How Dyslexia Helped Three Famous People Succeed Beyond Imagination

 Some of the biggest names in science, trade, and movies struggled in school with their thinking and learning differences. It may be hard to believe, but many people we know that made the world a better place were, in fact, dyslexic. 

Steven Spielberg, Keira Knightley, and Salma Hayek are some of Hollywood’s brightest stars - and they all have dyslexia. The greatest minds in history, like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawkings, and Pablo Picasso were also all dyslexic. Richard Branson and Steve Jobs are mega-successful dyslexic entrepreneurs who turned their brainchild into billion-dollar companies. 

These names are just a handful of representatives of what dyslexic minds can achieve. No matter what corner of the world you go to, you are bound to find dyslexic individuals who have tasted success despite being marginalized and experiencing early difficulties with reading and writing. 

This is because dyslexia is not a disability; it is a learning differentiation where the individual processes language in a different way. There are many positives to it, like enhanced creativity, the ability to see the bigger picture, problem-solving skills, and so on. 

That’s why these dyslexic individuals weren’t just able to think outside the box but shatter the current thinking of their time.  

In today’s blog, we will talk about three such individuals who were visionaries that impacted the world in remarkable ways. 

So, without further ado, let’s get on to it! 

Steven Spielberg 

It would be a lie if you said you didn’t root for Indiana Jones as he ran to avoid being crushed by a giant boulder, teared up as we watched E.T fly back home, or gasped at the thought of giant prehistoric dinosaurs plaguing the earth. 

Academy award-winning director Steven Spielberg is credited for some of the most iconic films to grace our screens. But do you know the director we all adore is dyslexic? (Though he wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until he was in his 60s.)

He explains the feeling of finally being diagnosed as: “the last puzzle part in a tremendous mystery that I’ve kept to myself all these years.”

During his childhood, Spielberg daydreamed his way through school. He shares that he always felt disconnected from his peers since he couldn’t keep up due to dyslexia. He learned to read two years later than other pupils. 

The school administration thought he was lazy. His peers bullied him relentlessly. And after losing a hard-fought battle with maths, he finally dropped out of college. 

Luckily for Spielberg, he was able to transform his daydreams into movie marvels we see on screen today. He didn’t let dyslexia hold him down. Instead, he transformed it into a great advantage. 

He says: “Movies really helped me…kind of saved me from shame, from guilt…making movies was my great escape.”

And not only did movies give him an outlet to channel his energies, but feeling like an outsider for a long time helped him co-write The Goonies, a super hit film about a quirky group of friends who were all black sheep at school. “I was a member of the Goon Squad,” he adds. 

Spielberg reportedly takes twice as long as most of his Hollywood peers to read books and scripts. He also went back to college in his 50s to complete his degree that he’d left abandoned in 1968. 

The director has a special message for people experiencing learning difficulties:

 “It is more common than you can imagine. You are not alone. And while you will have this the rest of your life, you can dart between the raindrops to get where you want to go and it will not hold you back.”

Albert Einstein 

Albert Einstein, the German-born theoretical physicist, is the mind behind the general theory of relativity, one of the two most important theories in modern physics alongside quantum physics. He is best known for deriving the mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc2.

We all know Einstein today for his brilliance in physics and maths, but did you know he struggled with language difficulty? 

Einstein also frequently described his thought process as being nonverbal:

“Words or language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.” (This quote was taken from a letter he wrote to the mathematician Jacques Hadamard in 1945.)

Einstein had extremely delayed speech - he didn’t speak until he was three and didn’t speak fluently until the age of six. He also had a hard time jotting his thoughts down, retrieving language, and reading aloud - all characteristic signs of dyslexia. 

At school, his lack of adeptness at arithmetic and language led a teacher to forecast that ‘ nothing good’ would come out of Einstein. 

However, little did the teacher know that Einstein excelled at visual imagination and spatial reasoning. As a little boy, he had a strong interest in geometry. And in his teenage, he thrived at a Swiss school that taught students based on creative and visual methods while discouraging memorization. 

So naturally, he credited the conception of the theory of relativity to thought experimentation, in which he imagined himself riding on a streetcar traveling at light’s speed. 

While Einstein wasn’t diagnosed as dyslexic during his lifetime, he frequently described his thought process to be nonverbal on several occasions. 

Here’s a quote from him during a conversation with psychologist friend Max Wertheimer:

“Thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”

Richard Branson 

Billionaire Richard Branson’s story is nothing short of inspiring. As a dyslexic child, Branson had tremendous difficulty navigating his way through school.

Today, he’s the CEO of Virgin and an author, investor, philanthropist, and space explorer that everyone looks up to. However, things weren’t always looking good for Branson when he was a child. 

Branson felt like a failure when it came to reading and writing - flunking exams and finally dropping out of high school at the age of 15. He shared that his dyslexia was treated as a “handicap.” His teachers thought he was lazy, dumb, and someone who simply couldn’t fit in. 

But today, he partly credits dyslexia for his success. He shared: “My dyslexia has shaped Virgin right from the very beginning and imagination has been the key to many of our successes.”

He believes dyslexic people have a vivid imagination. He thinks one reason people with dyslexia do so well in life is that they tend to simplify things since they struggle in school, including problems. 

“It helped me think big but keep our messages simple. The business world often gets caught up in facts and figures — and while the details and data are important, the ability to dream, conceptualize and innovate is what sets the successful and the unsuccessful apart.”

The billionaire believes that the skills associated with dyslexia, from problem-solving and creativity to imagination, will be soon needed in the new world of the workforce that will be shaped by automation and artificial intelligence. 

And he has a message for all of us: We should stop getting children to think the same way. Instead, we should support and celebrate all sorts of neurodiversity - encouraging children’s imagination and creativity. 

RIFFIT & Dyslexia

For each one of the geniuses mentioned above, there are millions of dyslexic people who aren’t able to realize their dreams and reach their full potential owing to their neurodiversity. Even with so many scientific breakthroughs we have witnessed over the last 5 decades, we have failed to understand the needs, aspirations, and potential of a large proportion of the population that don’t process information the standard way - leading them to a lifetime of illiteracy and social exclusion. And today, we’re here to change that - one song at a time in the RIFFIT app. We’re here to empower dyslexic minds by leveraging songs as a mainstream communication tool to our daily lives. 

Decades of scientific evidence has shown that music has the ability to unlock improvements in reading and comprehension abilities of dyslexic people. Simply input text (word, jpeg, pdf, etc.) into the RIFFIT app, select your favorite musical genre and melody, and listen to the melodious songs on the go. Imagine how empowering it must be for dyslxic children to approach reading and writing through music - to be longer burdened by meticulous re-reading for the hundredth time.

Download RIFFIT today from the AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riffit/id1553782662?mt=12