James Dyson, Dyson

25:49He taught hockey. He just wanted to do everything. And I'm a bit like that. I was certainly like that at school, especially if it didn't involve academia. And he was like that. I just thought of a connection maybe I didn't make previously. he wanted to change professions towards the end of his life he fought in the war in burma we'll call it the forgotten war yeah and it really was you know it's a nasty nasty war a long way away um and he came back from that in 1946 and in 1949 he contracted cancer okay so he'd been away from his wife for six years you know first six six years of their life together then And he had three years being a classics master at school.

26:38And then he got cancer. And so he was in and out of hospital for the next seven years. Did he have an opportunity to work for the BBC or something like that? That's what he wanted to do. That's what he wanted to do, but never had the opportunity. But never had the opportunity to do it. And now I'm thinking, I just asked you the question was, how the hell do you leave this fantastic position to go off on your own? You realize, well, I had the opportunity to. Where like your dad, unfortunately, for a situation outside of his control, never got that opportunity. No, he had his life stolen from him at the age of 40.

27:08I mean, I'm almost 80, so twice as long as he did. Your mom passed away early too. Yes, she got cancer as well in her 50s. 55? Yeah, 55. My mom passed away from cancer early too. Yeah, a horrible disease. Did you ever, this is nothing related to what I would think I was going to talk to you about, but your dad passed away at 40, your mom in her mid-50s. You've lived much longer than both of them. When you were younger, were you worried that you were going to die young too? No, it never occurred to me. Interesting. No, never occurred to me. I think it made me want to get the most out of life fast, maybe impatient to live my life.

27:52Funny. I obviously have a habit and obsession with reading biographies. Most of the people I read biographies are not like you. They're actually dead. And I think this unexpected... I'll try and keep going. No, no, no. We're going to do it. I want to come to Dyson HQ and I want to record more things. I want to like see the headquarters and everything else. So yeah, you have a reason to live. In addition to your beautiful family and everything else. One of the byproducts of reading a bunch of biographies of dead people is you get to the end. And it's not that you got to the end of the book. You got to the end of somebody's life story.

28:25And it's not morbid, but you have this constant reminder that our time here is limited and don't waste a single day. I think about that. I have intolerant to wasting even 24 hours. And he's actually like a powerful motivator and just a great byproduct of the profession I've chose. I want to go back to you're taking risk for the sake of risk. You want to be your own man, I think is the line that you have in the book when you leave. So I understand that. We're going to get to the ball barrow. But can you say more? So that was the point. You did ask me that question of why I didn't ask Jeremy Fry to help fund that thing.

28:58It's because I wanted to do something on my own. and you felt... I'd worked for somebody and I wanted to do something entirely on my own. But you'd still be the entrepreneur. But it was a terrible decision. But that's how I felt at the time. Why not take money from him? Because I felt I'd worked with him. He'd been my mentor. Okay. And I wanted to just go off and do it on my own. It was to prove something to myself, I suppose. It was a stupid decision because I was still having other people help fund me. So it was a really stupid decision. And you do make stupid decisions in life. And I learned from my mistake.

29:33And so when I started the vacuum care, I went back to someone who understood entrepreneurship, who had been an entrepreneur rather than people who hadn't been entrepreneurs. We were talking about this earlier. You and I were talking about this earlier where there is now a new class of capital available to entrepreneurs. That is not institutional venture capital. That obviously still exists. But you have a lot of people that have had incredible success like yourself. but I've become friends with Michael Dell and this is something that he's interested in and providing alternative funding solutions to entrepreneurs from an entrepreneur and knows exactly what they're going through.

30:08That is not a professional investor. That is not, doesn't even, not trying to make more returns. They have more money than they'll ever spend. They literally love entrepreneurs and want to help entrepreneurs. I think it's really important. I want to go through the list of mistakes because you always say this and I love it. I have the first version of your second biography, which is Invention of Life. I think it's changed now. I think you were going to name it like failure is more interesting than success or more fun than success. It's a lousy marketer I am. Yeah, the publishers quite rightly said it won't sell.

30:40So let's focus on the failures and the mistakes that you made with the ball barrel. What still like sticks out in your mind about that? Right at the beginning, having people fund it, help fund it, because I had to put up a guarantee. My brother-in-law put up a guarantee. The guarantee's against your house? The guarantee was against my house. Okay. Fortunately, I had a house by then. My brother-in-law put up a guarantee, and we borrowed money from the bank. By the way, interest rates went to 22 % while we were doing that business, and that was the killer. so I borrowed money again when I started the ball bearing the vacuum cleaner business so it's not boring money that's a problem it's involving people who don't understand startups and the pain you have to go through what did they not understand they just didn't understand the business the what it what it's like for example the ball bearers copied in America by an ex-employee and another company.

31:46And they wanted to go after him and teach him a lesson. And I said, no, no, no, let him do it. If he wants to do it, let him do it. And we'll come into America and we'll sell ours against his. He'll pave the way and we'll come and sell our original version. But they wanted vengeance. So we spent a lot of money trying to sue them, you know, to no good effect, really. So that's one example. The real thing I learned is that it's much better to put your own money in. I didn't have any money. I borrowed it, but it was money that had been given to me by a bank. So it was my money, even though I was on the line for it and my wife had to sign the house away and all our possessions and all that sort of thing.

32:29So I was making my decisions for me. I wasn't having to worry about investors and what they might think, which when I was doing the ball bearing business, I was always doing that. I was having to ring them up and say, do you think we should do this? Is it okay if I do this? You seem to have an inherent, I don't want to interrupt you, an inherent distaste for anybody else having any kind of control over what you're doing. No, not that at all. That's not what I meant. Okay. I'm glad you raised that. That's not what I meant. For example, I have non-executive directors. I run the business as though it was a public business, but it's a private business.

33:05And I think it's very important to have good people advising you. Now, what I meant was when I'm entirely on my own and I make a decision, I make a decision without reference, certainly in the early days, to anybody else. Is it the right decision for the business? Will it make a better product? Will it sell more? All that sort of thing. That's very, very single-minded. You don't have to worry about investors at all. I had to worry about the bank balance, but I didn't have to worry about investors, which made me very single-minded. And if there's a failure, it's my failure. It's all down to me.

33:41Whereas if you've got other people, then other people are making joint decisions. So I really enjoyed not having anyone to turn to. Whereas with the ball-berry business, there were other directors, there were other investors. So I had to worry about what they thought. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I did. but if you're on your own, you make the decision for entirely the right reason. What do you think that you thought was important that they did not for that specific product? When we started selling the ball-bearer, the retailers, first of all, there weren't big hardware chains. They were individual-owned hardware stores.

