selling it properly there's let me pause here again who did the uh when Steve Jobs returned to Apple who gave who did the presentations for new products very similar idea to what James is telling us here I set off around the world to start selling it properly it was time to it was time spent away from designing but it was to teach me that only by trying
to sell the thing you have made yourself by dealing with consumer problems and the product's failings as they arise you really come to understand what you have done to bond with your invention and to improve it only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to fo it on others and demand a heavy price with all of his heart and so he does
this for many years but this is where he's like okay I want to switch from employee to entrepreneur I want to be my own man he winds up selling over 250 of these sea trucks as many many millions of dollars in Revenue they generated but he's like there's just I have to do this there was an itch an itch that just had to be scratched four years out of
college four years selling for RoR which is Jeremy Fri company four years waiting for something that could be mine and so he discovers what that product is and the first company he's going to start by using by something that he uses over and over again his life that you just If You observe the products that you already use then just think about how to make
them better and so he's going to do this with the wheelbarrow and obviously he does it with the vacuum he lives in like this farmhouse in like the English Countryside and so he's on the weekends he's doing like a bunch of like gardening and and moving and renovation work and so he kept having to spend a lot of time he says in the company of a
wheelbarrow and he said that he discovered it's a pretty crummy piece of equipment and it was riddled with thought with faults and so there's like a list in the book and like he writes out everything he doesn't like about it he's like all right well I'll just go about changing all the things I don't like about it other people probably
don't like that either and then I can make it even look better because no one's really changed it for over 100 years and so he makes this thing called the ball Barrow which actually it's amazing I think he made this in the 1970s and it still looks great like you can look at pictures he like oh you could I don't know if they sell s to
this this day but it looks like a product that we could use today but one of the interesting things is he thought he had the best job in the world he loved Jeremiah fry who's learning a lot and he's like I'm leaving the best job in the this is how you know he's an entrepreneur he has to be right uh he's like I'm leaving the best job in the
world so I can make a better wheelbarrow so says here I was kissing goodbye to the best job in the world a $10,000 a year salary a company car only because I was driven by a desire to do something on my own I had seen most of my efforts go to rewarding the shareholders and had just thought it was time 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 I still Marvel at dedas this is his wife who is absolutely unbelievably supportive you can't put a price on a supportive spouse right I was still I have friends that have unfortunately the opposite of this and it's just it seems like hell to me I
still Marvel at dedra's encouragement of me at that time leaving Jeremy the man who had given me my first chance at such a young age and had been such a good friend to me ever since but basically what he's telling us is that he's not leaving because he was upset with him like he and he even says like I feel almost like he's going to take this like
I'm betraying him and he's like I don't like I'm so grateful for him they want up being Partners later on too I felt very grateful to him for all he had taught me and felt deep down as if I might be betraying him but I had been working under a great man for a long time now and it was time for me to be my own Man At Last Jeremy was shocked at
first quite understandably and then to his undying credit offered to back me financially I thanked him but declined and so it's this idea is like I have to try this on my own I have to be my own man he realizes that's a mistake because it's not like Jery's going to tell him what to do he just wanted to help him financially so he's going to eventually
go back and they wind up being Partners on like a vacuum cleaner before the Cyclone but really I want you to understand James's personality because I think like this is something that you and I could adopt in our life he just you tell him something can't be done he's like woo thanks for adding that fuel to my fire I'm going to show you it can't be
done so people are saying like he's trying to get people to manufacture his product and they're like can't be done the ball is not feasible you cannot mold plastic into a complete sphere this only strengthened my resolve and made me determined to prove them wrong and so the reason he tells us all these stories is because most of it is him making a
mistake and learning oops I'm not going to do that next time he tries to sell the ball Barrow to stores and all the store buyers say no and so then he realizes like oh like okay I have no other choice let me just go direct to customers and what happens and so he says it was an interesting lesson in Psychology teaching me that the
