#201 Isambard Kingdom Brunel (James Dyson's Hero)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. A century is a brief span as a historian measures time. Yet between 1760 and 1860, a small group of men transformed the face of England and brought about an economic and social upheaval so vast that the life of no single person in this country remained unaffected by it.
They set in motion a process of rapid, technical evolution that still continues.
Of this small group of men whose lives had such prodigious consequences, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was perhaps the outstanding personality.
He has his statue in marble. Every boy's railway book refers to him.
You may have seen his name engraved upon that great bridge.
We may know of him as the overambitious author of the Broad Gauge or of that premature giant among ships, the Great Eastern.
Perhaps we only remember him by virtue of the evocative overtones of that remarkable name.
A name in which all the pride and self-confidence of an era seems to wring out like a brazen challenge.
What sort of man was this Brunel?
That is the question which this book tries to answer.
Although I've always admired Brunel's work, my inquiry was inspired by curiosity and not by hero worship. But the further I went, the clearer did it seem to me that large though the achievement was, the man was larger still.
Brunel in fact was more than a great engineer. He was an artist and a visionary. A great man with a strangely magnetic personality which uniquely distinguished him even in that age of powerful individualism in which he moved.
To learn something about such a man, about his private thoughts, his hopes and ambitions, and about the spirit which drove him is to know about the sources from which the greatest of all revolutions derived its dynamic strength.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today which is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the definitive biography of the engineer, visionary and Great Britain. And it was written all the way back in 1957 by LTC Rolte. So before I jump back into the book, I just want to tell you where I got the idea to read a biography on Brunel. Last week, I reread the autobiography of James Dyson. And James Dyson is extremely explicit in his autobiography. He's like, listen, Isambard Kingdom Brunel is my personal god. He talks about all the ideas that he learned from studying the life and career of Brunel that he applied to his own career, and that he would use the example of the persistence and doggedness and perseverance of Brunel to inspire him not to give up in his own work. And so he credits Brunel with building the foundation of Dyson's multi-billion dollar empire that he has now. And so I just want to reread this part again, because I think it's so important. It speaks to the power of biography and learning from the great people that came before us. And so this is Dyson talking about Brunel. 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. So I'm actually going to pause right there before I finish this paragraph. This biography of Brunel covers his entire career. Most of my highlights, as I go back and reread them, is about what Dyson picked up here. The fact that he was fired by an inner strength and self-belief, almost impossible to imagine. James says it's impossible to imagine in this feckless age. Remember, James is writing this book in the early 2000s. Funny, the author, LTC, wrote, he's writing this book in the 50s and thinks the same exact way. There's a lot of paragraphs in the book where it's like, they just don't make people like this anymore. So let's go back to this.