34:21So there was no Home Depot or Lowe's? No, none of that, which makes life a lot easier. You might not think that, but it does make life a lot easier if you're manufacturing something. So we had to sell through wholesalers who sold to all the individual retailers. And garden centers, where you go and buy garden stuff, they were all individually owned. So you had to have teams of salespeople going around all these things, trying to sell products to them. Oh, yes, we can take one this week and one all that. It was a completely mad system. um now i'd started the business selling direct to people through little adverts in the newspaper tiny little adverts and people would send their checks in those days people used to send checks it was pre-credit cards you have a great line about this in the book you said the entrenched professional will always resist longer than the independent consumer yes exactly so um exactly that and that that was the point the illustration of that is when i went around trying to sell to garden centers and hardware stores.

35:22They were not interested. They actually laughed. They said, that thing with the big red ball, no one will ever buy that. But they did buy it from these little ads. So I wanted to go on expanding the idea of selling direct and not having a middle person and not having to have salespeople. But they said, oh, no, look, you're being successful. I think now is the time to do it properly and get a factory and sell the normal way through retailers. Did you push back against that decision? A bit, yes. Now, I said, look, we're doing quite well now. We're not going to borrow money. We're not dependent on anybody.

35:54We're just replacing these ads and seeing what happens. And OK, the business might be very small, but it's OK, actually. It's wiping its face. But then we got into debt and the debt got bigger and the debt went to 22 % interest rate. I mean, a company's lucky if it can make 5 % profit or 10 % net profit. But we're fighting a 22 % penalty all the time. The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20 % of their data because 80 % of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations.

36:38Unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit HubSpot.com today. That is HubSpot.com. So there's another thing that happened where you made the mistake of assigning. This was your invention. This was your, the Ball Bear was your creation. You made some other products, but we can skip over that for now. And then you filed a patent. It was patentable. And you transferred the patent, not to yourself, but to the company. And then when they kicked you out of the company, they then took your company and your patent.

37:16Yes. Yes, they took everything. But actually, there's a silver lining to all of that, which I'd offer them the vacuum cleaner. Yes. And they didn't believe in it. This is why I'm obsessed with people so far for every single person I've talked to the show. They've done what they do for an excessively long period of time, anywhere from 20 to 45 years. And I think you just – you see this over and over in these stories. It's like people are way too big of a rush. It's like you're going to have these happy accidents. You just stay in the game long enough to get lucky because it's a byproduct of the stuff you're doing.

37:46In the case of – you're working on the ball barrel, right? And you discover what a cyclone is because you're solving a problem with the ball barrel. There's no way you could have predicted at the beginning that you could apply it to another domain and then wipe the floor with all your competitors. Can you explain what you were doing and how you accidentally discovered the cyclone for the first time? The important thing is to observe things all the time for an engineer and work out how they work. And also, incidentally, you're always working out how to make them work better. Would it be better if I did this?

38:15Isn't there a better way of doing that? And that always happens with all the inventions. They don't just come out of the sky. They occur because you observe something. So curiosity and observation and trying to understand things is the way to come up with new ways of doing things. And so it was with the vacuum cleaner. As you said, we had this huge plant that sprayed the frames with powder. A lot of the powder missed the frames because it's spraying sort of open things. There's masses of it missing it. And we were sucking it away onto a cloth filter, a huge cloth filter, which clogged all the time.

38:54Like a vacuum bag. Like a vacuum bag. You make the connection, you see. You make the connection. And what clever people did was have this huge cyclone. So I got a quote for one, and there was no way we could afford it. So over a couple of weekends, we built one, and it was 30 foot high. and we had to make a hole in the roof of the factory to stuff that has a chimney, a sort of outlet at the top. And a cyclone separates dust from air. So between you and I, there's a lot of dust. And a cyclone will separate that by centrifugal force. So if you drive at a corner of a road very fast in your Porsche, if you drive too fast, you spin off into the ditch.

39:39and so that is with a dust particle. A dust particle, though the ones between us are floating, they're very fine. If you make them go around the corner at very high speed, they get flung out to the edge into the ditch. So a cyclone is a circular container and you apply enormous centrifugal force to the dust particles within it and they all get flung to the outside wall and the only way out is from the centre, a chimney in the centre. So that's the basic principle of a cyclone. So I made, yes, I'd used vacuuming inside everybody else and they always seemed to make this screaming noise and not pick things up.

40:16And one weekend I was cleaning the house and the bag was full. What? No. It said the bag was clogged, which is a slightly different thing. Anyway, so I looked around for a new bag, couldn't find one in the house. So I opened it up, emptied it out, and then gaffer taped it back up again and shoved it back in. Still no suction. So I thought, that's odd. I thought, you know, it didn't suck because the bag was full. I suddenly realized the bag was empty and something else was at play here. And I emptied it up. I took the gaffer tape off and opened it up. And there was a fine lining of fine dust around the inside of the bag.

40:57and I suddenly realised that the suction is created by airflow which has to go through the pores of the bag. But this fine dust is clogging the pores. It's not the fact the bag's full, it's the fact that the bag is clogged. They call it a bag full indicator, that's a lie. It's a bag clogged indicator. So I felt pretty angry about this. I did go, got out and drove to a shop, bought a new bag and put it in and I had good suction for a short while and then it dropped off again and it said bag full. It wasn't bag full, the bag's clogged. So I got pretty angry about this and I came to a realisation, it's not a very clever realisation, that all the air is trying to go through these little holes in the bag and it's so easy for them to be clogged.

41:44And then of course I remembered the big cyclone, huge 30 foot cyclone we built at the factory to stop the cloth getting clogged in the dust. Instead, we were spinning it out successfully by centrifugal force. It never clogged. So I thought, why don't we have one of those 30-foot cyclones inside a vacuum cleaner, you know, a foot high? So it wasn't very clever, really. So I built one out of cardboard. It's very clever. Well, not really. No, it's very clever. It's not very clever. So I built one very quickly in the kitchen at home out of cardboard and gaffer tape again. I took the bag off my upright vacuum cleaner, replaced it with a bit of hose and this cardboard mini version of the 30-foot one we built at work out of steel, and pushed it around.

42:31And I was pushing around the first vacuum cleaner that never loses suction. So I thought I had a good idea, so I filed a patent. And I offered it to the ball-bearer company. Why? Because you guys are doing all these gardening products, right? I don't think, were you making anything else that wasn't related to gardening before this? No. And then I think one of your main observations was like, this is not the best business because it's seasonal. That's horrible. Right? A seasonal product is awful. Yeah. So why don't we, especially in England. But people buy vacuum cleaners all the time. So, you know, every day.

43:08And that's what I want. Because with a seasonal product, you know, there's a fallow period where you sell nothing. and then spring comes along and hopefully you know you start to sell so it's a and you sell the weather makes a huge difference to what you sell and if you have a bad spring it's a wet spring you never make up for that so if you if you change your product make it better you don't actually know one year to the next whether it's an improvement or not whether it's sold more but it all depends on the weather so you've got to employ people during the winter when you don't need them. And then in the summer, you need more people.

43:42It's just a horrible, seasonal business is a horrible business. Avoid seasonal business. So I pity anyone who runs a ski resort. So you take this vacuum cleaner, all right, guys, I have the solution to our problems. Yes. It's a genius invention. It's very clever, even though you keep saying it's not clever. I have this clever invention and their response is? Their response is, if there was a better vacuum cleaner, who would electrolux and all the existing people would have done it. I love that you started our conversation that history repeats. The way I say it is like, human nature repeats. And so I think history rhymes, but human nature is very constant.