entrenched professionals is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer so in the book it shows he essentially just puts a small little ad in a newspaper you you can see the ad on the page that I'm holding my hand and starts making money so it says in desperation I turned to the newspapers and slapped down some direct response
ads and you know what the check started 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 up by members of the public who were sending off checks to a company no one had ever heard of on the strength of a little drawing in a tiny
newspaper advertisement it was fantastic FC the business began gradually to show a profit and we were reducing up to 30 a day from here on things snowballed and then this is the first time he repeats something over and over again in the book that it's his belief that one great editorial or even one average editorial is worth a thousand ads and so it says
the gardening correspondent of the Sunday Times newspaper had seen one of our ads and called me up asking if he could see one I drove to his home and he loved it so he writes this article and the article comes out and the sales just Skyrocket it is also the very best way of convincing the public one decent editorial counts for a thousand
advertisements this is something he's going to talk about with the vacuum cleaner as well this is what again the book is just excellent because you see him learning he's like oh that's a good idea I'm G to and then he used that idea for decade after decade after decade from that point on and throughout my struggles to launch the Dual Cyclone I
made editorial the basis of all my thinking about publicity and so let's go back to this idea that Warren Buffett and Charlie Monger talk about it's like hey you have a good company and you're going to make a decision that actually your competitor is not necessarily you have to work worry about it's like your own self like you're going to mess up
something good and you know James is a young person he's inexperienced he he has Partners on this including his brother-in-law you know they raised money so he's got all these like people these advisers and board of directors all trying to tell them like what to do and none of them know anything and so they're Mak they're selling 45,000 ball
bearrows a year 45,000 and the product never even existed a few years before and they're going direct and this idea is like a direct relationship with the customer is the Holy Grail do not abandon it and what happens is the board of director like okay now we're a serious company we're selling tens of thousands of these things right we need to bring in a sales
manager and the sales manager is dumber than a bucket full of rocks and a a liar and goingon to betray him too uh the board felt that we should take on a sales manager the sales manager name was John Brandon he turned out to be a complete bastard I love love how James talks about talks about this in following his advice to abandon direct
selling and supply shops via wholesalers we to lose that contact with the con consumer that was the basis of our success as with the Dual Cyclone so with the ballbarrow see what I mean he's constantly you see him learning these ideas like okay he's smart enough to to uh to not make the same mistake twice uh the establishment of a client base by
word of mouth is what gives a product longevity and integrity a sort of wise man building his house on Rock principle and so the board hires this guy the guy gives terrible advice James I think uh they they're going to have to keep raising more and more money so his uh he gets deluded so not only does his ownership get deluded but his influence
gets deluded he's going to wind up getting kicked out of his own company we were only making half as much money now on each sale because we had to incorporate a margin for wholesalers the business became cash negative good gracious and we started to find ourselves sinking into debt what was the response of the board to expand I love
what uh Warren Buffett says in his shareholder letters that his contribution to the performance of his subsidiaries that are run all run by fantastic manager is that of Applause uh and he says because you just see so much poor thinking and poor execution in business that once you have somebody truly great you just get the hell out of
their way I think he says something like you know you don't tell Babe Ruth how to hold a bat and you just see this it's like these people should not be running the company and so they're now they're losing money so let's expand and the problem is they're doing it on borrowed money this is I I skipped over this part uh they're borrowing money uh
at this point in history you know what they're paying their interest rate they're paying 25% imagine first of all you got now you got a negative you're losing money on every sale then you expand then when you have to expand you have to pay 25% interest how how do you think this is going to turn out how do these people not know this right we had to sell off
to keep going we had to sell off a third of the company I I was now only a minor uh shareholder I was becoming a more and more isolated voice despite being the ventor of our product and the only one who had any real relationship with it and so the story of the blowing up of this this at one time successful company is really important because it gives him
the main idea for his career the main idea for the book The Main Idea is always to maintain 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 what he's able to do with Dyson the company he's at now is
