“I’ve Read 425 Biographies. This Is The Best” - David Senra
CChris Williamson
Small Business/StartupsBooks & LiteratureManagement
Transcript
00:00:00Out of every single biography and autobiography I've ever read in my life, and I think as of
00:00:04today, it's like 425 or something like that because it correlates with the Founders episodes I've
00:00:08done. If you only read one book, it'd be his first autobiography, which is called Against the Odds,
00:00:13an autobiography by James Lyson. Because it's not about... Today, you fast forward, he's 78 years
00:00:19old. He owns 100% of one of the most successful private companies in the world. He wouldn't sell
00:00:22it. I had a friend that tried to buy it. He guessed, my friend that tried to buy it, that
00:00:27if James would sell, it'd fetch between $60 to $80 billion. James has no outside shareholders.
00:00:33That's 100% of it. My friend put a flyer out to him saying, we want to buy your company.
00:00:38He paraphrased the response that came back from Dyson, which was, fuck you, this is a family heirloom.
00:00:43It's not about the money. He's an engineer. He's a designer. He's obsessed with the work that he's
00:00:47doing. So that book is not about this. It's not the 78-year-old James Dyson. It is the Dyson in his
00:00:5330s and mid-40s that is just failing for a decade and a half over and over and over again.
00:00:585,126 failed prototypes. The 5,127th one is the one that worked. It's the James Dyson that's going to
00:01:04bed because he's working in a carriage house, which I guess is like a garage in England. What is a
00:01:09carriage house?
00:01:10No idea. I had to look it up. It's in the UK, so I figured you'd know. So it's like a detached
00:01:15little workshop outside your main house. I think it's in Bath, England where he is, where he's failing
00:01:22all day long, walks inside, passes his kids, gets into bed, cries himself to sleep. Then his kid is
00:01:28four, sees him failing. His kid is seven. Dad's still failing. His kid is a teenager. Dad is still
00:01:33a failure. And so the reason this was so important to me is because I knew I wanted to podcast. I knew
00:01:37I loved it more than anything else. I have this irrational love of podcasting that people make
00:01:41fun of me for and I'm fine with. But I was having no success. It was not that like I wasn't making any
00:01:47money. It was, I was, it was costing me money to do this. My, my savings went down every month and I
00:01:52for some reason wouldn't quit. And one of the reasons I don't think I quit is because episode 25,
00:01:57the very first time I read James Ice's book is I read this book and I'm like, well, this guy
00:02:01struggled for 14 years. Like I can give it a go for a year when it being five and a half. I didn't
00:02:06think it'd take that long, but like just knowing that story and rereading that book over and over
00:02:09and over again, just, I was able to relate to him. I was like, he didn't give up. Why do I have to
00:02:13give up? Like, do you know how good you're going to feel if you get to the other side of this?
00:02:16And I did have a lot of faith that I would get to the other side of it. And so when you meet James
00:02:21Dyson though, like I read his first autobiography at least five times. I've read the highlights from
00:02:25that book hundreds of times. This is not a joke. I'm not exaggerating. I read his second biography,
00:02:30which he wrote when he was in the seventies twice. I read, he has, he wrote an encyclopedia when he was
00:02:36like 45 or 50 about, he's obsessed with inventions. It's called a history of great inventions. It literally
00:02:41like somebody printed out a Wikipedia page of like 200, um, inventions with hand scrawled notes.
00:02:48There's a picture of me and James going through the book and me showing him like me annotating every
00:02:51single thing. And so be able to sit with him. I thought I understood him completely. And there
00:02:57was still, this is why it's so powerful to be able to talk to these people. First of all,
00:03:00he sits across from you and you realize that he's built, he doesn't, he's not a, he's not a
00:03:04absentee executive. He does the work. He's, and he's on the, the manufacturing line. He's in the
00:03:10engineering meetings. He's in design meetings. So you sit across from him. He's a very thin guy.
00:03:15His fingers are probably twice as wide as mine are. Why? Because he's been working with his hands.
00:03:23Like if you look at your biceps, like your, how many curls did you do to get those biceps?
