For this video I want to talk about someone who is dyslexic and who is also very successful. Choosing someone to talk about in this video was difficult because dyslexia is common among self-made millionaires. In fact, one study I read reported that 40% of self-made millionaire CEOs have dyslexia.
Stick around to see who this person is and WHY I’m talking about him today.
Many parents fear that their children with dyslexia will struggle throughout their lives. In fact, I knew what the report would say when I took my child for evaluation, but reading the results made me cry.I cried because I knew my child would struggle to do what comes so easily for other children. I cried because I feared for her success in life. I cried because I didn’t fully understand how to support her at that time.
Parents get emotional because we want the best for our children and we don’t want them to experience the anxiety of learning to read and spell at a slower pace than their peers, we know that kids can be mean and we don’t want them to be ridiculed for their differences, and if you’re like me, you’ve also realized that schools often have limited knowledge on how to support children with dyslexia.
If this learning difference comes with so much emotional turmoil, how do so many people with dyslexia experience so much success in life? why did LinkedIn add “Dyslexic thinking” as a skill option for members’ profiles?
People with dyslexia have brains that work differently. They process language differently, which is what causes their difficulty reading and spelling. However, that same brain often has very unique strengths that make them prime candidates for creating great change in the world.
Here are just a few characteristics of many individuals with dyslexia
They possess wonderful imaginations and are exceptional problem solvers. They are often curious about the world around them. For example, my daughter often does “experiments” in our house which cause a great mess, but are often a great learning experience for her. Although these experiments can be frustrating in day-to-day parenting life, I try my best to remember that doing these experiments is what makes her brain thrive and soak up knowledge.
When you combine curiosity, imagination, and problem solving skills you have the potential for creating great changes in our world.
The successful entrepreneur with dyslexia I want you to know about today is Daymond John. He is one of the hosts on the show Shark Tank. Now you may be asking yourself how I picked him to include in my video today.
Here’s why…
I watched a video of Daymond talking about his dyslexia and here’s what he said attributes to success in most dyslexics. “They don’t get caught up in the reading about how things should be done, they focus on executing how it should be done.”
This struck me as a really important point. Many people (including myself) get caught up in the process of how to do something that we never actually execute; we get stuck in the research and learning part.
A person with dyslexia, who struggles to read about how other people have already done things “correctly”, may lack the desire to read about that information for hours. They just get about the execution of things. They may not have the background knowledge that someone else does who researched something for months, but they do have the imagination and problem solving skills to figure out their own way of doing things. The people we know who are really successful, like Daymond John, figured out a better way to do that thing they executed leading to their incredible success.
So let’s celebrate creative thinking that’s outside the box and creativity that comes from experimentation and exploration because this is the type of thinking that leads to incredible change in our world.
