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Dyslexia and Wealth Are Linked

40% of Millionaires found to be dyslexic

By Shirley YanezPublished 5 years ago 4 min read
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It seems I am in good company!

Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell Walt Disney—each of these game-changers were dyslexics. In fact, 40 percent of the world’s self-made millionaires have dyslexia.

Going to school with dyslexia for me was brutal, and my mother leaving me at 8 made navigating life really tough. The reason I have incredible drive and rigid discipline today, and two things you need to build a business empire, especially if reading and writing is a challenge, stems from feelings of shame and inadequacy in the classroom.

I can remember my head teacher going round the classroom asking different children to read out loud. I was always sweating and praying he wouldn't call me out to the front. I learned how to memorise words and what they look like, but I never learned to read in the conventional sense. I left school at 14 without one single GCSE.

The positive side of dyslexia is that you develop other gifts. I've trained my mind to have a photographic memory. It also makes you more creative in solving problems because your mind is always in fight mode to understand the world around you. You instinctively learn to handle problems as part of life, and although it is a truly lonely time, this builds incredible discipline because you feel you have to prove yourself to everyone else around you.

I have decided, after finally mastering the art of writing my new book The Mind Detective, to talk out about this as a guest speaker as much as I can to make changes in the way people think. I hate the idea of other kids going through what I endured because of incorrect information and stigma.

The dyslexic mind has the ability to innovate and create in the world to the point that they are massively successful because they are able to bring and create something new or reinvent a new approach to an old problem.

Most people who make millions have difficult childhoods or have been frustrated in a big way; this is me. Dyslexia is one of the driving forces behind this and my own success. People with dyslexia are often very good lateral and strategic thinkers. Again, this is me.

Today, the experts believe that one reason people with dyslexia succeed as successful entrepreneurs might be that they tend not to be good at details and learn to excel by grasping the bigger picture, producing original ideas, and thinking outside the box. This is me, I was much more motivated than most at school because of the social exclusion I felt. It was really hard to perform well at school and pass exams, so I had to find other inventive ways to feel accomplished. Whilst everyone else was swatting up on exams, I was selling cigarettes on the playground, making a small profit and building a market.

To gain an accurate assessment of the reality we find ourselves in, we need to know ourselves very well. We may need to take off those rose colored glasses of denial in order to see our accurate truth.

Learning how to deal with personal difficulty and being open and willing to truthfully face the truth of the matter in hand is much more productive than clinging on to imagination and false illusions.

To feel truly content and connected to your authentic self, it is required that you learn how to be strong and self reliant, so you can confidently pick yourself up every time you fall.

Facing fear is the most difficult thing we have to do in life, but it is the only way to regain control over our mind and be able to accurately assess ourselves in our surroundings.

Overcoming fear also contains vital keys in becoming the director of our own lives, as well as leading us to achieve mental, emotional and spiritual freedom. Basically creating a calm and relaxed life without internal suffering.

When we become more competent in developing emotional self-regulation, our inner safety is enhanced, so trust can be formed. We discover that we really do have the resources inside of us for feeling comforted happy and safe.

I was told for the first two years of my life I was amazing and could do anything by my mother and all the people in our street, so my inner confidence sat-nav was set on course for world domination right from the start. Going to school not understanding I was dyslexic at 5 made conventional learning very hard, and by the time I was 12, even with all the confidence in the world, I knew subconsciously I would never excel in exams.

Writing my book was an unbelievably difficult experience. It took me over a year, but I persisted, and using a computer truly helped me achieve my dream of producing a publishing triumph I am so very proud of.

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About the Creator

Shirley Yanez

I am a British Social Entrepreneur, Talk Therapist, Life Coach and Author of my new Book The Mind Detective. I am dyslexic and proud. Most people believe that Dyslexia is a sign of not being intelligent but this is wrong.

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