called Kirk Dyson and he says this did not happen at Kirk Dyson The Story So Far if I have told it right has been about my dream of doing something on my own how I gradually had to let other others in and how they occasionally let me down and so as soon as things starts turning South the guy that told him to do this to begin with the the guy the
boor hired right betrays them winds up leaving for one of their competitors this came as a bit of a blow to the board who were shocked at Brandon's disloyalty I wasn't by the way for I suspected he was a rat all along we talk about the idea that entrepreneurs usually only experience two two uh emotions Euphoria and Terror this book
is all almost all Terror so he's going through a terrible time in his business he's losing control he's about to be kicked out of his business and then his mom dies from cancer young his father died from cancer young now the same thing of uh about two decades later he's going through with his mother this is devastating I was very low at this point
but business traumas were put in perspective by the sad death of my mother she had been suffering from incurable cancer of the liver a disease whose Discovery in her own body had seemed a bitter twist of fate after the death of my father from it 20 years before to be deprived in only her mid-50s of seeing her children and grandchildren mature was very cruel that
that when I read it again even though I know this happened and I had read this part multiple times this happened to my mom too and what he's talking about here is that's the the part that kills you it's this part where like my daughter was really young when she died my son was born after and I remember her like talking about I can't wait till I'm in
my 80s I have gray hair I'm get get to watch my grandchild grow up in this line this is like books hit you so hard like to be deprived in only her mid-50s of seeing her children and grandchildren mature was very cruel that's the way I think about it's so cruel during her sickness Dedra 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 parents was a terrible blow and outweighed all all my own personal disasters and then right after this he gets kicked out of his own company and this is not only like and then it destroys check your your mom your dad's dad your mom just passed away your business partner is your
brother-in-law and he's it's going to destroy his relationship for a decade with his sister I weep to recall it I had in my naked naive assigned the patent for the thing meaning the ball barar to the company rather than to myself I had no rights at all to the invention I had created and labored over for so long it was not a mistake I was ever to make
again uh it wasn't the fact that he talking about just being deeply depressed it wasn't the fact that I felt that I'd been pickpocketed by my friends and family it was a bigger loss than that to lose my advention was like losing a limb no it was worse than that it was like giving birth and then losing the child and I was completely shattered
by it the effect of my relationship with my sister was sad she and her husband claimed they couldn't talk to me for legal reasons but I didn't even try to put up a fight I hated legal actions back then and once they had thrown me out of the business I had built I wanted only to turn my back on them and get on get on with my life I didn't speak to my
sister for 10 years and I suppose it only goes to prove the old cliche that you shouldn't go into business with relatives and so that experience was not all bad because then he goes back in time he just been kicked out of the company but there's two things that happened while he was still at the ball bear company that are going to actually
lay the foundation for this extremely valuable company that he's going to build over the next what is that 40 Years of his life and so he just talks about how annoying it was that he's pushing around this Hoover junor vacuum and really the way I think about James is like he's fueled by this like righteous indignation if he's using your
product and it just sucks he feels like just like with the wheelbarrow and then the vacuum he's like I could do better than this I'm going to do better you're selling millions of these things and they suck like how dare you and he says like it had been annoying me for years it just seemed to push the dirt and dust around the house and I came to think of
it as even more expensive broom than a cheap vacuum cleaner and he gets matter and matter and matter I was Furious I felt the same anger towards the vacuum cleaner as I had towards the wheelbarrow we were victims of a gigantic con by the manufacturers they fit these bags and the Bloody things clog up immediately and had done so for a hundred years and
so that's what he's discovering when he's like doing work around his house when they're manufacturing the ball Barrow they have this issue because they have to do their they um they have to do powder coating for the ball barrel and it just throws up all this like dust everywhere they can't eliminate fast enough they have to actually stop the
conveyor belt and close down the entire production line to clean this out and so they're trying to figure out like how do you deal with this he he contacts other people and they're like oh you need to be using you're doing it the wrong way you should actually be using a big industrial cyclone and James is like what the hell is a cyclone it turned out
