In 1979, James Dyson's life seemed, by most measures, a disaster. He had no job, no income, a mortgage on a dilapidated house near Bath, and three young children to support.
Every day, he walked to a shed in the garden, where he worked tirelessly on a seemingly futile idea: the bagless vacuum cleaner.
This period of Dyson's life lasted about five years.
A licensing deal with a U.S. company gave him another decade of runway, which he used to invent and bring to market his first cyclone vacuum cleaner: the DC01, launched in 1993.
Fourteen years spent in the wilderness - five of them teetering on the edge of poverty - doesn't seem like anyone's idea of fun.
Yet, in his autobiography, Dyson describes that period in a surprising way: idyllic. The years filled with nappies, leaking ceilings, and relentless failure, he insists, were the best of his life.
This isn’t what we might expect to hear. The values of patience, compounding, and long-term vision are often celebrated in building great things - just look at the company Dyson built.
But even then, spending fourteen years alone, working on a single project with minimal validation, seems more like something to endure than something to enjoy.
Yet Dyson somehow managed to live the life of Sisyphus, pushing the boulder uphill each day - and doing it happily. People say think in decades, not weeks - this is what it looks like in practice.
Read his autobiography, however, and it becomes clear what his secret was: his three young children.
Have a baby, and suddenly you're handed a project that’s laughably long-term: not a one or two year timeframe, not even a ten or twenty year one, but something that lasts forever: a life’s work, as Rachel Cusk mordantly put it in her book on motherhood.
The result: you enter parent time. Everything starts to zoom out, and the usual markers for tracking time - holidays, trips, milestones - no longer matter in quite the same way.
My first child was born in 2022. Since then, life has blurred into one continuous stretch of time, marked only by the birth of baby number two in 2023.
I can see why my brain works this way now. When raising children, it's crucial to stay present and not get sidetracked by the minutiae of each day. But it’s also how you want to be thinking when working on anything great.
Two very different tasks, but with a similar mindset required for both.
To get a taste of what it feels like, there’s a book - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles - that attempts to simulate parent time in novel form.
In the story, the protagonist is sentenced to house arrest for life in a Moscow hotel. The first chapter starts one day after his arrest, setting things out in intense detail. The second chapter takes place on day two. The third, day four. The fourth, day eight.
As the story progresses, the passage of time shifts from days to weeks to years. By the middle of the book, when the protagonist becomes a father, each chapter jumps forward by years.
First, his daughter is five. Then, just 20 pages later, she’s 13. Another 30 pages, and she’s 29.
Towles’ explanation for why he chose this structure goes beyond simply fitting the story—it’s about its truth to life:
“We remember so many events of a single year in our early adulthood, but then, suddenly, we remember an entire decade as a phase of our career or of our lives as parents.”
There is an entire industry devoted to helping people think in decades, not weeks. Creative residencies, podcasts, and accelerators all aim to stretch horizons and break free from short-term thinking.
It’s the implicit promise of Y Combinator and the explicit one of competitors like HF0: transforming people trained to measure progress in days and quarters into long-term builders.
Or, you can just have a kid. Parenthood forces this state on you by default. Suddenly, ten years slogging away in a shed feels like mere moments. And if your 2,504th attempt at a cyclonic motor fails?
No matter - you’ve already accomplished something far more important: keeping your children alive for another day.
Living with small children sharpens focus and kills vanity. Life becomes simpler - practical, urgent, and stripped of pretense. Bad days end with perspective. The trivial loses its grip as long-term thinking becomes second nature.
Accept this, and parenthood shifts from being a break in productivity (think Keith Rabois' rule: "If you’re a startup, never hire anyone over 30") to becoming an accelerant for creative thinking.
Because building something - whether it’s a family or a business - is still building. You’re either in the mode or you’re not. And once you’re in it, the momentum spills over. When one is up, the other is down.
You learn to enjoy it. And even if you don’t - if you have the life of a nappy-changing monk - it’s not like there’s anything else you have planned.
So maybe the best - and almost certainly the easiest way to start thinking in decades isn’t to try and think yourself into doing so.
It's to burn your boats and put yourself in a position that forces you to do it - because the best work often emerges not in spite of, but because of, life’s most demanding commitments.
When you’ve already survived the chaos of toddlers, what’s another failed prototype?
It’s how Dyson did it. He might have never been big on discounting his products, but when it came to life, it seems he loved a two-for-one deal.
aled@ashore.io
Aled in your inbox
“Genuinely the only email I always open.” Lessons in building from unexpected places, in your inbox once a week, plus a few updates on Ashore. Directly from co-founder Aled. Join 3.5k+ founders, operators, and investors, and get inspired.
X (Formerly Twitter)
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Host Agreement
Frequently Asked Questions
Ashore For Teams
Founder Residencies
Team Retreats
About Us
The Journal
Crossover Creativity