Founders
Episode 300 #300 James Dyson (Against the Odds)
Founders

Episode 300: #300 James Dyson (Against the Odds)

Founders

Episode 300

#300 James Dyson (Against the Odds)

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading Against the Odd: An Autobiography by James Dyson for the 4th time.

What I learned from reading Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson for the 4th time. You can also find the book on Book Finder

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[4:30] Invention: A Life by James Dyson (Founders #205)

[2:41] I am 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.

[11:00] Isambard Kingdom Brunel: The Definitive Biography of The Engineer, Visionary, and Great Briton by L.T.C. Rolt. (Founders #201)

[13:10] After the idea there is plenty of time to learn the technology. My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape long before I understood how it worked.

[14:15] 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.

[18:00] I would not be dragged into something I didn't want to do.

[22:40] They were all running round and round the track like a herd of sheep and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was making me come in first.

[23:34] 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.

[27:20] Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. The mere fact that something had never been one before presented, to Brunel, 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 age.

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 at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self-doubt I have looked to his example to fire me on.

[30:33] The vision of a single man pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession.

[36:30] The root principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it.

[41:38] You simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several.

[49:30] A direct relationship with the customer is the holy grail. Do not abandon it.

[52:00] 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, reciprocally, 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.

[1:02:20] Before I went into production with the dual cyclone I had built 5,127 prototypes.

[1:02:30] 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.

[1:03:30] While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it is all you need to succeed, the truth is 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's cyclone had not worked. There were times when I thought it would never work, that I would keep on making cyclone after cyclone, never going forwards, never going backwards, until I died.

[1:06:20] I was broke, hungry and depressed. The outlook was very dreary. My doggedness and self-belief in the absence of any real evidence that they were justified was beginning to look more and more like insanity.

[1:10:30] Persistent trial and error allows them to wake up one morning after many, many mornings with a world beating product.

[1:13:15] I began to consider forgetting the whole thing and doing something else with my life.

[1:16:00] The poor buggers were so wrong, to think that designers knew nothing about business, or about marketing, or is about selling. It is the people who make the things that understand them, and understand what the public wants.

[1:21:30] Go further. There is nothing wrong with making the consumer laugh. Conventional looks do not make a product more marketable.

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#300 James Dyson (Against the Odds)

Introduction

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 I 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 legal 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, one in four British households owned a Dyson. My company was selling 1 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 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 we're going to talk about today, which is Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson. If you ask me for like a top 10 list of my recommendations of books that I cover on the podcast you should read, that is -- kind of that top 10 list is always changing. The #1 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 Dyson was 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 #1 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 Dyson Cyclone is that I knew it would all turn out like this from the beginning. Despite all the setbacks, the lawsuit, the cash crises, the ridicule, the bad feelings, and the doubt, I always knew deep down.

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