Sir James Dyson And The Decision Of Perseverance

So great is English businessman and inventor Sir James Dyson’s success that you probably already know what he is famous for, simply by his name. Dyson vacuum cleaners are considered the gold standard all over the world, and people like and trust this brand more than any other. But this great empire took time to build, and it started with nothing more than Dyson getting frustrated with his own Hoover vacuum cleaner—it always lost suction power and replacing its disposable bags was a chore.

ally was—it took a whopping: 5126

on vacuum cleaner in Japan in: 1983

But where there wasn’t a way, Dyson attempted to make one. Instead of giving up, he decided he’d have to make his own company. At the age of forty-six he embarked on producing and marketing the product himself. You can already guess how the rest of the story went—Dyson built that company up, and today it’s valued at almost $4 billion.

Like Edison, he was tireless in his work and never allowed adversity to stop him.

But Dyson displayed a truly rare singlemindedness. The next time you look at a Dyson vacuum cleaner, you can imagine it as a symbol of rock-solid perseverance. Dyson pushed through frightening debt, discouragement from his peers and immense resistance from the market.

So, what could a vacuum cleaner magnate teach us about personal discipline?

Dyson is, if anything, an expert on failure. Rather than trying to avoid it at all costs, he now actively seeks it out, knowing how valuable it is in the creation and innovation process—he even spends several million pounds every week on research and design, i.e. the pursuit of failing, learning and trying again, or what he calls educative failure.

“Stumbling upon the next great invention in an ‘ah-hah!’ moment is a myth,” Dyson says. “It is only by learning from mistakes that progress is made…each failure brought me closer to solving a problem.” What does failing give you? Insight and experience. It tells you what doesn’t work, and maybe even why. Failing is a lesson, if we can learn to embrace it.

Imagine a forty-two-year-old Dyson with money problems, bad debt, literally thousands of failed prototypes under his belt and a market that didn’t want what he had to sell. It’s easy to think of the countless people who would have given up in such circumstances. But Dyson did not. He had confidence in his ideas, and the courage to keep on even when others didn’t share his vision. The incredible thing is that Dyson achieved after so long, and more than that, he kept going even after he’d found some success.

His perseverance was not just a way to overcome adversity and come out the other end. It was a way of life. Today his company thrives on open-mindedness, bravery, and courage. He has claimed to love hiring younger people who are unburdened with expectations of how things “should” be done, and are more fearless when it comes to trying something completely new. Here we see the growth mindset appearing again: by putting ourselves in the frame of eternal students, we never allow ourselves to become complacent, or assume we know all the answers.

If we can comfortably tolerate the unknown, we can give ourselves a real chance of actually grasping it and doing things that haven’t been done before.

In the end, it’s not quite what Dyson did as how he did it. There must have surely been times when he doubted himself and was tired, and just wanted to give up. Undoubtedly his work took an enormous amount of effort and diligence and, you guessed it, self-discipline. We often think of self-discipline only as the skill it takes to push through and work hard even when we’re lazy or tired or unmotivated. But it’s more than this.

Self-discipline is the ability to drive ourselves forward when everything else is threatening that progress, or when we don’t even know the direction we’re supposed to be going in. Self-discipline is about the habit of looking plainly at your fear, every day, and realizing it will never go away, and that if you want to achieve your goals, you’re going to have to act despite that fear.

When asked, Dyson tells his admirers that he never gives advice, and that we shouldn’t listen to advice. He even warns against doing market research because it so often takes the wind out of your sails. He believes people shouldn’t strive to be entrepreneurs in the first place—rather, identify what you care about and go at it full throttle. The success will come when it comes, but in the meantime, your work is always here, in the present, being the best you can be no matter what.

Like so many ultra-accomplished businessmen of his caliber, he ironically doesn’t think of himself as one, and likely wouldn’t have found the same success if his primary goal was to win fame and make a lot of money. This gives us a clue to the correct attitude toward success. Those who make it work are masters at the process, and they are not overly attached to the outcome. This is the growth mindset applied to business. If your ego and vanity shackle you to an idea of how your success should look, you’ll be less resilient in the face of adversity, and less wiling to learn when life doesn’t go to plan. The greatest people are often far more comfortable with complete failure and even humiliation than those who have their eye set on fame and glory at the finish line.

