The Dyslexic Advantage (22 page)

“I used to spend a lot of my time doing management training and strategic development for managers in large firms, then I moved over to working with entrepreneurs. I quickly noticed a difference. While many of the entrepreneurs were very good at presenting a clear and convincing picture of the business they were trying to build, they were very reluctant to get their ideas down on paper and to produce a written business plan. That was something I hadn't come across when I was working with corporate managers. A manager with a large company could typically produce a very good written strategic plan. So I found that rather strange, and I began to wonder why that was. That's really how I first got interested. After that, whenever I met entrepreneurs who were great at communicating visions but seemed reluctant to put their ideas down on paper, I started questioning them about how they'd done at school, and whether any of their children were dyslexic, and so forth. So that's how my interest in dyslexic entrepreneurs developed. That pattern kept coming up again and again.”

Dr. Logan eventually conducted formal research on entrepreneurs, both in the United Kingdom and later in the United States. In the United Kingdom she found that the incidence of dyslexia among entrepreneurs was about twice the rate it was in the general population, and in the United States it was at least three times as high.
¹
In the United States, fully 35 percent of the entrepreneurs she surveyed were dyslexic, while fewer than 1 percent of U.S. corporate managers were.

Dr. Logan found several key traits among dyslexic entrepreneurs. The first is a remarkable sense of vision for their businesses. “They've got a very clear idea of where they're going and what they're doing, and holding that end point in sight is a very powerful tool because it can be used to harness other people around that vision.”

Second is a confident and persistent attitude. “Having got through and solved all the problems of schooling and coped with those challenges, they have a can-do approach that they bring to new situations. They not only know what they want to do, but they're also confident that it's going to work.”

Third is the ability to ask for and engage the help of others. Dr. Logan found that most dyslexic entrepreneurs employed significantly larger staffs than nondyslexic entrepreneurs, and they were more likely to delegate operational tasks to their staffs while focusing their own attention on the overall vision and mission of their companies. “They know they're not particularly good at the details, so they surround themselves with people who are good at doing finance, or good at attention to detail, or whatever it happens to be; and unlike many entrepreneurs who won't delegate and will constantly interfere, they'll bring the best people around, and then they'll trust those people to do it. Many individuals with dyslexia have used the same sentence to describe this attitude to me: ‘I employ the best people I can find, even if they're cleverer than me.' That comes out again and again.”

The fourth trait is excellent oral communication, which they use to inspire their staffs. “Often they have very personal charismatic relationships with the people who work for them, and even when they have enormous empires they manage to somehow create those same sorts of relationships. The employees are energized by them. A good example of this is how the staffs of both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic were both going to go on strike. They both wanted pay rises. But Richard Branson [the dyslexic CEO of Virgin Atlantic] went to the staff conference, spoke to the staff, and explained why he couldn't give them a pay rise; and everybody went back to work and carried on.” By contrast, the CEO of British Airways didn't use that approach, and their labor standoff continued.
²

A fifth and final strength, which Dr. Logan has repeatedly observed but has not yet confirmed with her research, is that “many of these successful entrepreneurs use their intuition a lot. For example, I've been talking recently to a very successful dyslexic entrepreneur, and he told me that he never does formal market research. He just goes and he'll stand next to a store that he's thinking of purchasing, and he looks at the footfall, and that sort of thing. It's certainly more of a right-brain approach than a logical reasoning approach.”

In short, the skills that Dr. Logan has identified in these dyslexic entrepreneurs consist to a surprising degree of the kinds of D- and N-strengths we've covered in this part and the preceding one: Dynamic reasoning to “read” future opportunities, establish end points, and solve problems, and Narrative reasoning to convey the vision to others, inspire them, and persuade them to join in. These are the kinds of skills needed to operate in any environment that is changing, uncertain, or incompletely known.

Key Points about D-Strengths

I
n these chapters, we've discussed the D-strengths that many individuals with dyslexia exhibit. Key points to remember about Dynamic reasoning include:

In closing, let's look at an individual who shows remarkable D-strengths—novelist Vince Flynn. Over the last decade, Vince's twelve counterterrorism-themed novels have sold over 15 million copies, making him one of the top-selling novelists in the world today. Vince's stories are renowned for their intricate plotting and their surprising twists and turns; but nothing he's written can approach his own life story for unexpected plot developments.

Vince was diagnosed with dyslexia in the second grade, when he was given the label “SLBP” (“slow learning behavior problem”) and placed in a special ed class. Vince recalls his problems with reading, writing, and spelling as “nearly incapacitating,” and he got by primarily by becoming a master of classroom survival tactics. As he once recalled, “[I] knew how to figure out the game and was always respectful to my teachers and tried hard. As long as you did that, it didn't matter how poorly you did on tests; they were going to pass you. . . . You participate in class discussions and the teacher says, ‘This kid gets it; he just doesn't test well.'”
¹

Vince graduated from high school with a C+ average, then enrolled at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. There his lack of reading and writing skills immediately began to cause problems. After his first semester he was placed on academic probation. He took two English classes and got a C− in both. He barely scraped by until his junior year, when two things happened that changed his life forever. The first was an event that Vince told us he still recalls as one of the most humiliating of his life.