44:16And this idea of, no, I can't possibly imagine a future that's different from our present. Just for some reason, the majority of humans just cannot do that extra step in thought process. And obviously, I think you're gifted with that. And there's an assumption that experts do things correctly or in the most clever way. Which you learn from Jeremy Fry is ridiculous. It's not true. There's a great line in the book where it's like, Jeremy Fry ridiculed experts. Yes. Yeah. Well, no, he wasn't that rude. But I mean, yes, he said don't trust an expert. Yeah. Again, a very old idea. Andrew Carnegie said the same thing.

44:52Henry Ford said the same thing. It's happening 100 years before you were trying to make a record. You know where it was repeated? It was during COVID. Yeah. We're following the science. Yeah. We're listening to what the scientists say. and i said don't listen to what the scientists say but don't do everything they say you know apply common sense so then you get this this is something interesting because this is one thing i don't think i understand um at least your your thought process now you're you're you're kicked out you lose your patent you lose how long it was five years that you're working on the bomb so you did seven years on the sea truck then another five years and now you're like okay Why?

45:30Was there another product? You knew you wanted to invent. You knew you wanted, I think, invent more than manufacture. I think now you love manufacturing once you became one. But you were an inventor for... Well, no, no. I was a manufacturer, a full manufacturer with the C-truck and with the ball barrow. But at the beginning of the vacuum cleaner, you wanted to just invent and license. Yes. I thought, look, I've done all that. Why can't I just invent and design things and license them to other people, like an author? and writes a book and someone else sells it. Which is surprising to me because you clearly like to control.

46:05You don't want to rely on other people. Bad decision. Okay. It was a bad decision. No, it was a bad idea. Because you have to worry about what's going on in that other person's shot. There's like horror stories. They try to sell these licenses and they can talk about this in the books. It's like you might have one guy that's really enthusiastic and you come back two months later and he's gone. Yeah, and someone else thinks the opposite. It was a nightmare. And I was becoming a lawyer because I was doing license agreements all the time. And they're worrying what happens. And then they cancel it and all that sort of thing.

46:37What came to mind when you mentioned earlier the mistake that you thought your ball barrel partner, your partners in the ball barrel had where they want to chase this guy down in lawsuits. Right before he passed away, unfortunately, I got to spend three hours at Charlie Munger's house. And it's me and two other young entrepreneurs. And he was just giving us advice for three hours. And one thing, he's just like, don't waste your time in lawsuits. He's like, any time I got screwed over by people, he's like, I didn't sue him. I just realized you can't do a good deal with a bad person, and it just moved on.

47:01He's like, the lawyers are going to suck you dry. It's a distraction from your main business. You just have to keep moving on. So now you go, okay, I'm going to do the vacuum cleaner. You immediately thought of Jeremy Fry, or you had a different way initially to start this business? Because I'd been having directors and investors who knew nothing about business, I thought I'd go back to someone who I'd really enjoyed working with and who clearly understood about starting businesses. I'm enthusiastic about it, like Michael Dell. The five years that you said since left his employment, you still had a relationship with him?

47:35Oh, yes. Yeah. He's still a friend. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And so you go to talk to him and he gets it immediately? Yes, gets it immediately. Actually, I had two ideas that he and I were both more attracted to the vacuum cleaner. What was the other day? The other one was, I mean, they now have it, but when you sand something, the dust used to go everywhere. So I had a device that collected it in a bag, funnily enough, or a little cyclone, while you were sanding something or drilling something. I mean, it exists now, but when I started 50 years ago, whenever it was, it didn't exist. But we decided that wasn't big time.

48:14It was a sort of peripheral thing. So we wanted to do something important. And then whose idea was it, let's not focus on manufacturing, let's try to create a working prototype and then take the licensing route? Was it you or Jeremy? I think it was both of us. I mean, both of us have been manufacturers, he much more than me. And we both said, look, we're really inventors. Let's engineers, let's just do that bit. And if the invention is good enough, surely people will license it. And then this is where we now have... Delusion. Yeah. You have to deal with other humans that are very difficult. Not just humans.

48:50So now this is the point. This is what I talked about where this book changed my life. Because this is the point where you have an idea. You have the stubbornness of a mule. You have obsession. I have a lot of these same traits. I think you have them obviously to a greater degree. And maybe we'll see how my life plays out. But now this is the coach house. And so for America, I had to look this up. I was like, what the hell is a coach house? It's actually like I heard another interview. It's like the garage for Steve Jobs. It's like I'm working in the garage. We call it a coach house. Do you have any savings?

49:20Are you in debt? No, I'm not in debt. I'm in debt. I got into debt when I was a student. Do you not understand how unusual that idea is? I have no money. I'm in debt. Let me do this other super risky thing. You don't even have a working prototype yet. No. No. No, it's just an idea, really. I have a little cardboard one. Take me in your mindset then. What do you think was driving you? Were you anger, like the desire to prove yourself, the love of the product? What was actually happening at that point? That is an unusual decision to make, a decision that your entire empire now rests upon. That's an incredible time in your life.

49:58Well, I saw a problem with a product that everybody uses every day, a vital product to clean their homes. And I, as a user, I hated it because you have this bag that clogs and then you have to go and buy another bag and so on. But more than anything, it's the performance is lousy. I mean, if you have a 100 watt light bulb, it's supposed to give 100 watts all the time. But this vacuum cleaner light bulb starts off at 100 watts and ends up at 20 watts pretty quickly. So it's deeply unsatisfactory. So I thought if I can solve that problem, I thought if I could solve that problem, other people would buy that product.

50:35It's no substance. It's just an idea. What was the chance that you gave yourself a success that you could actually solve the problem? You were pretty self-confident you could? No. We're getting crazier. No, of course not. You don't know you can solve it. Yeah. But you've just got to try. And that's true today. You know, when we're trying to solve it, we don't know we can solve it. We don't know that we can make a motor go at 130 ,000 RPM when existing motors only go 50 ,000 RPM. I want to talk about motors. You don't know. You just got to do it. Okay. So I want to talk about motives. Don't forget about that.

51:14That's like one of the most – you inadvertently said one of the most inspiring things. Like, no, I didn't – no, I have no money. No, I'm in debt. Just a simple flaky idea that it's intolerable that the product that I'm buying does not work. I'm just going to make a working version. And if I make a working version, other people will buy. At that point, you're right to focus in on that moment because ideas are so fragile. And they're easily knocked away by anybody. It's why experts are dangerous. It's why experts are dangerous. Experts are dangerous. Henry Ford said in his autobiography, which I think was published in like 1910, if I ever wanted to sabotage my competitors, I'd fill their ranks with experts.

