Be permanently dissatisfied like Dyson

If you are satisfied, you tend to stop striving. If you are never satisfied, the process never ends.

I am currently reading James Dyson’s book, Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure. As an owner of Dyson air purifiers, I wanted to understand why the brand has been so successful. One of the answers I found was in the founders philosophy of being Permanently Dissatisfied.

“I believe that it is crucial to keep on improving and never to relax with a product that appears to be selling well. Permanently dissatisfied is how an engineer should feel.”

Permanently dissatisfied? Wouldn’t one feel miserable if they were “permanently dissatisfied”?

As I read through Dyson’s journey I realized that permanent dissatisfaction had nothing to do with one’s emotional state. It was all about constant improvement through the iterative process.

“DC11 was one neat bundle, easy to carry and to store. DC14 was a new upright with a lower centre of gravity and other design improvements, while DC15 Ball featured the very kind of ball I’d come up with all those years ago.”

Dissatisfaction leads to invention

Eventually the dissatisfaction drove Dyson to take control of the one vital component they didn’t own - the motor.

“While we improved every aspect of the vacuum cleaner, there had always been one vital core component for which we had to rely on others: the motor. Because we were buying from a supplier, any of our rivals could buy them, too, and we had no control over quality. Although at the time we were neither designers nor manufacturers of electric motors, we wanted to come with a breakthrough on their design, creating a quantum leap in performance.”

Despite board members claiming that it was too risky and expensive to compete with established giants, Dyson took a leap of faith.

“With each new version of the motor we aimed to double its power output and halve its weight.”

The result? By 2020, Dyson was manufacturing 24 million motors a year, assembled entirely by robots.

This new technology unlocked entirely new categories:

• 2006: They launched the Dyson Airblade hand dryer. It sold successfully to hotels, airports, schools and hospitals.

• 2016: The Supersonic hair dryer was launched as a response to their question:

  “Could we make a light, quiet hairdryer that could dry hair fast without damaging it?”

“During four years in development and at a cost of £55 million, we made some 600 prototypes of the hairdryer with 103 engineers working on the project.”

Useful Idea: Be Permanently Dissatisfied

Permanent dissatisfaction sounds like an emotional burden, but it is actually a philosophy of never standing still.

When you decouple dissatisfaction from your happiness and apply it only to your craft, you ensure that you reach new heights of success, simply because you never convince yourself that you have “arrived”. And why would you ever arrive if you follow your interests and passions?

“The depth of the research we’re undertaking in programming, AI, machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, energy storage, acoustics, super-conductors and any number of pioneering fields has been scaled up significantly, yet there’s still a lot more empirical testing to do in our labs.”

Be permanently dissatisfied just like Dyson.

See you next Sunday.

👋 I’m Harsh. I collect useful ideas to win in business and life.

Here’s where I spend most of my time:

• Ideals Virtual Data Rooms – building a $1B business by helping dealmakers close deals faster

• M&A Community – uncovering personal stories and strategies of M&A, private equity, and investment banking leaders

• Happy Ratio – growing a food company the hard way: profit-first, purpose-led

• Marcellus Investment Managers – evangelizing long-term investing to build financial independence

Harsh Batra
(LinkedIn)