James Dyson: 5,127 Prototypes

[static] You have a weird, uh, combination of, like, you build some of the greatest modern technology, but you're-- you have this obsession with and love of, like, the past, which I think is very interesting.

Yeah. A, a healthy obsession with the past, I think. It is, is... I mean, I did Latin, Greek, and ancient history at school-

Yeah

... and apparently of no use at all, but it is, it is interesting how Greek civilization took place and how Roman civilization started and how it failed and how people governed.

Mm-hmm.

Were oligarchies good? Were dictatorships good? So, uh, or democracies. You know, all, all-- it's interesting, and history repeats itself, and it's repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment. So it's, uh, history is interesting.

We were talking before we started recording. I have this obsession with reading everything that you have written. I've read your [chuckles] uh, first autobiography five times, your second one at least two times. But then, you know, 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, like, 2001. What-

Yeah

... caused you? Like, why did you do this? You were building your company at the exact same time.

Yes, uh, because I'm really interested in inventions, how, 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, um, asked me to do it, so I agreed to do it, and actually we published it as a series of colour supplements to a weekend newspaper and then put it into a book.

How old were you when you started this, when, when you had this obsession with history?

Oh, from school. Absolutely from school. Um, but particularly Greek and Roman history. I mean, British history is really interesting, and I know all the kings and queens. I know their dates. Uh, I'm not, I'm not a very clever person, actually. I'm not good at remembering things, but I have remembered all that history, and it, it jolly well does repeat itself, so you can learn really interesting things from history.

And this is what I've noticed. People that are, you know, the best in the world at what they do or near the best in the world at what they do, they all have this love of learning from history. Charlie Munger has one of my greatest qu-- uh, favourite quotes about this. He says that, uh, "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 if you can just pick up a book of [chuckles] 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, a very-- I had this obsession and love with my work, just like you do, and in my case, was, it was not invention, it was creating podcasting, podcasts. And this book, I found it, you know, I think it was April 2018, the very first time, uh, I read it, and I'd already been struggling to start my podcast for two years with very-- almost no, uh, 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 at year two into that five and a half years, before I had any, uh, you know, even remote level of success, is because I'm like, well, James struggled-- this book is, ninety percent of it is you struggling for fourteen years, building 5,127 prototypes-