James Dyson, Dyson

**David Senra** (0:02)
You have a weird combination of like, you build some of the greatest modern technology, but you have this obsession with and love of like the past, which I think is very interesting.

**James Dyson** (0:12)
Yeah. A healthy obsession with the past, I think. I did Latin, Greek, and ancient history at school, and apparently of no use at all. But it is interesting how Greek civilization took place and how Roman civilization started and how it failed, and how people governed, were oligarchies good, were dictatorships good, or democracies. It's interesting and history repeats itself, and it's repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment. So history is interesting.

**David Senra** (0:44)
We were talking before we started recording. I have this obsession with reading everything that you have written. I read your first autobiography five times, your second one at least two times. But then people might know about this, but they don't know that you actually wrote a history of great inventions. And what I noticed about this is it was published, I think you were writing this in 2001 What caused you, why did you do this? You were building your company at the exact same time.

**James Dyson** (1:11)
Yes, because I'm really interested in inventions, how they happened, who did them, what personalities were behind them. And they are inspiring stories. And luckily, an editor of a big newspaper in Britain asked me to do it. So I agreed to do it. And actually we published it as a series of color supplements to a weekend newspaper and then put it into a book.

**David Senra** (1:34)
How old were you when you started this, when you had this obsession with history?

**James Dyson** (1:39)
Oh, from school. Absolutely from school. Particularly Greek and Roman history. I mean, British history is really interesting. And I know all the kings and queens. I know their dates.
I'm not a very clever person. I'm not good at remembering things. But I have remembered all that history. And it jolly well does repeat itself. So you can learn really interesting things from history.

**David Senra** (2:01)
And this is what I've noticed. People are, you know, the best in the world of what they do or near the best in the world of what they do. They all have this love of learning from history. Charlie Munger has one of my greatest favorite quotes about this. He says that learning from history is a form of leverage.
And you can actually, you know, use ideas of people long dead. And you'll find out that they were very similar to you. That they had the same, they went through the same struggles, the same, they had the same fears, they had the same insecurities. They had the same triumphs. And you can just pick up a book of somebody's life story, like the ones that I have in front of me. I told you before we started recording. I was going through, you know, very, I had this obsession and love with my work, just like you do. And in my case, it was not invention. It was creating podcasts. Podcasts. And this book, I found it, you know, I think it was April 2018, the very first time I read it. And I'd already been struggling to start my podcast for two years with very, almost no success at all. Basically none, no success. And it took me five and a half years of struggle. And the reason this is so important to find it year two into that five and a half years before I had any even remote level of success is because I'm like, well, James, this book is 90% of it is you're struggling for 14 years, building 5,127 prototypes and refusing to give up. You're also funny as hell in the book, where you're like, anytime if you think I'm, you know, have a little bit of ego, just realize that I'm only celebrating that I have the stubbornness of a mule. This is the note. So obviously I mark up the books like crazy, showing this before we start recording. And this is really, I get to the very last page, and when I was recording my thoughts for the benefit of other people by making the podcast, this is what you inspire me to do. It's like, I hope Dyson's story inspires you to say, when you get knocked down, all right then, let's give it another go.

**James Dyson** (3:52)
Yeah, bouncing back is really important. And if you are exploring new territory, experimenting, you're trying to do something different, which is what you and I want to do, you're going to fail many times, and you've got to bounce back from it. And actually, if you learn that failure is so much more interesting than success, because failure, you question it, well, why did it go wrong? And actually, the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. But if something works, you say, great, that works, and you don't even stop to wonder why it works. So you've got to enjoy failure, as that sounds a difficult thing to do, but you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things, if you want to not change the world, but change things and improve things. Goes hand in hand. And it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that. At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant and to get the answer right first time. And there are brilliant people who can do that, but for the rest of us, we're not brilliant. And to get there, we have to strive, and we have to go through failure. And we realize that, you know, you don't get it right first time, you don't get it right second time. In my case, and I counted it, it's 5,127 times. One of the things I always want to say is that, that sounds like a struggle. Okay, it was a struggle, but actually it was a hugely enjoyable struggle. The debt was mounting and I had three children, a wife and a home and a mortgage to pay like everybody else. But I had a real point in life, I had a real aim and I had to get there. The failures were interesting because I'd learned from every single one of them, almost every single one of them.