Clockwise top left: Les Samuel and his wife Lisa 2012; Workers for Freedom Fall Collection 1997; Les and his father 1978; Les, (midddle) two brothers and his grandmother 1970; Les (lower center) and track team, c. 1966.
completely prepared in advance, no matter if it was a meeting, a presentation, a report, etc. because I couldn’t be put on the spot. I was always strategically working. I was on the chess team in high school. Then I fell in love with backgammon. Why? Because it was visual, strategic thinking—moves now and moves ahead. And that’s how I operated so it made great sense to me. It wasn’t until about 1999, after 30 years building an internationally successful business where I managed budgets, orders, multiple collections and international manufacturing that I started to see my dyslexia as a gift. I never felt I could afford the time because I had to stay ahead of everything. But in 1999, I sold my business and went through a divorce, so suddenly I had time in front of me. I could no longer run from myself. People can look at dyslexia now and say that it can bring really positive gifts with different ways of looking at and visualizing the world. But the system at that time didn’t have any alternative pathways for non-traditional learners. The word dyslexia didn’t even exist! Now if children are having difficulty learning in certain ways, they will test for various learning disorders. My experience is a great metaphor for the new challenges students face today. It’s no longer dyslexia because as a society we’ve acknowledged that and created a system to support it. As alternative as my path was, it was still straighter than what many students today face trying to find ways to learn in a system that perhaps doesn’t
or can’t recognize undiagnosed issues. And as a result, our students are dropping out of high school around the same age as when I entered the workforce – 16 – but the opportunities to build a long, successful career by starting work at an early age are much fewer than in the 1960’s when a college degree wasn’t a requirement for a career pathway. I didn’t know I had graduated high school until 2006 when I was helping my mother move and found my diploma in a closet. I was 55 years old. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I had finished high school, but I had moved out of my parent’s house when I was 16 and never really looked back so when they mailed my diploma to my father, I was already building a career. Today, I work as an executive coach with top CEOs, most of whom have advanced degrees, but they turn to me for guidance and business advice. Ironically, I believe so much of my success has to do with my dyslexia and the way I see the world. If we could all start to look at the world’s issues in new ways, maybe upside down, maybe backwards, we could stop talking about things as broken and people as failures and begin to diagnose the source of the challenges in order to create a whole new picture of success for our nation’s citizens. n Les Samuel is a nationally recognized executive coach and owner of BusinessWise, Inc., working with CEOs and top executives in major corporations across the country.
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