51:50They know so much about why something won't work, they'll get no work done. Exactly. Exactly. Your philosophy and his philosophy, there's a lot of overlap and excellence to that. History repeats itself. Human nature does. If you ask people what they want, they want a faster horse. You know, that repeats itself time and time again, many times every day. Well, you made a good point. I heard another, and you said in the book, I heard another interview. It's just like you're asking people to invent the future. That's not their job. That's your job. What are you doing? Yeah. Let's focus back in on this very important point or time in your life that you just mentioned.

52:23So you set up in the coach house. You're in debt. You have more money. So how are you funding things? I know your wife is like selling art, but like do you go immediately to the bank, take out another mortgage? Like what do you actually do? Exactly that. I went to the bank to take out a mortgage and Jeremy Fry guaranteed part of it. So he said we need, I don't know,£50 ,000 or something to last two years. So he put up a guarantee for£25 ,000 and I put up a guarantee for£25 ,000. So that got the thing started. Why could you do it for so cheap? Because your only expense was your time? Yes. Yes, I'm working at home.

53:01The only expense is my time and a few cheap materials. I couldn't buy a lathe or equipment. I was doing it all with little black and deckers and things like that by hand. I was making cyclones by rolling in rollers. I went and bought some antique metal rollers down at a junk store for£25. And I could roll cyclones. You know, they're a funny shape, like a sort of upside-down cone, and solder them together. So I was doing everything by hand. But I could do that. I mean, it works. You can do things for nothing. You don't need to spend a lot of money. And you thought, I'll be able to figure this out two years.

53:40Yes. It took how long? Five. Five years. And I'm still doing it.

53:49You're not under great financial strain at the moment. Actually, I thought I'd do it quicker than two years. I thought I'd do it within a year. But I discovered there were all sorts of problems. And also, with almost any idea, you find that when you start to apply for a patent, that people have tried to do it before and patented things. There's very, very few patents we file. And you absolutely, that was, you had to have something that was patentable, right? Yes. Oh, yes. Because we were going to try and license it. So we had to have a good, strong patent. Okay. which we ended up having a good strong pattern because we made an interesting discovery by accident.

54:28Because if you're doing enough experiments, you're trying to be logical what you're doing. But sometimes something occurs that's not logical and it works. So you've just got to keep trying. Luck will happen to you. This is why you're such a big believer in the Edisonian principle of design where I think in the book you say the biggest problem you have with young people, even though you like working with them, is teaching them one change at a time, record what happens. Their instinct is come in here, something's not working, let's change 15 things. And your point is how do you know what of the 15 things you have done have changed?

55:07So at this point you're doing, you have thick, like I know a lot about you because I've been studying you for nine years. You've been working with your hands your entire life. Are you still working with your hands? No, not much. Okay, no. Your fingers are useless. I can't do anything with them now. They're more arthritis. This is like somebody that lifts a lot of weights, but with their hands. I'm like, I was not prepared for how, like, your hands are huge and your fingers are, they don't fit the rest of your body. No, they're workman's hands. In fact, you know this wretched fingerprint thing at airports?

55:39It doesn't work for me. They're worn thin. There's no line. And it's fun, actually, working with your hands and your brain. is something that schools despise for some reason. This is going to sound really weird to you. Maybe it won't. But because my entire work is all digital, right? I read a book. I sit down. I record into a microphone that's digital. It's connected to a computer. It goes out into the world. I don't, you know, I just see numbers go up on a screen. I'm by myself the whole time. One thing that I do, which is kind of working with my hands, is I've insisted on I edit all the transcripts of every single episode by hand.

56:14and that is literally me going in there and changing a sentence or a word or adding punctuation. If I ever do anything else or in addition, even just for fun, it has to be something physical. Like I don't want to just have – I feel I'm missing out on something. And I'm trying to approximate that by like physically touching, you know, pieces of paper. This is why the books look like they do and I don't read digital copies. Like I like – I sit down with a pen, a ruler, you know, post-it notes, scissors. Like I feel like it's like arts and crafts over here, but there's just some weird satisfaction I get out of working with my hands.

56:47My hands don't look like yours though from like five decades of this. I mean it's something that's slightly despised at school. People who are good with their hands who can mend cars and do plumbing and so on. But the entire world that we inhabit is physical. Well, yes, exactly. I mean that's how man started. Somebody built this and like the building that we're in. We want to be intellectuals. I'm not getting involved in the dirty work. that and it's a great shame because i think that's why we've lost as countries the ability to make things manufacturing is vanishing from manufacturing made america great it made christian great it makes any country that's good at it great great yeah history again talk about history repeating hey yeah why do you think i love what you said uh we're gonna go back to this but you have this great thing that uh growing up in britain at the time you did you know they still remember churchill and world war ii and everything else you're like well one thing that we learned and we were taught was like, we're not the weak ones.

57:39Like we can actually persevere through unbelievably difficult times where it looks like the end is near and not give up and actually come on the other side as the victor. I think that was very important. So you've borrowed the money, you're doing one prototype a day, two? Yeah, one or two a day. Yeah. Day after day after day. And you say in the book, you know, I can celebrate now because my company, you know, we're doing like 300 million a year, I think when the book ends or something like that. but I'd be lying to you if I said there were days where I'd fail all day long, go in the house covered in dust and dirt, and essentially like get into bed thinking I may just go on building prototype after prototype after prototype and never succeeding forever.

58:24What was your inner monologue during that time? Like how were you convincing yourself not to quit? Well, there's hope, a thing called hope, expectation. I don't mean expecting something to work. I mean the excitement of going in the next day and seeing if the next experiment is better or why is it better or where is it taking me. So it's a journey of discovery, which is interesting. I mean, it doesn't sound from the outside, it sounds very boring and worrying and all that sort of thing. And true, it was worrying, the debt was getting bigger all the time. But I was getting a little closer a little closer and a little closer hadn't yet made it work and i hadn't got a product but i was actually enjoying the process even getting covered in dust because you i i our engineers do their own tests and build their own prototypes um because there's something funny about the process of actually making the prototype yourself that you learn and when it fails it may been something you noticed as you were gluing it together or machining apart, that sort of visceral experience makes you get forward.

59:43Whereas if someone else builds a prototype and someone else does the test and you look at the test results, you haven't got that same involvement, that same utter understanding of it. The understanding, again, quoting Charlie Munger, His whole point was that he thought that the spreading of the theory of comparative advantage is actually really dangerous. Because like, yeah, you can outsource like, oh, this country over here can manufacture and we'll do finance. He's like, but there's knowledge in trial and error. And the country that is doing the manufacturing is actually learning at a way faster rate than you because all day long they're just doing trial and error.

1:00:19So he's like, the problem with people that come up with the theories is the first order effect is fine. You're not considering, you're just ignoring the second, third, fourth, fifth order effects and what's going to happen over a long period of time. I've never heard anybody, it was in this book called Poor Charlie's Almanac. I was like, I've never even thought of that before. I went to school for business and they teach you all these things. I'm like, this is stupid. I think Munker is actually right about this. Yeah. No, experiencing the whole thing is absolutely critical. But were you taking it day at a time?