to be a 30ft high cone that spun the dust out of the air by centrifugal force and so he winds up welding up a 30ft cyclone this was the the end result production just went on and on with no no stoppages until the end of the day and so then he's driving home and he realizes wait that's the same concept that I can just apply this lesson I just
learned at my factory and apply it to my crappy vacuum so remember at the beginning of the book where he's like listen when I made my first prototype it was made out of like cereal packets and cardboard this is the start of what's going to turn into the Dyson Empire and so we see his righteous indignation is actually used as fuel that same night a
cold Bleak one in October 1978 I leapt into my car and dashed home through the storm thinking of nothing but bagless vacuum cleaners in my kitchen I said about the old Hoover Jr with the Zeal of a revolutionary I tore off the bag and tried a little vacuuming just to establish that the mechanics were all in order my next move was to lay my hands
on a quality of cardboard and model up a miniature version of the 30ft thing the 30ft Cyclone that I had been building at the factory I then plugged the vacuum cleaner in and flicked the switch expecting the worst but there were no explosions no blast of Dusty air into the kitchen I just pushed it around the house and it seemed to be perfectly
happy after a few minutes I disconnected my cardboard Construction and peered in to find a deposit of dust in the bottom of the cone I vacuumed the whole house from top to bottom and then once more for luck occasionally disconnecting the Cyclone to empty it and check that it was not that it was all not a dream I was the only man in the world with a
bagless vacuum cleaner he is 31 years old 31 when the idea strikes and he has his first prototype it is 14 years from this point in his life till he's able to manufacture a vacuum cleaner up to his standards that he owns completely and so now begins James trying to figure out what way to do this now here's the crazy thing about how
many different iterations he goes through Company ownership should we manufactur himself should we license it the first idea he has remember we've just gone back in the story the first idea he has he offers the cyclonic vacuum idea to the ballbarrow board as a way to turn the company around they don't believe in it and they actually
tell him that it's a stupid idea and so he says I was stopped by one of them with the words I was to hear over and over and over again for the next 10 years but James he said smugly your idea can't be any good if there was a better kind of vacuum cleaner Hoover would have invented it the refusals of the board then turned to outright hostility look
James you are not to develop this any further it is a stupid idea and so shortly thereafter he gets kicked out of the company and this is going to be the start of the vacuum cleaner business I was despondent why could no one see the potential of my cyclonic dream I set out to work in a garage that had been used as a garden shed behind our house the
garage had no water no heating no phone no gas or electricity I was determined that here I would make the damn thing myself but he's got no money and so he's like okay what do I do and then then he finally rectifies the mistake he made earlier he goes the obvious man was Jeremy fry because what he's talking about is like listen there's going to be
no like I don't even know if I can build this thing yet so like I need somebody that understands what I'm about to go through and not say Hey you have to make money next week next month you know actually be years from now and says the obvious man was Jeremy fry he was someone who knew that things don't always work out immediately that
Innovation takes time and persistence I was fed up with the type of non-executive directors I had been with at Kirk Dyson right so she's like let me just go back to a Founder that actually thinks like a Founder not these other guys uh with $25,000 from Jeremy and $25,000 from me the rest was borrowed from my home as security so he puts up
his house multiple times throughout this this next 14 years he's constantly like putting basally betting everything he has that this is going to work out so they set up this company it's called the air power vacuum cleaner company I was in the vacuum cleaner business at last and this is one line that the very very first time I read this book which is
over five I don't know five years ago now that I have never ever forgotten he just described where he's working right I'm in this little garage we got no water no heating no phone no gas or electricity before I went into production with the Dual Cyclone I had built 5,127 prototypes so far you only know about one well well this little room is
where I built most of the other 5,126 prototypes this is all struggle he's going to go through three years of toiling with nothing to show for it day in and day out I made Cyclones I would have breakfast with Dedra at halfast 7 take Jacob and Emily to school and then at 9:00 a.m. I'd go to the Coach House which is the garage I would break for a
half hour at lunchtime and see a bit of Sam Sam is his youngest child and then go back to work until halfast 6 all the while I was making Cyclones for 3 years I did this alone I could not afford to pay anybody to help me when you start out you just don't think it's going to take that long Sam grew up and started walking and then talking and all the