These lessons are not just for business. Any time we want to improve, learn, create something new or gain mastery or knowledge, we must work for it. Just like Jean-Dominique Bauby was able to write a bestseller with less physical capacity than most people, it’s sobering to think that Dyson was successful even with far more resistance and difficulty than the average person can expect in their endeavors. The next time you look at the limits and obstacles in your way, ask yourself if they’re really preventing you from doing what you want… or if it’s you and the beliefs you hold that are keeping you back.

This is an exercise in recalibration. For whatever reason, some of us may believe that life ought to be far easier than it is, and take any sign of discomfort, adversity or unpleasantness as a sure sign that we’re on the wrong path, and should just quit. Anybody can dream about the wonderful goals they’d love to have for themselves, but the more decisive factor is how much discomfort and uncertainty you’re able to withstand, not how big and fanciful you can make your dreams.

Anyone could say, “It would be great to be a wealthy and successful businessman,” but the rubber hits the road when you realize that this path is one of constantly facing your fears and working incredibly hard.

Dyson perhaps possessed an almost supernatural talent for persevering despite all odds, and many would correctly say it’s survivor bias to claim that his perseverance was a good thing—would we have admired him so much if he had failed all his life, and never made anything of his business? Nobody can predict the future, and there’s no saying what fate or luck will land in our laps. But for someone like Dyson, this is irrelevant.

Maintaining an unflappable attitude and a pride in one’s work—whether it’s successful or not—is what will keep you persevering, in the absence of external reward, praise or anything else. Like the other people we’ve explored in this book, Dyson found a source of his own value and meaning—and it came from within. Only by having a fearsome inner drive can we keep going no matter what the circumstances. When we believe in ourselves, are well aligned to our values and care about the process rather than the outcome, then we can simply take failures along the way in stride.

It may be a helpful practice to joyfully welcome failure when it happens to you. Literally smile and celebrate when things flop, fail or turn out completely differently than you’d hoped for. It’s proof that you’re growing. Thank the universe for giving you a great clue, and a wonderful gift on your endless journey. Don’t give your ego the chance to realize it’s been bruised. Laugh at yourself if you must, and swiftly move along. Rather than turning away in embarrassment at what’s been done “wrong,” simply become curious like Edison and study the problem itself: Why did it happen this way? What could you do better next time? How are you going to make that happen? Identifying the very next step to get you back in the game can be a wonderful antidote to feeling demoralized at a setback.

This doesn’t only apply to inventions dreamt up in a laboratory. We all make grand plans for ourselves that crash and burn. Our dream job isn’t what we thought it would be, we bought something foolish, said the wrong thing, broke something valuable, mismanaged a social matter, injured our knee while running or discovered our souffle keeps getting a dent in the middle no matter what we do.

But it’s OK to fail, it’s OK to change course midway, and it’s OK to start all over again and try something really outrageous. Provided your mistakes don’t literally threaten lives, why shouldn’t you take the opportunity to try as many things as you can? Why shouldn’t you use your entire life as a laboratory, and test out what works and what doesn’t?

To practice some of this in your own life, start changing the way you talk about failure. A good start is to remove the word from your vocabulary entirely! Instead of saying you failed, reframe it: you got a different result from the one you were expecting. This small tweak can lead to large mental shifts around the way you think about learning, work and failure. Make a point of voluntarily sharing all the times you’ve made a mistake. Be honest and straightforward—isn’t it a relief, in some ways, to just accept that things aren’t perfect the first time round?

If someone calls you out on an error or criticizes your work, thank them. It takes a deep confidence and sense of security to know that being wrong doesn’t threaten your sense of self-worth, and isn’t something to deny or get defensive about. Rather than seeing a mistake or failure as life slapping you in the face, start to think of it as a kind teacher who is constantly working to keep you on your toes, to help you evolve and develop. If you are comfortable looking at, talking about and experiencing feelings of failure, you become in a sense immune to them. You realize how little power failing has over you.

You failed. So what? What’s more, you’ll fail again. So what? A great insight can come when you realize that people will often only judge your mistakes harshly if you do so first. If you can look at your life without shame or regret or embarrassment, very few other people will be tempted to do so. If your attitude is to never be ashamed of the results of hard work and curiosity, why should anyone else?