1:00:46Did you allow yourself to think how far, was it literally just what was in front of you? Like, or were you thinking what this is going to be a month from now, two years from now, during this time? Well, I was imagining that if I can make it work, that I could then go and show it to the existing manufacturers of these flawed vacuum cleaners with horrible bags in them, smelly, noisy, dusty, expensive bags, that someone would snap it up. That's what that's that was the what was in my mind. And it wouldn't necessarily make me rich, but it might get me out of debt. Money and finance is not a driver to you.

1:01:26No. No, I have to survive and live, of course. And money can sometimes be a good determinant of whether what you've done is successful or not. Not always. Sometimes it's just not. So I don't necessarily develop products to make enormous commercial success. It's nice to do that. But sometimes you do it because you want to do it. It might be a small success. I think there's a very simple genius to your approach in company building. I think this is why I keep recommending your books over and over again, because there is just a simple, beautiful, elegant genius to the way that you think. So this is a hairdryer is probably a good example of that.

1:02:05I used it this morning. Oh, sorry. It's excellent. Because, you know, we were making vacuum cleaners and cooling products and heating products and so on. And we had done this tiny motor, and we thought we could make an even smaller one if we'd done that motor. We can make an even smaller one, and that would make a great hairdryer instead of those bulky great motors they have at the moment. So that was the start of it. And these are discovered by Trioner. Yes. Well, very early on in the vacuum cleaner business, we were buying these big, heavy vacuum cleaner motors. We've got one here, but I mean, they're big, you know.

1:02:41And they get 30 ,000 RPM. And the theory is the faster you make a motor go, the smaller it can be, the fewer materials it can have, and the more electrically efficient it is. So quite early on, we realized that we needed to develop a new type of electric motor because electric motors, this sort of thing, haven't really changed for 150 years. It's the same Faraday idea. so we rather cheekily as people who don't make electric motors we thought let's make a new type of motor so I recruited some people from British universities who are academics who knew about electric motors and we started as a non-electric motor manufacturer developing our own motor it took a long time took 10 years 10 years before you had success in that too yeah yeah and you You can say we were being stupid and all that sort of thing, but no one had done this before.

1:03:38No one had made a motor go 140 ,000 RPM. Let's jump. We're going to jump back and forth. The dentist drill, but that only lasts a few seconds. Let's jump back and forth between the history of building a company and what you're doing now. When you're thinking about the products you're making now. Are you starting with, because you seem to be, my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, one of the best companies in the world are making motors, electric motors. And so I feel that now you're like, what else? We have this skill set. We have the company's 45 years old, something like that. We have this world-class skill set.

1:04:15Are there other products that we find deficient in need of renewal that we can apply our ability and world-class talent at building electric motors to? Is that a process of product development for you? It can be. Okay. And we have the brilliant idea of doing an electric car. Yeah. Because we make electric motors. We make filtration and cooling devices. Let's talk about the car. And we're developing batteries. Let's talk about the car. So we thought, oh, we should do an electric car. When was this? 2014. Okay. And I looked at what the industries were predicting, and they said 2 % electric cars by 2030.

1:05:00And I thought, they've got that wrong. That can't be right. So we started developing an electric car. We're developing batteries, by the way, new technology. We still are. So the batteries... Are you manufacturing batteries too? Not yet, not yet. But you want to. We want to, yeah. What a surprise. You want a controller or not? I didn't understand that. New technology ones, not ordinary ones. So we said we're developing batteries. Electric motors are one of our things. Air treatment is another one of our things. That's pretty much an electric car. So we started developing one. And then we got to 2017 and dieselgate happened.

1:05:40So the first three or four years, Tesla was everything. Tesla was doing everything very successfully. But no one was taking any notice of that. They all thought Tesla was a flash in the pan or something. They were ignoring it because it was such a different thing for them to do. They make internal combustion engines, not electric motors and batteries. So, Dieselgate changed all that. They realized, partly from a PR point of view, but also this horrific reaction to Dieselgate, that they had to get into electric cars. So, most of the big manufacturers immediately jumped into electric cars and made them, and they make a terrific loss on.

1:06:20Explain. Electric cars are very expensive things to make. Batteries are incredibly expensive. The electronics involved in the batteries are expensive. the batteries are very heavy so it's a it's a very different type of car and very expensive to make i mean much more expensive than an internal combustion engine they were selling them at a loss for a complicated reason car manufacturers emissions which are controlled by law are based on their overall emissions from their range of cars so if they had not the individual model? Not the individual model. So if they had a model which didn't emit anything, they could go on making big gas-guzzling vehicles in which they make a lot of money.

1:07:03So they're prepared to lose money on the electric car to make the money on the big gas-guzzling SUV or whatever it is. But Tesla and us were just electric vehicle manufacturers. Tesla's brilliant and$30 billion dollars gone into a huge investment i'm little company on my own and i have faced a very uncertain future trying to settle an electric car in that sort of setup and uh if you have fairly low volume in your new manufacturer all your costs are 30 percent higher because you're not buying very many um seats from the seat manufacturer or very many tires from the tire manufacturer and so on so All your costs are much higher.

1:07:50And we knew that because - You had a series of structural disadvantages. Huge disadvantages. And Tesla overcame it through share scale and might and investment. But we didn't have that sort of money. We couldn't take that sort of risk. So we stopped it. And how much did you spend on R &D for that? Well, we spent about$750 ,000. A million. $750 ,000 ,000. I keep working in pounds. Half a million. Half a billion pounds. Okay, so$750 ,000 ,000. Yeah. And you have the actual prototype sitting in your headquarters, I think, in Singapore. Yeah, we've got one there. Is there anyone that you can at least drive or they don't exist?

1:08:29There was one we could drive very slowly, but health and safety meant we couldn't take out. We built one of the final sort of... Where's that one? Is that the one in Singapore? No, no, no. That's a model in Singapore. No, no. We've got it in one of our hangars on our airfield. Okay. Yeah. Do you ever get in it anymore and just drive around? No, no, no. It's too painful. Like, would you get in a car that cost you$750 million? Everybody said, you know, you must have learned a lot from that experience. And the answer is I learned absolutely nothing. What do you mean? I mean, it was fun to do. It was fun to do.

1:09:05It was fun to do. And half the people were snapped up by other manufacturers. And half the people working on it came to work and do vacuum cleaners. Oh, I didn't even think of an emotional thing. Think about it. If you worked on something for a decade, it didn't go anywhere. They must feel... Yeah. Quite a decade, five or six years. Five or six years. No, it's an awful thing to do. But sadly, we didn't really learn anything from it. Yeah. All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common. They have excessively high energy levels. After spending several hours with James Dyson, it was obvious that he is high energy too.

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1:10:44That's a dollar a day. Learn more and join by visiting functionhealth.com forward slash Senra and use code Senra25 for a$25 credit towards your membership. That is functionhealth.com forward slash Senra. What is an example of you taking the existing skill set that Dyson has built up over many decades and applying it successfully to a new product then that did not come from, like, that's the actual, like, sequence of events. It's that you didn't identify the product first. You're just like, well, we have the skill set. What can we apply it to? Did you have hair dryers? What's, like, an example of that?

