Creative Wisdom From James Dyson
James Dyson at work on his next big idea. Image courtesy of Dyson.
James Dyson built his empire on something as ordinary as a vacuum, yet his outlook is anything but mundane.
He’s a restless problem-solver who treats everything —from airflow to product design to business strategy — as a creative challenge waiting to be reimagined. And he’s pretty darn good at seeing elegant possibilities in everyday objects.
Dyson is equal parts engineer, designer, and hands-on builder who turned a single frustration — his vacuum losing suction — into a global technology company. He spent years perfecting his first cyclonic prototype, funding the work himself and refusing to license it when others doubted the idea. That same stubbornness carried him from lone inventor to founder of a multibillion-dollar enterprise that now develops everything from hair dryers to air purifiers. He remains deeply involved in the details of design, proving that an entrepreneur can scale a company without surrendering the creative spirit that started it.
Read on for 10 of his insights, taken from his book Against the Odds, including why he sees perseverance as costly, his delight in skewering “bean-counters”, and how to strengthen an idea so it can become a global product.
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1. “The thing about inventing is that it is a continued and continuous process, and it is fluid. Inventions generate further inventions.”
2. “The only way to keep possession of your invention is to keep strengthening it.”
3. “I am not to be clever, but to be dogged.”
4. “The trouble is, though, that perseverance is by no means cheap.”
5. “From the first sprouting of the idea, through research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineer 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 (or mule) sees it right through.”
6. “Innovation requires builders, not bean-counters, and the last person you should be running something is the man who controls the cost. Sure, you need the man in there somewhere to keep a rein on things, but he shouldn’t be at the top.”
7. “Accountants, executives, money men are often jealous of their creative counterparts, because they themselves have never created anything. They are always very quick to do the creative ones down, to be negative and destructive in everything, and to insist that the creatives know nothing of the business as a way of defending their own importance in the scheme of things. I guess it is a pretty frightening thing to be uncreative.”
8. “The only real way to make money is to offer something to the public entirely new, that has style value as well as substance, and which they cannot get anywhere else.”
9. “In business, you will be wrong by and large, 50 percent of the time. The trick is to recognize when you have gone wrong and correct the damage – not to worry, at the moment of making the decision, whether it is the right one.”
10. “Only the man who who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on other, and demand a heavy price, with all his heart.”
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