What I learned from rereading Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson and reading A History of Great Inventions by James Dyson.
Isambard kingdom.
Brunel was unable to think small and nothing was a barrier to him.
The mere fact that something had never been done before presented to Brunel no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible.
He was fired by an inner strength and self belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age.
While I could never lay claim to the genius of a man like that, I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was.
And at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self doubt, I have looked to his example to fire me on when I was deeply in debt and the dual cyclone looked as if it might remain a drawing board dream.
I thought of his father, Mark Brunel, who spent time in a debtors prison when the tunnel that he was building seemed destined for failure.
When I have considered relinquishing total control and taking a backseat consultant role, and there have been many fantastic buyout offers, I have remembered how Brunel never accepted such a position in his life.
I have tried in my own way to draw on Brunel's dream of applying emerging technology in ways as yet unimagined.
He was never afraid to be different or shocking.
He never shirked the battles with the money men and he had to overcome the most incredible resistance to his ideas.
When he applied the system of the screw propeller to a transatlantic steamship, he actually filled a boat with people and sent them across the sea.
I have asked people only to push my inventions around, not to get inside them and try to float.
And so I have sought out originality for its own sake and modified it into a philosophy which demands difference from what exists.
And I have told myself, when people tried to make me modify my ideas, that the great Western Railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession.
Throughout my story, I will try to return to Brunel and to other designers and engineers to, to show how identifying with them and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has.
And that was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today and the one I just finished rereading for the third time, which is against the odds, an autobiography by James Dyson.
So I reread the book because I wanted to do something special for episode number 200.
And out of the more than 200 books that I've read so far for Founders podcast, this is still my number one recommendation.
I think every single entrepreneur, every single investor, every single person that is trying to do something difficult in their life should read this book.