1:11:21Yes. I mean, I think the way we approach the car is slightly dangerous. Okay. Because we were saying, look, we've got these skill sets. And you were trying to match it. And we would say, oh, it looks, it would go very well in a car without really saying, you know, is that going to be a successful product? Is it going to be a breakthrough product? Well, it might have been a breakthrough product if we had managed to do the battery. And certainly our motors we developed were very efficient motors. And an electric car is all about efficiency, aerodynamic efficiency, drive motor efficiency, and so that you can have better, smaller batteries.

1:11:59Power consumption is a big thing. about six to a quarter of the power is taken up by air conditioning and heating, for example. So if you can make that more efficient, you can make your car go further. So it's all really about how far can you go on a battery. How do you come up with a new product? I know you're very secretive. You don't talk about things you haven't released yet. No, it's a very good question. I didn't answer it properly. There's two ways. One is you realize you have a technology and you can make a hairdryer. How many of these do you make now? Motors? Oh, we've made about 150 million of them.

1:12:34A year, though, now? Yeah, we make about 30 million a year. And it's very interesting. In the book, you said that companies, other companies, try to get you to make motors for them, and you adamantly refuse. Is that still correct? That's correct. And I love what you said, because you want your engineers focused exclusively on your own products. It's the importance of focus, as opposed to retrofitting your technology to somebody else's product and somebody else's shop. It's not a good commercial decision, that, by the way, the one I've taken. Yeah, but you're – Because I could have a division that dealt with other people, supplying meters to other people, which I'm sure would make money.

1:13:09Okay. This is very interesting. I think this is missing in business. I am – we talked about before we started recording, I had this idea of anti-business billionaire. These people that are so obsessed with the quality of the product they're making, that's their number one – they just want to make the best possible product. They do things that may seem irrational because it would improve the quality of the product. And the point I'd make is there's – I think you're one of them. There's a series of people I've read about where people like that that are just obsessed with making the best product for customers to solve an actual real need and retain control.

1:13:42They wind up with the money anyways. But that's not the motivator. So why – explain your rationale. And I think it's the right rationale. But I'm very curious if you can actually articulate it. why do you not set up this other division that you wouldn't have to run that would just make a bunch of money doing this thing? Why don't you do that? Because that doesn't excite me. Thank you. You forget the point of life is for living. I know. That's for making money. It's developing your technology and coming out with different radical products. That's what interests me, not making money per se. How long have you had the discipline to adhere to that?

1:14:18I'm just following excitement. I'm following curiosity. I'm following interest. How? Have you been like that forever? I think so, yes. Yes. Yeah, I'm very single-minded and not being distracted by things. And actually, it's really important that because when you start running a business or doing things, you have too much to do. There's too much to do. So you have to make all the time, you have to make a choice. What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? If you get to be a big business, that's still important. Say more about that. Well, if you get big, there's a tendency to think lots of people so you can do everything.

1:15:00But you can't. You can't do everything. You can't do everything well. And you probably can't do everything anyway. So the important thing is to decide what's really the most important thing and just do that. And there are going to be things you don't do. And there's going to be some failures because you're not doing things. But if you're doing something really, really well, then you'll be okay. How do you go about deciding what's the most important thing for you? Well, that's the fun. That's fun. I mean, you decide the most important thing, and that's an important decision. And you say, well, I haven't got time to do the other things.

1:15:37I won't do it. Will one of those kill me? I don't know. Probably not. So I'll concentrate on the thing I really want to do, which I think is the right thing to do. Is single-mindedness and focus the same thing to you, or do you mean different things? Yes, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. And if your brain isn't very big, which mine isn't, it's a much better way to run your life is just to concentrate on one thing at a time. But you have multiple product lines. Yeah, that's stretching my brain a bit. Yeah. But yes, and I'm learning to manage that in myself. I've got lots of wonderful people around me helping me, including my son now.

1:16:14I know you did the vacuum cleaner first, and you did the vacuum cleaner as the only product in Dyson for how long? Eight years, probably. Okay, so you're focused. And then was the washing machine the second? The washing machine came on quite early after about four or five years. But it didn't work. It worked very well. Don't say that to me. No, and I made another mistake with that, which was that, you know, I'd been making vacuum cleaners at about$300,$200,$300. The washing machine was$1 ,200,$1 ,300. So it's more expensive than other people's washing machines. Yeah, but the vacuum cleaner was more expensive than other vacuum cleaners, though.

1:16:58I wasn't learning from history. My marketing people said, if you make it cheaper, you'll sell a lot more. All right, so for the last time in my life, I listened to them. And, you know, marketing people get on selling things, not decide what product it should be or how much it should be sold for. So I listened to them, and we didn't sell anymore. We just lost more money. And the other directors, non-executive directors, said, you've got to stop that because you're losing money at it. Actually, if I'd been on my own, I'd have probably gone on with it and put the price up. But, you know, sometimes you have to listen to other people, and they were probably right.

1:17:41So we put it behind us and got on with what we were doing. They're still in operation, though. Oh, yeah, I use them. So you have your own Dyson Wash U.S. Yes, yeah. Yeah, it's great. It's great. And people have now copied a lot of the ideas, like the big door. You know, if you're trying to put a duvet in this tiny little hole.

1:18:01So, and it was very expensive to make, actually. And I should have learned my lesson from that, because it had two drums, it had two motors and a gearbox. It had a lot of things that other washing machines don't have. But it did a very good job. It was a very good washing machine. It begs the question, are there any other Dyson products that you own that are not available to consumers? What else have you made for yourself? I keep you caught about that. I keep you caught about that. Tell me after, please. I want to hear about this. I want to go back to this because I do think it's one of the most important things.

1:18:31The way I just described this, like this crazy experience I've been on, which, you know, I'm probably at the – when I'm done, probably going to read more biographies and autobiographies of, you know, entrepreneurs and founders and inventors and anybody else in the world. and everybody's always like, give me like a top 10 list or like break it, like can you condense down what you've learned so far? And I was like, well, if I can condense it down to a one word of how different these people are to most people, like most people in, you know, mass of humanity, it's focus. They're unbelievable, it's one word.

1:19:00It's like, they're unbelievably focused. I still, if you don't mind me just asking you another question, just see if you have anything more to say about this. Because it's something like I'm obsessed with as well. How do you figure out what to focus on for you?

1:19:14That's a very good question. I think it's something which you believe could work. And that's a breakthrough. It's something completely different. It's going to do a job much better. And that's what you think. But of course, you can only think it's... But what are you following there? Is it intuition? Is it just, I can't get this off of my mind? Like, what is actually happening? It's partly intuition, but I don't believe in intuition is feeling or guesswork. Well, I think you've got to elaborate on that. Intuition is much more interesting because it's all sorts of influences. It could be history.

