Exhausted after working late last night, I fell into the sofa to watch Double Jeopardy. I've seen it before but back then I was still in college. That first time round, the part I found hardest to swallow was Ashley Judd's fall from society after the conviction of her husbands murder. In an instant she goes from being the hostess with the mostess to simply most wanted.
Watching it last night I didn't feel myself shocked so much as empathetic. I'm on no murder charge but I sometimes feel as distinct from my peers as if I were. Developing a product on a shoestring isn't fun and it isn't glamorous. Ask James Dyson, he spent ten years doing it.
Today, Dyson is one of the richest and most significant business people in Britain. Eleven years before that he was a significant and an accomplished designer. For ten years in between though, for ten whole years he was a man making cardboard vacuum cleaners in his dining room.
A few years ago, I read his autobiography and wondered at how he held it together in the face of such cynicism and isolation. I didn't think that I would ever be able to hold out like that.
Well, I'm not sure that I could but it's coming up for two years now and at least I'm getting an idea of how he felt. I also begin to know how he kept it together. He knew what he was creating and he knew its potential. He knew that there was no guarantee of success but he knew his concept was better than anything that currently stood.
It's not easy to hold that type of belief, especially when others don't. A lot of people ask why something that's apparently so special hasn't already been done. It's a smart question when what it is asking is, "how will this succeed". It's surprising though how many people ask because they they genuinely believe all the smart things have already been done.
Sometimes even smart people cannot conceive of improvement and have 20:20 but entirely retrospective vision. When Hoover told him that he was onto a non-starter all Dyson had was his own belief and confidence in his product. Remember, Rocky wasn't Rocky until he beat Apollo Creed, until that happens he's just Balboa.
Confidence is all anyone who takes this gamble can hope to have and it's all that keeps us going. That and our friends and relatives. Even they though, ultimately feed from our vision which itself feeds from our belief in what we are doing. In the end, it's all about the product.
Some of us will be right and some will be wrong. Some will be right but have terminal execution and some will be wrong and get lucky. Any which way, the most significant things will not be iterative and will have taken time to make. Mutation is quick and easy but design is not. Anything can mutate but only humans design.
Every morning, after showering and before breakfast I go for a short walk. I walk down to Parson's Green at about the same as the commuters are setting off. Everyone goes in the same direction, towards the station and I walk with them, part of the crowd. Once there though I loop around and come back.
On the second part of my journey, there is no crowd. On the second half I see peoples faces not their backs. Occasionally I also see where they look and guess at what they're thinking. Mostly they're concentrated on walking fast or listening to music but every now and then I see a flicker of confusion. Every now and then I can see someone wonder why it is I'm walking away from the station and not towards it with everyone else.
Webkitchen is Peter Nixey's blog and website.
Originally from the UK, Peter is now in San Francisco and CEO of Clickpass a startup working to make single-sign-on and OpenID both website and consumer friendly.
