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This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe<\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cA great challenge of life: Knowing enough to think you are right, but not knowing enough to know you are wrong.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2014 Neil deGrass Tyson<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cIdeas are so fragile,\u201d Sir James Dyson reflected in a recent interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n He would know, given the extraordinary determination it took to protect the very fragile idea he spent a lifetime pursuing: a bagless vacuum cleaner.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dyson originally found it so difficult to raise money for his idea that he still owns 100% of Dyson Limited, his maker of \u201ccyclonic\u201d vacuum cleaners (which really are so, so much better than the ones with bags).<\/p>\n Because such ideas are \u201cso easily knocked away\u201d by people who know how unlikely they are to succeed, Dyson warns prospective inventors and entrepreneurs that \u201cexperts are dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n Experience, he argues, doesn\u2019t just add knowledge \u2014 it adds reasons to 1) not try things and 2) stop trying hard things.<\/p>\n This is why he hires students as young as 17 to work at Dyson.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re experienced, you know why not to do something or how not to do something,\u201d he explains. \u201cWhereas if you\u2019re naive and you\u2019re a young engineer\u2026you don\u2019t have that negativity.\u201d<\/p>\n Having endured such expert negativity himself, Dyson now values the naivety he needed to ignore it.<\/p>\n \u201cI love naivety,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause it creates a different way of doing things, and we\u2019ve got to find different ways of doing things all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, Henry Ford was universally told that his different way of doing things wasn\u2019t worth pursuing: An internal combustion engine could never compete with steam engines.<\/p>\n Ford persisted, of course, and steam engines were soon on the road to extinction.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is the way with wise people,\u201d he wrote in his autobiography<\/a>. \u201cThey are so wise and practical they always know to a dot just why something can\u2019t be done. They always know the limitations.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Dyson, Ford therefore preferred employees with \u201ca state of mind in which nothing is impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n