1:19:52It could be all sorts of things that form an opinion that you define as intuition, but actually it's not. It's a whole lot of hundreds, thousands of things you've experienced which help you make a decision or give you an insight or give you hope. What do you think is guiding you to the right, to focus on the right thing? That's the hard thing. I mean, ultimately, it's intuition. But intuition isn't just, it's not air-fairy. It's not a feeling, you know. You know, your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things. And from that, you make a decision. And you can't rationalize it and say, oh, that's that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that.

1:20:43Therefore, this equals that. It's an intuition that I could be right, I could be wrong, but I think I'm going to back that I'm right about this. And then you've got to make it work. Yeah. But it's very fragile. That early idea, I came back to that with the vacuum cleaner, you know, the cyclone idea. It's a very fragile idea. You can blow it away. It's worth nothing. And they tried to, your partners and Bob era tried to blow it away. Everybody tried to. My friends tried to blow it away. What on earth are you doing? But he took hold of you right away? Yes. And did your confidence deepen as you get down the path?

1:21:20Or were you pretty adamant, like, no, I'm not going to give up until I solve this problem at the beginning? It's that. At the beginning. I got the bug and I'm going to go on. I'm going to make it work. And, you know, it took 5 ,100, much longer than I thought it would and all that. And I got deeper and deeper into debt. But I was going to make it work. I got a rat by a tail. I'm not going to let it go. I've got to make it work. I've got to. And the bigger the debt got, I suppose the pressure became greater and greater. The pressure did, but you had to have lulls in confidence and doubt throughout that period.

1:21:58Well, of course I had doubts and made it work. Yeah. Yeah. I can't pretend you don't have doubts. Were you talking to anybody about this? Did you? My wife. Nobody else. No. Not even Jeremy? No. No. No, actually, I bought him out. Let's go back to that. Okay. Can you explain why you bought him out? Yeah. This is after failing for, if I remember correctly, after failing to try to license it? Yes. The first successful license was Japan, right? No. The one that made money. You're making like$70 ,000 a year. Yes. And they sold it not even to, you weren't even sure they used it because it was like pink, right?

1:22:36No, they did use it. I thought you said in the book they may have just been there for like some kind of art. Maybe, maybe. They didn't sell very many, but they did sell some. And I never discovered how many they sold because they're very secretive about it. But they did pay me the minimum royalties. That's when you brought Jeremy out? Yes. We had a big lawsuit. Is this to Amway? Yes. Oh, God. And he hated lawsuits. So when that started, he wanted to get out. So I— Was that contentious between you? Did it damage your relationship? No, not at all. No. And we remained very good friends afterwards.

1:23:09He just said, I hate lawsuits. And my financial advisor thinks the vacuum cleaner is going nowhere. And he owned 49 % of the business. So what did you buy an offer? I bought him out. How much money though? 45 ,000 pounds. This is another thing. His children never forgive me. I've remained friendly with his children, but they will never forgive me. I think people will know this, hopefully in the introduction or whatever the case is, but you own 100 % of Dyson. Yes. It is one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world. Well, I don't think it's that. Because I've heard stories. That's fine.

1:23:46I mean, I'll talk about it. And you bought out your 49 % partner for£45 ,000. All right. So what happens? Now you're on your own. Yeah, completely on my own. And you stayed. I know you have executive directors. I fight the lawsuit. Had to fight that lawsuit with Amway. Yes. For five years. Yes. Borrowing money, selling actions in the lawsuit, lawyers on contingency, all that type of thing. And it took five years of my life. The only income was the drip of license agreements for that point? Yeah, yes. A drip of license agreements just kept me going. At one point you said, to hell with it, I'm doing this on my own.

1:24:25I meant not licensing, like I'm going to manufacture and control it from soup to nuts. Yes. It was at the end of the lawsuit, actually. That's when I decided I had enough of this licensing game. I'm going to do it myself. But you have no money. No money. I'm sick of traveling because I was traveling in Japan, America all the time. And I was just sick of it. And I got meningitis from it, I think, from an airplane. So I thought that I'm going to stop and I'm going to have a little sort of cottage industry making vacuum cleaners in Britain. That was the... Okay. But then you have to borrow, I think it was like 600 ,000 pounds?

1:25:01Yes. For tooling. For the tooling. And you did that how? Well, I went to various venture capitalists, the sort of people who ought to lend to startups. And the kind of response I got was, well, you know, it's not a very interesting area. We're investing in restaurants, fast food restaurants at the moment. Or we're not lending to you because you're an engineer. If you bring someone from the industry to run it, then we might consider backing it. Those are the sort of responses I was getting from venture capitalists, as we used to call them. And in the end, I went to my local bank, the clearing bank.

1:25:38And you're putting up as collateral my house. Again? Yes. Okay. I'm getting quite used to this, by the way. Deirdre has to keep signing the awful gray forms for signing away the house. So, yeah, I borrowed. They lent me a huge amount of money, actually. I mean, it was 1992. There was a big housing crisis. The banks had lots of return properties. Wait, there was a guy. didn't somebody like inside the bank vouch for you? Lloyd's Bank ran a system. Instead of going to a man sitting in a branch of the bank and borrowing from them, they had a sort of flying doctor who went around businesses. So he was a real business expert.

1:26:22And he didn't work from an office. He just went around people's businesses. Interesting man, actually. And the bank refused his request for the loan. So he went to the ombudsman within the bank and persuaded them to lend me the money. And it was a crazy thing for them to do, actually, because, you know, this guy is setting up business to make vacuum cleaners to compete with all the big multinationals. What's he doing? Living in a little coach house near Bath. When you think about it, it's completely mad. When we were making a profit and everything was OK, I said to him, why did you lend it to us?

1:27:01Why did you go through the hoops to lend me that money, which was sort of a risky thing to do? At a time of deep recession, when they had to repossess so many houses, he said, oh, well, I went home to my mother, my wife, and said, what do you think of a vacuum cleaner without a bag? And she said, brilliant, exactly what I want. And he said, I also saw that you had fought a five-year lawsuit in America, and I saw that you had determination. so i was very lucky it's a real piece of luck do you think that is the key to to succeed is determination more important i mean we talked about focus but determination is much more important than intelligence yes yes doggedness never never never giving up um just carrying on and not worrying what other people are saying you know my friend said you're completely mad What are you doing spending all that every day in that shed with all that dust around?

1:27:59So most people around you were trying to dissuade you from where you're going? Yes, yes. Everybody thought I was mad. How did you receive that feedback or that criticism? The more I got it, the more encouraged I became, actually. Because I don't know. I remember when I was trying to license it, I went to all the people who are now my competitors and a lot of others as well. and they all turned it down. They were all quite interested in it, but turned it down. And the more it was turned down, the more I realized I had something. You believed you were right. Yeah. You had no doubt. Yeah. Because they never really gave a good reason.