while I made Cyclones over the next 3 years we used up all the money that had been borrowed and our mortgage grew steadily bigger and bigger and bigger and again one of my favorite lines in the book there is no such thing as a Quantum Leap there is only dogged persistence and in the end you make it look like a Quantum Leap while it is easy for me to celebrate my doggedness
now this is one of the most important paragraphs in the book while it is easy for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it is all you need to succeed the truth is that it was that it demoralized me terribly I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day exhausted and depressed because that day Cyclone had
not worked there were times when I thought it would never work that I would just keep on making Cyclone after Cyclone never going forward never going backwards until I died this was 3 years of constant work making at least one model a day for over a thousand days I was exhausted and the company had not made any money the money problems
were getting more and more serious every day and I had to make this project work or we would go under I was pretty driven and a combination of fear and hope had kept me at my task so after this takes over a thousand days right and so they have this idea they finally get to a point where okay I have a working prototype but it's been 3 years we have
no money originally they set out to manufacture it itself like well to set up a factory to hire all these people it's going to be too expensive and so they do something that is going to wind up being a mistake but he's going to try to license it to other people James is very clear in his personality he does not want to rely on anybody but himself
he wants complete and absolute control I think a lot of entrepreneurs like this and so unfortunately they're going to try to relinquish control and say okay we have an idea you manufacture it and you just pay us a royalty that seems pretty straightforward and it's just another few years of Hell Jeremiah fry and I decided that rather than
attempting to produce the thing ourselves we should try to sell a license for its production and so we go from 3 years of toiling all alone in this garage behind his house to two years of toiling and having these meetings are just a gigantic waste of time and he has meetings all over the world uh and so it was that over the next 2 years until 1983 I approached
every manufacturer you could think of it was really extraordinary and quite unexpected every single one of them seemed to miss the point that here was an innovation of real benefit to the consumer a massive leap from a crappy old carpet sucker to a cleaner of total efficiency and undiminishing power for each manufacturer in turn it represented
an opportunity to bring out a new product with a major technical advantage over their competitors in those two years that I plotted around 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 and so it's just page after page after page of Agony this is his State of
Affairs right before he signs his first license agreement he is 38 remember when he when he buil his first prototype he was 31 this is he's 38 right before he signs his first license lcy agreement uh in the early weeks of 1985 I was broke hungry and depressed the Outlook was very dreary my dogness and self-belief in the absence of any real real evidence
that they were Justified was beginning to look more and more like insanity and so the book just details you know even the people that would sign agreement they would screw him over they'd be in lawsuits they would string him along it was just absolute torture and yet he didn't give up and then the Japan there's this Japanese company that
loves it right they get the concept right away and the deal is done within just a few weeks so literally we could be arguing with somebody about a clause and their attorney's going at at it for like six months Mon and these people just get it done in a few weeks they thought the machine was wonderful unlike anyone I had met so far they understood
exactly what I was trying to do and knew exactly how to sell it and within three weeks we had signed a deal in which I was to get an upfront fee so the license agreements he makes the point that there is no such thing as a standard license agreement you can like it's an you should look at it like an act of creativity and so for him because he has
no money the important part is like I need large upfront like an upfront fam and he says he knew he knew of stories where large compan compes would guarantee like a very fat royalty on the on the back end and they would just wait and drain individual innovators so they essentially like sell off their agree to like sign over their invention to them
because they just essentially just bled them dry so he's like I'm never doing that they he gets $35,000 upfront and then 10% royalty and a minimum guarantee every year of making at least $60,000 from this one one license agreement and so he's happy but he's also like frazzled not sleeping he's traveling all over world he has to go and essentially
like live in Japan for weeks at a time from the very beginning of 1985 the GeForce which is what this company's going to call his invention was all consuming it had to be I had lost uh these two other licenses I was heavily in debt and I had to survive my nerves were fragile enough to be susceptible to such doubts I needed a success to help
