James Dyson Quotes

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum 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.

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.

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You never learn from success.

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.

Successes teach you nothing. Failures teach you everything. Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do.

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.

In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well.

Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.

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.

If you want to do something different, you’re going to come up against a lot of naysayers.

Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.

Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.

A lot of people give up when the world seems to be against them, but that's the point when you should push a little harder. I use the analogy of running a race. It seems as though you can’t carry on, but if you just get through the pain barrier, you'll see the end and be okay. Often, just around the corner is where the solution will happen.

Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.

Life is a mountain of solvable problems and I enjoy that.

You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.

Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.

The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you're totally free.

[M]anufacturing, science and engineering are ... incredibly creative. I'd venture to say more so than creative advertising agencies and things that are known as the creative industries.

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.

I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate.

Beauty can come in strange forms.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.

Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.

After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology

Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.

One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.

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.

It's the unlikely juxtaposition of creativity and logic which causes the wooliness and confusion around the term 'innovation'. Everybody wants to be innovative; many companies and ideas are proclaimed to be innovative and no one doubts that innovation is a money spinner. And, thus, we are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.

If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.

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.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

I just want things to work properly.

All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers.

At school, I enjoyed playing the bassoon. I was in the orchestra and played the melody when the other boys sang hymns at prayers time.

I think people are realizing that engineering and science are extremely good degrees to get and you'll be very highly paid once you've got them.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don't just try to make money out of money

If you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think.

Success is made of 99% failure.

Anyone developing new products and new technology needs one characteristic above all else: hope.

[In my home workshop,] generally I'm mending things, which is interesting because you learn a lot about why they broke.

The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.

Hire inexperience. This year we plan to hire 200 engineers - half of whom are recent grads. Young people are not burdened by years of experience. They haven't learned - or been told - what is right or wrong. With engineering, there is no tried and tested path. You try, and fail, and fix, and fail again.