1:28:40Well, for the vacuum, the existing manufacturers, there's a great story in the book. You know, again, I'm going to quote Charlie Margaret. He's one of my heroes. He's like, never, ever think about anything when you should be thinking about the power of incentives. He's like, incentives rule human, like they drive so much of human behavior. And I'm thinking of Charlie when I'm reading your book. And it's like, yeah, you know, it turns out it's really hard to sell. I know you don't like this word, the bagless vacuum cleaner. You think it should be like no loss of suction vacuum cleaner. I'm just going to use the term for the story.

1:29:08It's really hard to sell a bagless vacuum cleaner to people who make$500 million a year selling vacuum bags. Well, it was partly that. It was partly that. And partly I realized they didn't want to change. Human history of cleaning. Yeah, and that's what encouraged me. I mean, although each rejection, I should have got more and more depressed. You had the opposite reaction. I had the opposite reaction. These guys don't want to change. I think this is going to be one of the most important things I learned from this conversation is this idea. Assuming that you're doing things for the right reason, you're following your curiosity, you're completely obsessed with what you're doing, this idea of taking essentially what is a negative and turning it into fuel.

1:29:47You're turning it into fuel. You're trying to dissuade me, and it's only making me more dogged. I think your dogged determination is a great line, by the way. Yes, it's not. Well, no, they're rejecting it without having a good reason. Yeah. That's what was interesting. Yeah. You would have listened if they found a design flaw or if they told you there was something there. You're like, no, no, I am right where everybody else is wrong. Difference for the sake of it. That is how you build insanely best products in your category. You seem to be able to build a best product in every category you create.

1:30:18But also how you create value, like a durable value, so that you're actually doing something differently and better than everybody else. That's what I'm trying to do, different and then advance. We also have a crazy line in this book, which I don't know if you remember, but you would be different even if it was worse. I don't know if you still believe that now. Oh, yes, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, you got to say more about that. That is a crazy thing to say. Yes, because sometimes, for example, with the vacuum cleaner, dipping the dirt out of a bin, some people say it's worse than disposing of a bag because it creates a bit of dust.

1:30:58I mean, not everything is always perfect about something which makes progress and eventually you overcome the problem. So not everything is better. Sometimes not everything is better. But the good overcomes the bad. It's much better than the bad. But the difference is you're essentially organizing design principle. It has to be different. You're not going to make – there's no reason for – No, it's got to be better. It's got to be better. It has to be better. Yeah, in my opinion. Yes. But it has to – you're not going to make like another Me Too product. No. No. No, there's – no. Because I don't want to do that.

1:31:36I'm not motivated to do that. and I built a team around me who are motivated to take risks and do something different and better always so let's go back to you buy the tooling I'm not going to like redo the entire book we'll skip over the issue that you're having to move the tooling and you're having issues but then eventually you have this great line in the book you end one in this chapter these are like my favorite like some of my favorite three paragraphs in the entire book and it's on total control. And you say, from the first sprouting of the idea, through research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineering drawings, tooling, production, sales and marketing, all the way into the homes of the nation, it is most likely to succeed if the original visionary, and you put into parentheses, our mule, because you're only celebrating your stubbornness, sees it right through.

1:32:24As I often have said, I aim not to be clever, but to be dogged. And my doggedness had gotten me so far to a point where I had my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner at last. On May 2nd, 1992, I found myself looking at the first fully operational, visually perfect Dyson Dual Cyclone. I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. May 2nd, 1992 was my 45th birthday. Still heavily in debt. Do you remember that day? Oh, yeah. No, I do. Yes, I do. Yeah, I remember quite a lot of my birthdays. But yes, that was really important because to get to that point had taken me 11 years, I think, wasn't it?

1:33:1411 years, something like that. And a lot of money. And I was hugely in debt. But I had the first prototype that worked. Outside of your family, is that period of your life the period you're most proud of? uh no no i don't know it's all it's all it carries on doesn't stop so i don't ever sort of stop and think now's a moment to be proud um if i don't really like pride why it's sort of self-serving um it's never good enough so you can't be proud explain more well i'm never satisfied i I mean, there's always something wrong. I've got to go on improving it. You talk about this in this book, that the engineering mindset, if you're reading this, I think you even say, like if you're reading this, you have this mindset, you know, like it never turns off.

1:34:09You're never satisfied. You can't just go home and be like, oh, everything's, this is great. You just see the imperfections. I don't know. Is it really focusing on imperfections or just focusing on the missing improvement? It's just knowing that things could be better, that there's a better way of doing it, that I haven't done it well enough, that I've got to make it better. I'm just driven like that. So I'm never satisfied. And I think satisfaction is a pretty dangerous thing anyway. Say more. Well, because there's a kind of smugness to it that I'm perfect and I don't need to do any better than this.

1:34:45I can relax. And I just don't think like that. I'm always wanting to do something better. My wife hates it because when we're exploring the car or something, I always think there's something better around the corner and she wants to stop and enjoy where we are at the moment. So, I mean, I do accommodate her on that. But, I mean, that's how I think and feel. But does that lead to – but you seem to be very, like, happy and, like, not content. That's not the word. But you seem to be, like, a happy person where this is not, like, a torturous inner monologue where all you see is, like, you're never satisfied and you see the things that could be fixed.

1:35:22It is slightly torturous. So, okay. But it's what I do. I feel the same way, though. It's what excites me. But it can also lead you to periods of very dark unhappiness. How do you not let it? Well, I suppose I'm lucky because I don't think it makes me that unhappy. I mean, I have moments of unhappiness. Give me an example of a moment of unhappiness. Well, you know, or something or an experiment doesn't work and I hope it would. Those sort of things. but I bounced back from them very quickly. They're just minor. Is that more of like you got better with the wisdom of age and experience? No, I've always been like that.

1:36:02So you've basically been the same person and you just never stopped? Never stopped. Yes, yeah, yeah, I'd say that's true. And I think my father's death has quite a lot to do with that, coming back to that. And I was in a sort of group, because we lived in a school, in a public school, in a private school is probably a better expression, and the other teachers' children were the same sort of age, so we were a group, and we had the run of the school grounds during the holidays. But I was the youngest, so the others were up to five years older than me. So I was always dealing with people who were bigger and stronger than me or cleverer than me.

1:36:45And so I think it made me always strive. So I think a combination of being the youngest, because I was the youngest of three children anyway, and younger than this group that I went around with, made me try to punch above my weight a bit and made me very determined. In order to succeed at anything, I had to be really, really good. In order to beat them at tennis or whatever it was, or in a race, I had to be punching above my weight. So I think that and losing my father. So losing, realizing I was on my own. And I was away at boarding school on my own. So that whole combination made me the sort of character I am.

1:37:32Made me never satisfied, always wanting to find something better. And bouncing back from failures. That's the perfect spot to end this conversation. James, they say never meet your heroes. They're 100 % wrong. I don't feel ashamed at all. You're one of my heroes. This conversation has been excellent. Out of all the people that I've studied and met, you're definitely the person I try to emulate the most. I really appreciate you taking the time. Well, thank you, David. It's great to hear your story as well. Thank you very much. How you succeeded. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

1:38:03Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.