James Dyson quotes: the vacuum billionaire’s best thoughts.
“What I’ve learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you’re hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.”
“You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realized.”
“It’s a matter of having the right attitude – humble, curious, determined, willing to fail and try.”
“We all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it.”
“I reckon about 50% of the decisions you make are the wrong decisions. Which means you shouldn’t worry too much about decisions. You know you’ve got a 50% chance of getting it right and a 50% chance of getting it wrong. I think the important thing is to recognize when you’ve got it wrong and to learn from it and adjust quickly.”
“There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence – and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.”
“Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it.”
“Never, ever give up. Make it very clear what you are doing and why you are doing it, publicly and internally. Sometimes you cannot make a big leap but only lots of little improvements. In the end it adds up to a big improvement.”
“Hope is the most important element in success. I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate.”
“One little rule I do have is that when you react to a situation you should probably think what you should do and what you shouldn’t. And almost certainly do what you shouldn’t do.”
“There’s a terrible moment when failure is staring you in the face. And actually, if you persevere a bit longer, you’ll start to climb out of it.”
“Successes teach you nothing. Failures teach you everything. Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do.”
“Enjoy failure and learn from it. You never learn from success.”
“It is said that to be an overnight success takes years of effort. So it has proved with me.”
“Everyone gets knocked back, no one rises smoothly to the top without hindrance. The ones who succeed are those who say, ‘Right, let’s give it another go.'”
“I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.”
“We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.”
“Some of the best inventive moments are born out of ‘wrong thinking.’ Most people start with the right way so they all follow the same path. The wrong way will lead to mistakes from which you can learn and create new discoveries – the kind of original ideas that come to life when we dare to be different, keep an open mind, and have no fear of failure.”
“You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant.”
“After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology.”
“Risk aversion is a hapless approach for a company that’s hoping to develop new technology. It’s tempting in a downturn. But long-term research and development, expensive and often filled with failure as it is, is the only route to discovering it. By taking the cautious path, companies risk a drought of ideas.”
“Fear is always a good motivator.”
“In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn’t work well.”
“That’s a sort of lesson in life, isn’t it? You mustn’t be worried about what people will say about you. If you want to do something different, you’re going to come up against a lot of naysayers.”
“Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving. You’ve got to try things out.”
“If you invent something, you’re doing a creative act. It’s like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It’s years of your life, it’s your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.”
“You don’t have to bother to be creative if the first time you do something, it works. Creativity is creating something that no one could have devised; something that hasn’t existed before and solves problems that haven’t been solved before. Making something work is a very creative thing to do.”
“When you say ‘design,’ everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it’s an emotive word. Everybody thinks it’s how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.”
“The best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin, and in enormous volumes.”
“When you can’t compete on cost, compete on quality.”
“As a modern employer you have to treat people well.”
“Beauty can come in strange forms.”
“Life is a mountain of solvable problems and I enjoy that.”
“Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.”
“Children want the challenge of difficult tasks – just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.”
“Failure is so much more interesting because you learn from it. That’s what we should be teaching children at school, that being successful the first time, there’s nothing in it. There’s no interest, you learn nothing actually.”
“I have been a misfit throughout my professional life… and that seems to have worked to my advantage. Misfits are not born or made, they make themselves.”
“As a child I was always up against people who were bigger and stronger than I was. It raised my standards – in that I was not prepared to lose everything all the time just because I was the youngest – and taught me that I could take on something much bigger than I was, and win.”
“I like living on the edge.”
“When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.”
“There’s nothing wrong with things taking time.”
“Some people are academically inclined, some vocationally, and we shouldn’t penalize the latter.”
“I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears on them.”
“The greatest lesson for aspiring inventors was yet to come. The actual making of money. Paper stuff in thick wads which they finally give to you because you have done something good.”
Also check out Sir Richard Branson’s quotes.