“I was taking a class pass/fail, and I handed in a paper to the teacher, but I wasn't there the next class to pick it up. So I had a so-called friend pick up the paper, and later that day I went to meet him for lunch, and there was my paper sitting right in the middle of the table with eight guys gathered grinning around it. And at the top of the page there's a big red ‘F,' and toward the bottom the professor had written, ‘I don't know how you ever got into college, and I don't know how you're ever going to graduate, but this is the worst paper I have ever read in all my years of teaching.' I was so embarrassed that I said to myself, ‘This is it, I can't keep going like this. I've got to face this head-on.'”

“Right after that, Al McGuire [the Hall of Fame college basketball coach and TV commentator] came through St. Thomas on a speaking tour, and I was thunderstruck by what he had to say.” He talked about how he had grown up dyslexic, and he didn't know how to read or write; but he was a standout basketball player, and he b.s.'d his way through high school and college with never better than a C average. After playing in the NBA for a few years, he began coaching the Marquette Warriors, and in his last season there they made it to the NCAA championship game. About fifteen minutes before tipoff the scorekeeper came up and handed McGuire the scorebook and said, ‘Coach, I need your starting lineup.' And McGuire broke into a cold sweat because he had no idea how to spell his players' names. So he panicked and said, ‘I can't—I have an emergency,' and he ran back to the locker room and locked himself in a stall, and he started praying, ‘Dear God, if you let me win this game, I'll go back to night school and learn how to read and write.' So Marquette won, and Al McGuire retired from coaching and went back to school.

“Now, what I learned from this story was that the longer I put this off, the worse and more embarrassing it would become. So I really got serious because I wanted to write without being embarrassed and be something more than a functional illiterate.

“So I went out and bought two books,
The Fundamentals of English
and
How to Spell Five Words a Day
, and I started going to the library every day and really working through them. I also started reading everything I could get my hands on, because I knew that was the only way to get better.”

Vince started by reading
Trinity
by Leon Uris. Although he struggled during the first hundred pages, he was soon hooked, and he stopped worrying if he couldn't decipher all the words. He found that his mind could “fill in the blanks.”

After graduating from college, Vince took several sales jobs while trying to enter Marine aviator school; however, the several concussions he'd suffered playing football disqualified him. He spent several years pursuing a medical waiver that would allow him to fly, but when he hit twenty-seven and was no longer eligible for officer training, he began searching for another direction for his life. “I remember saying to myself there's no way I'm going to spend the rest of my life sitting in a cubicle,” so he started working on the manuscript that would become his first novel,
Term Limits.
Soon after, he “burned his boats,” quitting his job and telling his friends and family he was going to make his living as a novelist.

We asked Vince what convinced him he could make a living as a novelist when only a few years before he'd been told that his writing set new standards for ineptitude? He responded that it was the confidence that came from finding that his mind worked a lot like the novelists he loved. He said that when he read or watched movies, “I always knew what was going to happen next. A lot of times I could tell almost from the first chapter how it was going to end.” That experience made him think that if he could predict the plots of other people's novels, maybe he could create his own.

Vince's suspicions were on solid ground. As we've discussed, prediction and narrative are closely related mental skills. However, Vince's ability to predict plot twists might not have been enough to make him risk his livelihood if he hadn't also seen other signs that he had special skill in dealing with complex patterns. One was a surprising talent he'd shown as a child: “I was a naturally gifted chess player. It was a weird, weird, weird deal: even though I was failing in school, I could always just see in advance how the game would unfold. So I used to get driven around by my parents and dropped off at the houses of some of the best chess players in the Twin Cities. One year I actually finished fourth place in state. But I never told my friends at school because I was embarrassed about it.”

Another hint came in college. “While I was struggling in my other classes, I ended up taking macroeconomics, and for the first time in my life I found myself sitting in a classroom being one of the only people who knew what was going on. A lot of the kids who were gifted in English and math were just scratching their heads because it didn't make sense to them—there were just too many variables—and suddenly I'm the one who's saying, ‘How do you guys not understand this stuff? This is easy!' It just made sense to me.”

Vince's powers of prediction were clearly revealed in his writing. After his first novel got him a contract with a major publisher, Vince chose for his second a topic that in 1998 most people were still largely unaware of but which struck him as the most important national security issue of the time: Islamic radical fundamentalism. Vince's next three novels all focused on this threat, and all were published before the tragic events occurred that brought this danger to everyone's consciousness. “Prior to 9/11 I wondered, ‘Why isn't anyone else scared about this?' To me it was just obvious that this was a disaster waiting to happen.”

Vince's ability to predict both the headlines and the behind-the-scenes action is so startling that one of his books,
Memorial Day
, attracted a security review by officials at the Department of Energy because they were certain he must have been fed classified information from an inside source. But Vince says the realism of his stories comes entirely from his ability to predict using freely available information. “I can honestly tell you that I've never had an active-duty person with the CIA or the Secret Service or NSA or FBI or armed services—or anywhere—give me classified information. I just take the information that's available in the public domain, and then I fill in the blanks. I have a way of connecting those dots.”