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James Dyson built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times in an unheated coach house while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage. Four years on one problem bought him a position nobody else could follow him into, and the same shape shows up in a Michigan State lab, a Johns Hopkins operating room and a Toyota plant.
Show Notes
James Dyson built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times in an unheated coach house while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage. Four years on one problem bought him a position nobody else could follow him into, and the same shape shows up in a Michigan State lab, a Johns Hopkins operating room and a Toyota plant.
Featuring: James Dyson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Richard Lenski, Vivien Thomas, Alfred Blalock, Hamilton Helmer
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Chapters:
(00:00) Aeschylus on learning through suffering
(00:03) Dyson builds 5127 vacuum prototypes
(00:43) Lenski's E coli count generations not hours
(01:34) One market report becomes Trends.vc
(01:48) Vivien Thomas learns the operation on dogs
(02:18) Toyota's million small fixes a year
(02:40) Judgment from staying on one problem
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Hamilton Helmer
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One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
"Learning comes through suffering."
Aeschylus
A man built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage.
James Dyson worked from 1979 to 1983 in an unheated coach house behind his home in Bath. Each build was one cycle: make it, test it, change one thing.
He counted as he went: prototype 627, then 1,243, then 3,418. The 5,127th one worked.
By then he was four years deep into one problem and nobody else was in there with him.
In 1988 Richard Lenski started a count in generations rather than prototypes. He put 12 identical populations of E. coli bacteria into 12 flasks in a Michigan State lab.
Day after day, someone has moved a drop from each flask into fresh broth.
The broth holds sugar the bacteria can eat, plus a second food called citrate they cannot.
For 30,000 generations none of the 12 populations could touch the citrate.
Around generation 31,500 one of them evolved the ability to eat it.
The other 11 are past 75,000 generations now and still eat only the sugar.
That ability came out of a drop moved day after day for thousands of days.
In an Atlanta condo I started publishing one market report a week, free, on my personal site.
Readers kept coming back, so I registered the trends.vc domain.
The weekly report became a company.
Vivien Thomas spent two years operating on dogs in a Johns Hopkins lab, working out how to route blood around a malformed heart.
He built his instruments himself.
On 29 November 1944 a 15-month-old named Eileen Saxon went under.
Thomas stood on a stool behind the surgeon Alfred Blalock and talked him through the procedure.
Blalock had the medical degree.
The operation worked because Thomas spent two years learning how to do it.
Toyota workers file roughly a million small fixes a year, most of them small changes to the work in front of them. Those workers built the biggest carmaker in the world.
An edge built out of accumulated practice is what Hamilton Helmer calls process power in 7 Powers. A competitor can rebuild it and cannot buy it.
That practice adds up to judgment.
Judgment comes from being wrong in a specific way and finding out why.
The longer you stay on one problem, the shorter the list of people who can follow you in.
Which problem would you give your next hundred cycles?