knock down the doubting Thomases I spent much of the next year living in Japan in stin of 6 weeks at a time designing the GeForce and seeing it into production in March 1986 the GeForce went on the market at a cost of $1,200 per machine and despite or perhaps because of its enormous price it soon became the must-have domestic style item in uh
Tokyo this is really fascinating uh he's not essentially like people bought it he thinks they just bought it because it was like a like a design like a piece of art uh did they ever use it who knows they don't really have houses so there was no identif identifiable need for this fullsize cleaner the suspicion in the design world was that this
futuristic pink I forgot to mention that they insisted that it's like uh all of them were made in pink so like bright pink uh this the suspicion in the design world was that this futuristic pink machine half spaceship half vacuum cleaner just stood in the corner of most Japanese homes and generated ooze and Oz but it stood in a lot of corners and
though it took off only gradually within 3 years it was making sales of $12 million a year now here's the problem this is it goes back to his whole thing don't relinquish control it sells very well but his license deal was bad and so he only the most money he ever makes is the guaranteed minimum of $60,000 a year because you're relying on other company
to tell you how many they sell he says like they would turn in like sales reports that were like handwritten on like little scraps of paper then he'd have have an attorney to try to fight it out but he's in Britain they're in Japan then he hires a local guy in Japan to try to um figure out like if they're they're screwing him on on the deal the
guy comes back winds up having like you know with uh with the people manufacturing James product says oh no everything's okay and it's just like essentially like he never got to the bottom of it later on the book goes into more detail but a couple years later he's just like okay just buy me out completely and I'll come back and compete with like my own
version of this later on and so that's what he does and so in the middle of this as he gets to know Japanese and Japanese culture though he's like oh they're they're that we think the very same way that he believes he believes in progress in stages over a long period of time and he says Japanese believe in progress by stages in in the iterative
development that I have described as edisonian the persistent trial and error that allows them to wake up one morning after many many mornings with a world beating product they were learning all the time improving little by little so it says the Japanese took an opposite view of like uh some other cultures believe in like brilliant Eureka like
strikes of Genius moments James doesn't believe that in all at all he says the Japanese took the opposite view they put no faith in individualists and they lived an anti- Brilliance culture and that was healthy they knew full well that Quantum leaps are very rare but that constant development will result in the end in a better product and that is
a mindset I share with them I am not a Quantum leaper so now the year is 1991 remember we got started in 1979 things are a little better he has a couple license small license uh agreements but he's really wants to uh launch in his Home Market in the British market and then this is going to be like very difficult for a time he also got
ripped off by Amway and he's going through like this this like patent lawsuit that's very expensive but what's happening here in 1991 with this company called vax is really important because this is where he just realizes like forget all this I'm doing everything myself by the time I got a call from vax in early early 1991 asking if we could
build them an upright vacuum cleaner for the British Market I was already beginning to feel the world growing lighter on my shoulders royalties were rolling in now from our various licenses as well as down payments and design fees for new products so I signed up with and we began designing a prototype immediately but there was no sign of
them starting production for a while then I started to ask them why oh we don't like the design of the handle they would say or oh we think this is a bit weak they would say and so then I would go and redesign whatever they wanted and then we would hear nothing for while and then they would find something else they needed fiddling with it became clear to
me this is almost a year later uh eight months went on like this it became clear to me that they could go on Pro procrastinating indefinitely I found their General lack of commitment infuriating and so they're getting into big arguments and eventually he just snaps at him he says listen if you're not going to make the damn thing I will and
so what he's talking about is like he's fighting two Mega lawsuits at this time and any kind of uh Revenue that the the company's bringing in from any license agreements or anything else was just being eaten away in lawyer fees and he's having to fly back and forth from America uh to America rather uh multiple times and he's just he's finally like
getting close to snapping you know this is 1991 he started this whole deal in 1979 he is not rich by any means at this point he's still running into headache after headache after headache he hates dealing with other people and so he's like okay I think like this is it now he's in his early 40s he's like I'm going to go my entire life without
