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Henry Ford: learning to fail

Snippets from the book "Mastery" by Robert Green


1. Listening



2. Reading

One day in 1885, the twenty-three-year old Henry Ford got his first look at the gas-powered engine, and it was instant love. (...)


Working the night shift at the Edison Illuminating Company as an engineer, during the day he would tinker with the new internal-combustion engine he was developing. (...)

By 1896, working with friends who helped him build a carriage, he completed his first prototype, which he called the Quadricycle. (...)

It was a ruthlessly competitive environment in which new companies died by the day. Ford’s Quadricycle looked nice and ran well, but it was too small and incomplete for large-scale production.

And so he began work on a second automobile, thinking ahead to the production end of the process.

A year later he completed it, and it was a marvel of design. Everything was geared toward simplicity and compactness. It was easy to drive and maintain. All that he needed was financial backing and sufficient capital to mass-produce it. (...)


To manufacture automobiles in the late 1890s was a daunting venture. It required a tremendous amount of capital and a complex business structure. (...)

Ford quickly found the perfect backer: William H. Murphy, one of the most prominent businessmen in Detroit. (...)


The car Ford had designed as a prototype needed to be reworked (...).

He kept trying to refine the design to come closer to his ideal. But it was taking far too long. (...)

In 1901, a year and a half after it had started operation, the board of directors dissolved the company. They had lost faith in Henry Ford. In analyzing this failure, Ford came to the conclusion that he had been trying to make his automobile serve too many consumer needs.

He would try a second time. (...)

He convinced Murphy to give him another chance, something rare in the fledgling automobile business. Still believing in Ford’s genius, he agreed, and together they formed the Henry Ford Company.

Right from the start, however, Ford felt the pressure from Murphy to get the automobile ready for production so as to avoid the problems he’d had with the first company. Ford resented the interference from people who knew nothing about design or the high standards he was trying to establish for the industry.


Murphy and his men brought in an outsider to supervise the process. This was the breaking point—

less than a year after its establishment, Ford left the company.

The break with Murphy this time was final. In the car business, everyone wrote Henry Ford off. He had blown his two chances and nobody was ever given a third, not with the amount of money at stake. But to friends and family, Ford himself seemed blithely unconcerned.

He told everyone that these were all invaluable lessons to him—

he had paid attention to every glitch along the way, and like a watch or an engine, he had taken apart these failures in his mind and had identified the root cause: no one was giving him enough time to work out the bugs. The people with money were meddling in mechanical and design affairs. They were injecting their mediocre ideas into the process and polluting it. He resented the idea that having money gave them certain rights, when all that mattered was a perfect design.

The answer was to find a way to maintain complete independence from the financiers.


(...) several months into the search he found an ideal partner—Alexander Malcomson, an émigré from Scotland, who had made his fortune in the coal business. He agreed to finance this latest venture and to not meddle in the manufacturing process. Ford worked at creating a new kind of assembly plant that would give him more control over the car he wanted to design, now known as the Model A.

The Model A would be the lightest car ever made, simple and durable.

It was the culmination of all of his tinkering and designing. It would be assembled along a line that would ensure speed of production. (...)


With the assembly plant ready, Ford worked hard at getting the team of workers to churn out fifteen cars a day—a rather high number back then. He oversaw every aspect of the production—it was his car from the inside out. (...)

Orders started pouring in for the well made yet inexpensive Model A, and by 1904 the Ford Motor Company had to expand its operations. Soon it would be one of the few survivors from the early era of the automobile business, and a giant in the making.


(...)

Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education.

They tell you about your own inadequacies. It is hard to find out such things from people, as they are often political with their praise and criticisms. Your failures also permit you to see the flaws of your ideas, which are only revealed in the execution of them. (...)


Think of it this way:

There are two kinds of failure.

The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you.

The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn.

Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.

In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt.

You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning.

In any case, to apprentice as an entrepreneur you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, a part of you

even hoping that you’ll fail. You have everything to gain.

3. Speaking

- record yourself summing up the story in less than 2 mins trying to use some of the new words in the story, then listen to your own recording and try to identify the parts that could be improved.

Record yourself again trying to do better this time.


As always, enjoy your journey and make English part of your Routine.

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