Episode Details

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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