actually succeeding in what I want to do and this is the only sentence like this in the book I began to consider forgetting the whole thing and doing something else with my life I began to consider forgetting the whole thing and doing something else with my life then a wonderful thing happened out of nowhere and so he's sitting there with his wife they're having a glass of wine
they're looking at the English Countryside and he's like I started to see the world in like a more mellow perspective one that makes all of my troubles like seem so small wouldn't be the end of the world if this ended and maybe you know it's not worth fighting they're talking about like their future what they would do and again his wife is
super supportive this entire thing which is obviously very extremely important and then the phone rang and it was his attorney and he says guess what and James goes I couldn't I did not want to guess uh we're talking about resolving the case however no settlement had been reached yet and it was due to fly to America to make yet another dis uh
deposition and so then a few days later uh he goes to hether airport and he's heading towards the departure gate gives him all his luggage and he goes you know what let me let me call Dick baxer you know this is decades before uh you know wide cell phone use so he's gives him a call like a pay phone and cannot believe what what dick
is going to say it's all over James they don't need your deposition now we are and then it cuts out he says but the last word was lost in a cackle of static I didn't need to hear it though to grin with relief no more legal fees it is safe to say that this was the greatest turning point in my life since the day I tore the bag off of my Hoover coming at
a time when the single largest Pro problem was a shortage of money to produce my own vacuum cleaner the fact that I would no longer be hemorrhaging thousands of dollars in legal fees was like a gift from Heaven that leak in cash flow that had only days before made me consider giving up altogether was now finally plugged so now he has the strength to
continue on he's like okay forget this I'm doing everything everything myself difference and retention of total control but he's like okay I I'm already like I don't have a bunch of money I'm already like High leverage I have a bunch of debt and he's like I need to use other people's money and I'm willing to give them equity and return remember
I started the podcast saying that to this day he owns 100% of Dyson but now the book is saying wait a minute I'm trying to sell off Equity what happens he tries to raise money by selling equity and no one is interested every time with James like I he tries to take one path and he gets so much push back from other people he's like damn it I'll
just do it myself I'll figure out other ways to do it so like all right I'll go back in debt I I just need to find a bank one or two Banks were vaguely interested but only as long as I did not run the business myself you're a designer Dyson they would cackle what do you know about business I was tearing my hair out as these doors were slammed in
my face for the most obtuse reasons these poor buggers were so wrong to think that designers knew nothing about business this is one of my favorite parts of the book are about marketing or about selling it is the people who make the things that understand them and understand what the public wants and so all the banks say no he said he got bailed out by the Lloyds I
think this the Lloyds of London he just calls it the Lloyds and they they're going to wind up lending loaning him 750,000 and he has to put up uh his house as collateral yet again but this is where he's finally getting to what he's been trying to do for a decade and a half the whole point was to have a product of his own with his ideas
applied without compromise he does not want to compromise 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 I had gathered around myself a small team
and we worked together in the garage in the coach house we were a band on a mission to design a vacuum cleaner that would challenge the world and it was Bloody exciting with this team at last I could put into unhindered practice all the things I believed about the interdependency of design and function about the way in which aesthetic
Perfection could be generated out of the engineering principles of of the work rather than being used to hide them and about enabling the consumer to understand the technological benefits of new products by using them to make the products fun it was a fantastic environment to work in for it was just engineers and designers and no one to
mess us around there were no salesmen no advertising people no marketing managers to interfere and to try to guide us in their own direction we had nothing to do but to doce our own dream product there was no market research and there was no focus groups it was to be frank a designer's wet dream 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 and then order a million pounds worth of tooling it felt almost naughty I was following the path of my long cherished dream that designers could lead businesses from the front and so then he goes into great detail like why he made the design decisions he did this is one of his most
successful products ever but one thing he says he like listen is there a way that you can show a potential customer the benefit that your product provides very quickly and so that's why they made like the Dyson vacuum cleaners that like you can see where all the dirt goes it's it's like translucent or cther right and so he says the sight of a transparent
