By license from Presenter Media
The first time I met my then future brother-in-law, Vic, I was a senior in high school and he was a freshman in college. Like most boys that age the best way to get to know each other is to play a sport together and so I took him down the street to play basketball at an outside hoop. I had a few inches on him and had longer arms and a longer reach. I am sure I thought I could hold my own against him.
What I did not expect was that he could shoot with both hands and that my longer reach would be mostly useless. I discovered that when he was in high school he had broken his right wrist and had to play basketball that season shooting with his left hand.
Vic’s learning to shoot left-handed is what experts refer to as “compensation or compensatory learning” and is difficult because it takes hard work, determination, and resiliency. Most of the time we learn using “capitalization learning,” which is when we use our natural instincts and strengths to learn. This is much easier and, of course, the path of least resistance.
As you might know, I am a big fan of writer Malcolm Gladwell, and in his book David and Goliath he explores dozens of great examples of what can happen when ordinary people face giants of one kind or another
One term that Gladw
ell coined for many David success stories is “desirable difficulty.” This is a major challenge that requires a person to adapt and learn new behavior in order to survive and thrive.
What Gladwell and other researchers have discovered is that between 33 and 50 percent of successful entrepreneurs experienced some kind of difficulty that required compensatory learning. For some, like Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, and David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, this “desirable difficulty” is dyslexia. Dyslexia is a reading disorder that many people struggle with for their whole life and has various degrees of difficulty.
In this Blog article and the one that follows next week I will explore four interesting stories from Gladwell’s book about successful people with dyslexia.
David Boies
Attorney David Boies. David Boies is high profile attorney and is the Chairman of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, a very highly regarded New York law firm. Boies grew up in rural Illinois and did not know he had dyslexia until he was in high school. As a child his mother read to him a great deal. While he started reading a little in 3rd grade, he mostly “read” comic books because he could figure-out the story from the images.
Boies managed to barely graduate from high school and went to work in construction in southern California where his family moved. After he was later married with children his wife encouraged him to go to college. Because he was very well organized and had figured-out new ways to learn through listening, he finished enough courses so he could apply to law school. Because Bois had become an excellent listener he absorbed and remembered virtually all of the lectures – more than his classmates. He also discovered there were many short legal summaries that he could either try to read or have classmates read to him. Bois excelled and graduated from Yale Law School.
Boies knew that his legal niche would be in the courtroom (litigation) and not in corporate law or legal research. Litigation was where his talents for listening and memorization would be most successful. Boies has successfully represented such high profile clients as IBM, George Steinbrenner, CBS, and even Napster. A list of cases can be found on Wikipedia.
Brian Grazer
Movie Producer Brian Grazer. Maybe you have seen the movies Splash, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon. These are only a few of the films that Academy Award winner Brian Grazer has produced. Grazer is dyslexic and had a typically difficult time getting through school. Because he really could not read, he would spend many hours daydreaming, which really developed his creative mind.
By the time Grazer got to high school and often failed his tests and quizzes he had learned to talk his teachers into changing his grades; he developed incredible persuasion skills. When he entered college he learned to listen to lectures, use his classmates to brief and re-brief him on the subject matter before exams, and then persuade professors to raise his grades afterwards.
Both Boies and Grazer had what turned out to be “desirable difficulties,” challenges that forced them to use compensatory learning to survive. And, what they learned arguably made them the success they are today.
