Patrick Sankey

New episode: "The Stubborn Genius of James Dyson" A few notes from the episode: 1. Copying is for losers. 2. They only come to you because you're eccentric. They can get conformity anywhere. 3. Be different and retain total control. 4. Great work is just the vision of a single person, pursued with dogged determination that is nothing less than obsession. 5. The best founders are obsessive, impractical, product-driven enthusiasts. 6. Hire blank slates: Young people who haven’t been ruined by the bad habits of subpar organizations. 7. Be fired by an inner strength and self-belief that is almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. 8. Vision is just long-term stubbornness. 9. The root principle is to do things your way. It doesn’t matter how other people do it. 10. As long as it works, and it's exciting, people will follow you. 11. Demand difference from what exists. 12. Extreme success comes from doing something no one else is doing. 13. Learning from history is a form of leverage. Have an interest, verging on obsession, with the past. (Dyson literally wrote an encyclopedia on history's greatest inventions) 14. Do not sell a half-finished product. 15. People do not want all-purpose; they want high-tech specificity. 16. Don’t lose the direct connection to your customer. 17. 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. 18. You simply cannot mix messages when selling something new. Customers can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several. 19. You want a single message expressed clearly. 20. Appeal to a specific need. Don’t make your product too wide. Narrow it down. 21. You have to think about the incentives of the people you’re selling to. You can’t sell a bagless vacuum cleaner to people that make $500 million selling vacuum bags. 22. No one is ever eager to fix a cash machine that isn’t broken. 23. The more you’re able to control, the better your product— and then your company— will become. 24. Don’t copy the opposition. Don’t worry about market research. Follow your own star. This is what success entrepreneurs do. 25. The opposite of following your own star is following the herd. That is a path to dull conformity. 26. For innovative, intrinsically excellent products, the markets are often larger than you can predict. 27. The entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. 28. No one ever got an idea starting at a drawing board. 29. Founder led sales is the most powerful tool. 30. The inventive mind knows that there is always further questions to be asked and new discoveries to be made. 31. A clever person doesn’t spend 14 years building 5,127 prototypes of the world’s first cyclonic vacuum cleaner. A determined person does. 32. If you have an idea for a new product, you engineer, prototype, manufacture, market, and sell it yourself. Retain total control. 33. If it’s not beautiful you’re not done. 34. The founder is personally accountable for every product sold. 35. People buy stories. Invest heavily in storytelling. Why your product exists. How it is made. Who made it. 36. Control is more important than money. 37. When you own the whole company all decisions are your own. 38. How bad do you want it? Dyson made a new prototype, every day, for more than 1,000 days. Alone. 39. Perseverance is not cheap. 40. A project will die if the original mule doesn’t stay on it. The self-belief is not there to press through the hard times. 41. Your company should be the most exciting adventure of your life. 42. If you make it, sell it yourself. 43. Only the person with the closest relationship with the product can make a success of it. 44. There's nothing wrong with being persistently dissatisfied or afraid. 45. You need the confidence — and the stupidity —  to do things differently. 46. One decent editorial counts for 1,000 advertisements. 47. Difference for the sake of difference and the continuous improvement of products simply for improvement’s sake. 48. Persistent trial and error allows you to wake up one morning, after many, many mornings, with a world-beating product. 49. Seek out originality for its own sake. 50. Companies are built, not made. 51. You are more likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined than by being brilliant. 52. Never sacrifice quality for speed. 53. Magic — the unique way a product does what it does — is never to be underestimated. There are 100 more ideas in the episode. I hope you listen to it. 50 years of Dyson's career + 70 hours of reading (and simplifying) and me just ripping through idea after idea at 2x speed for 90 minutes. It will be hard to find a better use of time.