Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by James Dyson - Page 2

What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.

Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

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

China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn't have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers - the kind of people the U.S. is built upon.

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.

I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision.

The wonderful thing about Apple technology is just how intuitive it is.

I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don't necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.

It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.

We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.

An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.

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

Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.

I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.

I own every share of my company, and I don't want to sell any of it.

China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K.

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

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential.

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

Insurance companies don't make anything.

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

Anger is a good motivator.

Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

I don't design down to a price.

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 people are academically inclined, some vocationally and we shouldn't penalise the latter.

I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it.

Beauty can come in strange forms.

I'm not a businessman.

Emerging markets are hugely important.

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

I just want things to work properly.

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

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.

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.

The important thing is to learn from mistakes - something graduates are adept at. Our graduate engineers are working on new technology - from uncharted applications for our digital motor, to a new take on the hand dryer. With an unhindered mind, nothing is off limits.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

[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.

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

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.

Success is made of 99% failure.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.