James Dyson: just do it
He’s a hell of an inventor and he’s a sir too. On How I Built This
James Dyson owes a lot to his mentor back at the university: his professor and then first employer had faith in him and his engineering skills and gave him free space to develop the first successful projects he worked on. But two things set him apart. He wanted to be on his own as soon as possible and he wanted to apply the most important lesson his professor gave him:
don’t think about how to do it, just do it.
That was and still is his main focus: to improve existing things and appliances, no matter if he knows how they work. He just need to take on them, develop a better solution and make it work. That’s the attitudine that has always allowed him to tackle tough tasks and improve them. Through tests, trials and lots of errors. Exactly what happened when he spent five years in his early forties to develop the first prototypes of his now widely ubiquitous vacuum cleaner, or rather the most important evolution of the vacuum cleaner ever attempted. It took him more than 1.600 prototypes to get the perfect one and he worked on them on his own, running on very tight capitals he got from previous jobs and from his mentor. Five long years and eventually a working prototype to show to the most important vacuum cleaner manufacturers that told him that the idea was good but they were not interested because they earned more money selling bags for their products instead that from the products themselves. He didn’t blame them though: their was just another business model he wasn’t actually interested in. He wanted to optimize existing products. And he did it and kept on doing it, optimizing hair and hand dryers and lights and air filters.
Most of the products he designed have been and still are hugely successful but he admits that the method is always the same: trials and many errors.
Half of the times I’m wrong but this doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t keep on trying.
