8 Timeless Lessons from Henry Ford's 1922 Autobiography
What "My Life and Work" taught me about building, leading, and never settling
I stumbled upon Henry Ford's autobiography "My Life and Work" recently—published in 1922, over a century ago. I expected it to feel dated. Instead, I found myself underlining passages that could have been written yesterday.
Ford wasn't just an industrialist. He was a thinker who questioned everything: how work should be done, what money is actually for, and why most "experts" are wrong. Some of his ideas are controversial. Some feel uncomfortably relevant in our age of startups, hustle culture, and venture capital.
Here are the eight lessons that stuck with me:
1. Work-Life Balance is a Myth
Ford believed that to reach the 0.01%—the hyper-successful—you must think about your work "by day and dream of it by night." He drew a sharp distinction: an employee can drop their work at 5:00 PM, but a leader's "real work" begins then. Those evening hours are for reflection, planning, improvement.
He viewed effort like an engine: constant application creates exponential results, not linear ones. This isn't advice for everyone—but it's honest about what extreme success actually demands.
2. Ignore the "Wise People"
Ford found his success in a Blue Ocean—a market everyone else ignored. At the time, the "experts" claimed the internal combustion engine would never replace steam or horses. They had data, experience, credentials.
Ford's insight: experts often only know the limitations of what has already been done. True innovation requires ignoring those who insist something is impossible—especially when their certainty comes from having never tried.
3. Take Things Apart
From childhood, Ford was obsessed with disassembling watches to understand their mechanics. He believed you cannot learn everything from a book. You must physically take things apart to understand how components fit into the whole.
He viewed machines the way a writer views books—as sources of ideas to be analyzed, understood, and applied elsewhere. Tinkering wasn't just a hobby; it was his primary method of learning.
"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it."
4. Plan Relentlessly
Ford distinguished sharply between planning and experimenting. He would work out every detail on paper before building anything physical. Poor planning, he argued, leads to "makeshifts"—patched-together solutions that lack coherence.
This discipline allowed him to pre-plan the Model T's assembly line into four distinct constructional units before production even began. The result was unprecedented efficiency—not despite the planning, but because of it.
5. Service Over Finance
Ford was deeply skeptical of what we might today call "VC culture"—the prioritization of finance over product. He believed money should be the result of service, never the starting point.
His view was that many businesses fail because they focus on refinancing poor management rather than improving the value they provide to customers. Build something genuinely useful, he argued, and the money follows. Reverse that order, and you've already lost.
6. Beware of Complacency
Ford believed the moment you think you've "found your method," you're in danger. He was never satisfied with his metrics. When his stockholders celebrated production of 100 cars per day, he immediately aimed for 1,000.
To Ford, the journey of improvement is itself the reward. "Sagging back" into old habits, resting on past achievements—that's the death of a business. Success is not a destination you reach; it's a state of continuous motion.
"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right."
7. The Power of Simplicity
Ford's design philosophy was rooted in radical simplicity. He famously reduced the Model T to just four constructional units. His goal wasn't to optimize complex systems—it was to eliminate them entirely.
He believed people often waste enormous energy finding "better ways to do useless things." The most effective leaders don't optimize unnecessary steps; they remove them altogether. Subtraction, not addition, is the sign of mastery.
8. Absolute Self-Belief and Vision
Ford quit a senior position at the Edison Company to pursue his vision of a gas-powered car—at a time when everyone else thought it was a toy. He possessed what we might call a "reality distortion field": an unshakeable belief in a future others couldn't see.
His vision was crystalline: to build a car for the "great multitude" that was high-quality yet affordable for the average worker. He didn't just want to build cars. He wanted to democratize transportation. And he did.
Final Thought
What strikes me most about Ford's book isn't any single lesson—it's the intensity behind all of them. This was a man who believed deeply in what he was doing and thought hard about why he was doing it.
The book is surprisingly readable for something written a century ago. If you're building something—anything—it's worth the few hours it takes to read.
What's the oldest business book that still resonates with you? I'd love to hear.