Failure is an enjoyable part of success
Engineer Sir James Dyson talks to theBit’s Alan Martin about talented Kiwis, embracing failure, and what happened to the Dyson Car.
For someone who has earned billions over a lifetime of design and engineering, Sir James Dyson, at 75, is very willing to accept that not everything he touches turns to gold.
Other larger-than-life entrepreneurs would have you believe that their success is hardwired into their DNA, but not Dyson. He views failure not only as a necessary step on the path to success, but even enjoyable in its own right.
Dyson recently spoke to graduates at his alma mater Gresham’s School, in Norfolk, England, and encouraged them to embrace failure in order to succeed.
He has long supported emerging Steam talent in New Zealand – students taught with the educational approach that mixes science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics.
Dyson has also hosted the inaugural James Dyson Awards since 2005. The competition challenges students and graduates to ‘‘design something that solves a problem’’.
After his speech to the leavers of Gresham’s School, theBit had a chat with him, discussing everything from failure to robotics and his hopes for the next generation of doers and makers.
‘‘My tale is one of not being brilliant,’’ he said. ‘‘I wasn’t even trained as an engineer or scientist. I did, however, have the bloody-mindedness not to follow convention, to challenge experts and to ignore Doubting Thomases.’’
That, to Dyson, is the key to his success – and the good news is that these are qualities that can be emulated by anyone with the patience to slog through multiple prototypes and the confidence to trust their gut.
‘‘The failures began to excite me. ‘Wait a minute, that should have worked, now why didn’t it?’ I was scratching my head, mystified, but then had another idea for an experiment that might lead to solving the problem. I was usually covered in dust, getting deeper and deeper into debt, yet happy and absorbed.’’
Announced in 2017, the ‘‘radical and different’’ vehicle was intended to solve the main issue that people have with them: the relatively short ranges. Dyson’s car, meanwhile, would pack 150kWh’s worth of batteries, increasing the range to a massive 965 km.
When we asked Dyson what could have been done differently with hindsight, he paints the failure as being less of an engineering one and more the company being a victim of circumstances.
‘‘The product itself was not a design failure, nor was it a failure of the brilliant engineering team – rather it became too much of a commercial risk,’’ he said, describing the car as ‘‘wonderful to drive and be driven in,’’ with ‘‘very efficient motors’’.
‘‘What we did not predict was ‘Dieselgate’, or that the landscape would change so dramatically,’’ he said.
‘‘We also found that batteries cost too much, particularly for a car like ours which was packed with them to give it a decent range. Because of this shifting commercial sand, we made the difficult decision to pull out of production.’’
It was, said Dyson, his ‘‘saddest failure’’, but even this cloud has a pretty appealing silver lining, with invaluable lessons learned in the fields of lighting, air treatment, batteries and robotics.
The last of these is especially significant, given the company has pivoted to robotics as the next big frontier. It has a plan to recruit 250 roboticists over the next year to revolutionise the field, and improve on the somewhat limited robot home help that we have at present. Amazon’s Astro, for all its charm, can’t do the dishes or fold laundry.
It’s not the most fashionable area, as Dyson admitted. ‘‘Glamour repels me,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve always been naturally attracted to the prosaic. My obtuseness wants the dull to be exciting.’’
So are we going to see a Jetsons-style future in his lifetime? ‘‘I can’t share too much at this stage as we keep our secrets very secret,’’ Dyson said, but the aim remains to ‘‘bring robotics technology into homes’’ by the end of the decade.
‘‘Of course, big ambitions require great minds, and we cannot create the next generation of technology without the best pioneers,’’ he said. ‘‘We are thrilled to be halfway through the largest engineering recruitment drive in Dyson’s history – we are in the process of recruiting 250 robotics engineers this year, but are always on the hunt for more forward thinkers.
‘‘Ideally, we want to hire around 700 more in the robotics field over the next five years, from all corners of the world.’’
The next generation
That’s just one company’s recruitment, and Dyson is far from the only player in this field, so where is the next generation of engineers coming from?
Dyson hopes to play a small part in this, and created the James Dyson Awards in 2007 to try to give brilliant young minds a leg up. The awards offer prize money of up to NZ$59,000 for budding inventors with a design to solve a problem.
One of Dyson’s favourite entries came from New Zealand – the Hae Hae, an asthma inhaler for children, designed by 24-year-old Massey University student Maisie Panoho, last year’s winner.
‘‘I am always astounded by the entries to the award and New Zealand has historically been very successful,’’ he said. ‘‘It is incredible how focused young people are on tackling big problems and finding very meaningful solutions, particularly in the areas of sustainability and medicine.’’
Indeed, a second project Dyson highlighted was also in the medical field: Joseph Bentley’s REACT, which aimed to reduce the blood loss from victims of knife attacks.
‘‘This type of problem-solving invention shows the significant impact engineers can have on serious, global issues,’’ he said. ‘‘Developing a medical device is very challenging and there will be no end of hurdles, but I would urge Joseph not to be put off since the opportunity to save lives is so great.’’
Yes, setbacks await even the most promising young engineers. And the most successful will not only have the ideas, but the resilience to keep trying, no matter what obstacles are in the way. With that in mind, another highlight is the 2020 Sustainability winner Carvey Ehren Maigue.
Not only is the idea superb – vegetable crop waste spread across windows to generate electricity, as a kind of DIY solar panel – it was a refined version of an entry he originally submitted to the 2018 awards. ‘‘This will be a vital character trait as he embarks on the long road to commercialisation,’’ Dyson said, possibly seeing something of himself in the 27-year-old creator.
‘‘To this year’s entrants, I simply say: be radical and don’t give up,’’ he said. ‘‘Young people want to change the world, and it is wonderful to see so many people rolling up their sleeves rather than simply complaining about the problems – we need doers not grandstanders.’’
This article was first published at thebit.nz.