It must have been sometime in 1979 that I first heard the words.
But James, if there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner, Hoover would have invented it.
That was just before I left the first company that I had set up.
I gave up security, income and respectability and persuaded an old friend to come in with me on a project that I was developing in the garage behind my house.
For twelve years, I labored under heavier and heavier debt.
I tried and failed to interest the major manufacturing companies in my production.
I fought terrible legal battles on both sides of the Atlantic to protect my vacuum cleaner.
And in 1990, 213 years later, in the cold, wet english countryside, I went into production on my own as sole owner of the machine I had conceived, designed, built and tested alone.
After thousands of prototypes and modifications and millions of tests, I was in terrible debt, but in love with the cyclone.
By 2002, one in four british households owned a Dyson.
My company was selling a million vacuum cleaners a year and turning over 300 million annually.
And my products had achieved total worldwide sales of more than $10 billion.
Finally, late last year, I fitted the last and most important piece of the jigsaw.
I entered the biggest, most innovative, most exciting market in the world.
I came to America.
This is the story of how I did it.
That was an excerpt from the book that I just read for the fourth time and the one that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is against the odds.
In autobiography by James Dyson.
If you're asking me for like, a top ten list of my recommendations of books that I covered on the podcast that you should read, that top ten list is always changing.
The number one spot never changes.