The Dyslexic Blogger

This is a post that I’ve been thinking about writing for a while now. When I told my husband that I wanted to write a post on dyslexia, we had a joke-a-thon of all the clever lines that I should include. Things like: “Why do you suppose syldexicbogger.com is taken but dyslexicblogger.com is still available?”  It’s OK, I can say that because I am dyslexic.

I was very lucky. My mom realized that I was different early in grade school, and instead of calling me lazy, she found tutors to teach me tricks that helped me get by.

As an entrepreneur, I seem to be in good company. According to studies, one in five of us is dyslexic. As I start off my new venture, it’s nice to think that a lot of others with dyslexia have been there before. Some of the people that I look up to are Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson, Amstrad’s Sir Alan Sugar, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and Kinko’s Paul Orfalea.

About a year ago or so, I found a copy of the book “Copy This!” sitting around the house. I picked it up and looked at the back cover. When I realized that it was a book about Paul Orfalea’s life story, and how he was able to make it with his dyslexia, I needed to read more. Reading on showed me that it wasn’t in spite of being dyslexic, it was the dyslexia that gave him the tools to be successful.

Here are some traits that dyslexics have that allow them to succeed in business:

• Dyslexics have better than average communication skills. This allows us to get people to rally behind our ideas.
• Dyslexics adjust quickly to change and are very good adapters. This is a coping mechanism that we’ve developed to hide our learning challenges.
• Dyslexics think differently. It’s much easier for us to see the whole picture and know what outcome we are expecting at the end of the day.
• Dyslexics aren’t afraid to ask for help. Everyone has limitations. We’ve known ours for a very long time. We find people that complement us to do great things.

If you find some typos in my blog, please forgive them. I really do read things over more than once before I post, but I just don’t see the mistakes. One of the reasons that I love doing the wiki thing is that it gives an opportunity for people to fix each others’ mistakes.

I’ll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks. It’s a bit of a head clearing time between my old job and when the entrepreneurship really begins. Everything is in place and I’ll be ready to go as soon as I get back. It’s going to be a lot of fun.