Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

[M]anufacturing, science and engineering are ... incredibly creative. I'd venture to say more so than creative advertising agencies and things that are known as the creative industries.

The key to success is failure… Success is made of 99 percent failure.

Hire inexperience. This year we plan to hire 200 engineers - half of whom are recent grads. Young people are not burdened by years of experience. They haven't learned - or been told - what is right or wrong. With engineering, there is no tried and tested path. You try, and fail, and fix, and fail again.

Anger is a good motivator.

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.

When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.