James Dyson’s advice for founders: “You have to enjoy failure”

“If you are exploring new territory, experimenting, and trying to do something different, you’re going to fail many times and you’ve got to bounce back from it,” James Dyson explains.

The billionaire inventor argues that you should actually learn to enjoy failure:

“Failure is so much more interesting than success — the reason something goes wrong is often very interesting whereas if works you just say ‘great that works’ and don’t even stop to wonder why it works. You’ve got to learn to enjoy failure. That sounds like a difficult thing to do, but you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things.”

He continues:

“It always saddens me that school doesn’t really teach that. At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant and get the answer right the first time. There are brilliant people who can do that, but for the rest of us, we’re not brilliant and to get there we have to strive and go through failure. You don’t get it right the first time. You don’t get it right the second time. In my case, and I counted it, it was 5,127 times . . . That sounds like struggle and it was a struggle, but it was a hugely enjoyable struggle. The debt was mounting, and I had three children, a wife, a home, and a mortgage to pay like everybody else, but I had a real aim in life and I had to get there. And the failures were interesting because I learned from almost every single one of them.”

James Dyson concludes his autobiography by saying:

"Listen, it's easy for me to celebrate my doggedness now. I made $300 million last year, but I'd be lying to you if there weren't times where I went inside my house, had my wife look at me like I'm a failure, and cry myself to sleep. I got up and did it again anyway because excellence is the capacity to take pain.”

Full video: David Senra “James Dyson: 5,127 Rejections, $0 in Funding & a $15 Billion Company“ (Dec 2025)