#200 James Dyson (Against the Odds)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. The mere fact that something had never been done 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.
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 Marc Brunel, who spent time in a debtor's prison, when the tunnel that he was building seemed destined for failure.
When I have considered relinquishing total control and taking a backseat consultant's role, and there have been many fantastic buyout offers, I have remembered how Brunel never accepted such a position in his life. I have tried in my own way to draw on Brunel's dream of applying emerging technology in ways as yet unimagined. He was never afraid to be different or shocking. He never shirked the battles with the money men. 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 boat with people and sent them across the sea.
I have asked people only to push my inventions around, not to get inside them and try to float. And so I have sought out originality for its own sake and modified it into a philosophy which demands difference from what exists.
And I have told myself, when people tried to make me modify my ideas, 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 Brunel and to other designers and engineers 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 would all turn out the way it has.
And that was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today and the one I just finished rereading for the third time, which is Against The Odds, An Autobiography by James Dyson. So I reread the book because I want to do something special for episode number 200 And out of the more than 200 books that I've read so far for Founders Podcast, this is still my number one recommendation. I think every single entrepreneur, every single investor, every single person that is trying to do something difficult in their life should read this book. In his lifetime, Steve Jobs said a lot of brilliant things, but I think one of the most important things he ever said was this quote. He says, I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. And the book that I hold in my hand is pure perseverance. It took James Dyson 14 years of struggle, 5,127 prototypes, before he had a high quality product that he owned completely. And 90% of this book is all about that struggle and the lessons that he learned during that time period. And the reason I started with that specific excerpt is because James Dyson calls Isambard, Kingdom Brunel, one of his personal gods. And what's amazing about that is the fact that Brunel was doing his work a hundred years before James Dyson was. And yet Dyson is constantly talking about, hey, I got this idea from Brunel. Hey, the fact that I'm going through a difficult period, the fact that I read and learned about Brunel actually fired me on and gave me the confidence to continue knowing that everything is going to turn out OK in the end. It's the perfect illustration of this idea that good ideas are timeless. And James, like all the greatest founders in history, were also students of history themselves. So much so that James wrote a book. I actually have it right here. It's called A History of Great Inventions, written by James Dyson. I actually recorded like a small little bonus episode. I think it's like 45 minutes, maybe an hour long. It's a very unusual book. It's almost like a textbook, like a small textbook, or like maybe like a small coffee book. But anyways, I'm going to... I recorded a bonus episode for this other podcast feed I was going to do, but I realized, hey, that doesn't make any sense. I need to just have one podcast feed. So I'm going to include at the very end of this episode, you'll see that I'm going to include the bonus episode that I did on James Dyson's book, The History of Great Inventions. And I'm just going to put that at the end of this episode.