00:03:27How many, like him tinkering with his hands did he get? He's got massive fingers. They don't fit
00:03:33the rest of his body. Cause it's like a lifetime of tinkering. It's incredible. But then the reason
00:03:37I say, if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up at a loss is like most people that have success,
00:03:41they're like, I fucking made it. Look at me. I'm the best. And they forget it's the work that got
00:03:46in there. Not them. It's tied to the megalomania thing where Dyson's not like that at all. I didn't
00:03:50understand his organizing principle. And so this is what he said. He said, okay, I pick up a product,
00:03:55right? I look at it. I think about how can I make it better? I make it better. I put it back down.
00:04:02Short mile later, pick it back up. How can I make it better? I make it a little bit better. Put it
00:04:06back down. And he went through this over and over again. I think he used a coffee cup in the episode.
00:04:10It's been, you know, six months. I don't remember. And he goes, and I just didn't, I just did that
00:04:14for 45 years. I never stopped. That's the anecdote to the anecdote. I don't know if that's the right
00:04:20word to going to sleep on a win. He never slept on a win because he likes the activity itself. He just,
00:04:27he has an engineering mind, everything around him. He says it doesn't torment him, but he'd see this
00:04:31table. He's like, I think I could shave off a little bit there. I could fix that. I could do that.
00:04:34That's how his brain just works. And he just loves it. It's like a giant puzzle to him. And that's,
00:04:38I think that's the way to do it. It's just like, man, if you just love the activity for the sake of
00:04:42itself and you never stop improving it, like you're not going to fall prey to the failures and
00:04:47disasters of like a Kanye or a Conor McGregor or any of these other people you see.
00:04:51Fascinating that that was a quote from Conor McGregor, somebody that's had one of the biggest
00:04:54fall-offs in history. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. I've kind of been obsessed thinking about
00:04:59the difference between what it feels like to have fallen off and what it feels like to have never made it.
00:05:06I would rather never make it. I am, this is another thing where you're surprised. Like I've talked to
00:05:11Michael Dell about this, Daniel Ek about this, Todd Graves, Brad Jacobs, like all these, every single
00:05:15person I just mentioned is worth tens, Michael Dell's worth like $200 billion. And he's just like,
00:05:20it's not the love of success. It's a fear of failure. It's like, for me, that is my worst nightmare
00:05:26that like, I do mean that. Like I would rather never make it than make it, right? And then lose it.
00:05:33And so this is why I wanted to say something earlier that you just, you just prompted this
00:05:38thought. It's like, it's weird because like I'll meet with like young entrepreneurs a lot. Right.
00:05:42And I feel like the middle child because I'm not my twenties anymore, but I'm not 70, you know?
00:05:47And so I'm in both of these worlds and the advice I give to these like 25 years ago, you should go
00:05:52and spend some time with like a 65 year old, 70 year old. Like try to get an afternoon with Jimmy
00:05:58Yavin who's in his seventies, who's seen everything in the world or James Dyson who's seen everything in
00:06:03the world. Like we, we have this guest list that, uh, we want, we want to get, and it's in reverse
00:06:08chronological order by age, because some of these guys, like I got to sit down with Charlie
00:06:10Mugger, never got to record a podcast with him. Now it's that opportunity is gone. Same thing.
00:06:14Got to sit down with Sam Zell, never got to record a podcast with him. They have all this knowledge
00:06:17and all you have to do is just like sit down and they'll, they, they're already down the path
00:06:22that you're, that you want to go on. And they'll say, Hey, watch for that pitfall there.
00:06:25What don't, don't turn right when this is going to happen to you. Cause you realize like everything
00:06:28that happens to us is not us. If somebody else was sitting in your position, they'd be getting
00:06:32those DMS too. Like they just would. It's not you. It's the position that you're holding.
00:06:38Um, and I, yeah, I think it's like super important. People say I have a fetish for old people. I
00:06:42don't have a fetish for old people. It's just like, I, I want to avoid the failure, the, the, the
00:06:50set to success. And then the decline in failure that you see so over and over and over again,
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00:08:12Congratulations, you made it to the end of a clip, and the full-length episode is available
00:08:15right here.
00:08:18Go on.