Vacuum Cleaner full of rubbish would draw the eye of the potential customer if the customer sees a long line of pristine vacuum cleaners and then sees this weird looking one at the end all visibly full of dirt well then clearly it works doesn't it and so then James breaks down his design philosophy this is the same chapter all the stuff I've
been reading for you is from the Dyson dual Cyclone chapter towards the end of the book and this is just he just gets into details of like what he learned from this experience and what he teaches the engineers at Dyson so he says I have often been asked what my design philosophy is or my philosophy of invention and I have occasionally tried
to put it on paper for those who do ask it is a difficult thing to reduce to simple points because so much of it just exists in my mind and a weird concoction of things I have seen and leared but it might look something like this this number one no one ever had an idea staring at a drawing board so do not do this Francis Bacon always got his ideas
from walking in the countryside and observing nature rather than sitting in a study so get out and look at things and when an idea comes grab it write it down and play with it until it works don't sit and expect ideas to come and always bear in mind though that bacon died of pneumonia trying to invent frozen chicken he's hilarious another
one everyday products sell it is harder to improve and mature product if you succeed though there is no need to create a new market try out current products in your own home and make a list of things you don't like about them I found about 20 things wrong with my Hoover Jr at the first attempt then he says he always tries to create new
technology the thing about truly new technology is that it makes your invention patentable and then no one can copy it you will find that in the case of almost anything you dream up somewhere someone may have done something vaguely similar before this is often extremely difficult another suggestion use the edisonian principle keep testing and retesting and believe
only the evidence of your own eyes not a formula or other people's opinions you may have to fly in the face of public opinion and market research they can only tell you what has happened no research can tell you what is going to happen number five constant Revolution constantly rethink and improve every aspect in function never being satisfied
until you have solved every problem do that and you can be sure of consistently and reli ibly outperforming the opposition solving functional problems at every level and to a high degree of perfection as possible the only way to keep possession of your invention is to keep strengthening it number six go for expressive design it is what is inside
that is important to start thinking from the outside is to Doom the project from the outset good design generated out of the function of the thing will explain why it is better and why it should be bought products can only be beautiful when they work well and then you can allow the form to follow the function then be different for its own sake then
make it orange and red or pink and lavender go further there is nothing wrong with making the consumer laugh conventional looks do not make a product more marketable number seven he's speaking about himself here for sure stamina and conviction painful but true this is really selling us that Excellence it's the capacity to take
pain painful but true breaking the mold will upset people it will take longer than you ever imagined 10 years of development do you fancy that and then negotiations on a knife's edge a Sho string and hanging on by a thread it will take balls and finally number eight total control from the first sprouting of the idea all the way into the homes of the
nation it is more likely to succeed if the original Visionary or mule he put the words mule in parenthesis next to Visionary sees it right through so let me repeat that entire thing from the first sprouting of the idea all the way into the homes of the nation it is most likely to succeed if the original Visionary or mule sees it right through
I aim not to be clever but to be dogged and my doggedness had got me so far to a point where I had my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner at last on May 2nd 1992 remember that date on May 2nd 1992 I found myself looking at the first fully operational visually perfect Dyson duel Cyclone I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my hoop
and stuck a seral packet in the hole May 2nd 1992 was my 45th birthday I needed this right now I needed to reread this book I love this man I love the way he thinks I love this book I I hope you read it for the full story by the book I will leave a link down below I don't think it's available on Amazon uh for for a decent price I will leave the link to bookfinder as
well you'll find that in the show notes and available about Founders podcast.com as well if you want to support the podcast sign up for Founders premium you can listen to the AMA episodes I make and you can ask me questions directly I finally found a format that I like where each episode is an individual question I think there's like 17 or something like
that up there already and I'm going to be doing a lot more that link is down below in the show notes and available Founders podcast.com I will read this book again for episode 400 this is a book I hope I read and reread and revisit highlights constantly throughout my life but for now that is 300 books down 1,000 and I'll talk to you again soon