What Dyslexia Has Taught Me About Business

This isn’t a post about overcoming dyslexia. It’s about what being dyslexic has taught me about running businesses, leading people, and coaching founders, some of it the hard way.

When Did I Find Out I Was Dyslexic?

I think my mum first noticed when I was about five or six. We were doing a school play, a nativity or something like it. All the other kids were singing along and knew all the words. I was just standing there. I didn’t know the words and I couldn’t get into it.

I have three older sisters, so I think she’d already picked up that things were a bit different with me.

Sometime after that, around six or seven, I was taken to an educational psychologist. I remember it being a horrific experience. She was quite stern, sat behind a big desk, and insisted my parents leave me alone with her. I can’t remember the details of her report, just that it wasn’t helpful, and a bit damning.

Then my mum came across dyslexia somehow. This was the mid-80s, when it was very unknown. I got an official diagnosis.

The test was really difficult, but some parts of it I found really easy. That’s how dyslexia shows up. You’re not bad at everything. You’re weak in some areas and excellent in others. For me, the area where I absolutely excel is spatial reasoning.

What Is Dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a lifelong difference in how the brain processes language. It mainly affects reading, spelling and writing, and often working memory and processing speed too. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

The British Dyslexia Association estimates that around one in ten people in the UK are dyslexic. Research suggests dyslexia may be even more common among entrepreneurs, which says a lot about the kind of thinking it can bring.

Dyslexia is usually described by what it makes harder. That’s real, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it also shapes how you see problems, and that’s the part that’s taught me the most.

It’s Not Just About Spelling

People often think that if you’re dyslexic, you just can’t spell. That’s so common, and for a lot of people it’s simply wrong.

For me, dyslexia is mostly about:

• Memory recall: especially names of people and names of roads
• Working memory: mine is really poor
• Reading speed
• Reading comprehension

Working memory is one of the reasons I didn’t carry on as a developer. When you’re writing a program, you have to hold so much information in your head, and I struggled with that.

Other people with dyslexia might not have these challenges at all. That’s my particular type.

What Was School Like?

After my diagnosis, it was explained to the school. They had no idea. They kept thinking I was being lazy and not trying, and I got a lot of negative attention from teachers because of it.

A Sea of Red Pen

Pretty much every piece of work I handed in came back covered in red pen. Spelling corrections, grammar corrections, everywhere.

I was always doing my absolute best. To think that wasn’t anywhere near good enough for them was really, really damaging.

The Memory That Stayed With Me

I was eight. One teacher went round the class getting each of us to read the next bit of the book. When he got to me, I had no idea where we were.

One of the kids beside me leafed through my book and pointed to the place. But I couldn’t really read, so I fumbled, and I went absolutely puce.

He told me to stand up on my chair and read. Then he got me to stand up on the desk. Clearly I couldn’t read, so it wasn’t a choice.

It was a brutal experience, and it’s marked me significantly to this day. I also got picked on by other kids. If the teacher picks on you, it marks you.

Why Dyslexia Can Look Like Laziness

I do get it. You can seem bright, engaged and intelligent, and then you’re just not doing well in the same way as other kids. So it looks like you’re being lazy, and teachers often take that personally.

What Helped

My parents started taking me to a Saturday school to support dyslexic kids. I didn’t want to go, but I had to, and it really helped.

It took me until the age of ten to be able to spell my own surname.

A Fresh Start

I had such a bad time at primary school that I chose a secondary school where I didn’t know anybody. I wanted a completely fresh start, without anyone who knew my history.

I did much better there, because I could do subjects I was really good at:

• woodwork, which I totally excelled at
• technical drawing
• physics
• art and photography

Secondary school was still a huge struggle. Even though the school, in theory, understood dyslexia, lots of teachers still slated my work and thought I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I realise now that when I sat down to do geography, Irish or English homework, I’d often dissociate. It was just so painful. And then I’d receive the negative criticism when I handed it in.

A lot of dyslexic people leave school believing something about themselves that isn’t true. It can take years, sometimes decades, to unlearn it.

A Book Worth Reading: The Dyslexic Advantage

There’s an amazing book called The Dyslexic Advantage. It’s a green book with a really nice cover.

[Image: James’s photo of his copy of The Dyslexic Advantage]

It’s particularly helpful for anyone working with dyslexia, whether you’re a parent with a dyslexic child or an adult who suspects they’re dyslexic and is trying to work through it.

It almost celebrates the fact that you’re dyslexic, and treats it as a good thing, which is a really nice way of looking at it.

The book uses an acronym, MIND, for the different strengths dyslexia can bring and how they show up in different people:

• Material reasoning
• Interconnected reasoning
• Narrative reasoning
• Dynamic reasoning

I think there’s also a short assessment in it to help you see which ones are strongest for you.

What Has Dyslexia Taught Me About Business?

Dyslexia has taught me to see the big picture, ask for help, keep things simple, and build ways of working that suit how my brain actually works. Here’s what each of those looks like in practice.

1. Seeing the Big Picture

Many dyslexic people find it easier to see how things connect than to hold every detail in their head. In business, that can mean spotting patterns, opportunities and problems that others miss.

My brain sees the world as if everything is connected, a bit like a spider’s web. Pull on one tiny string and the whole thing moves.

That makes me a good coach. If you’re trying to help someone perform well at work, my brain is looking at every part of their life, because something’s not working and something’s keeping them stuck. Then it’s about unravelling that with them.

My brain is also very good at picturing things five, ten or twenty years ahead.

Spatial ability, physics and logic are natural strengths for me too, along with creativity. Being able to see things other people don’t, joining the dots in a different way, thinking outside the box.

Richard Branson is the classic dyslexic entrepreneur, and he’s well spoken on it. From what I’ve heard him say, one of his strengths is incredible empathy. When he’s building a product or a business, he can really put himself in the customer’s shoes, and that helps him decide what’s a good idea and what isn’t.

Empathy can be very high in people with dyslexia. It certainly is for me.

2. Asking for Help

When some things are genuinely harder for you, you learn early that you can’t do everything yourself. For founders, that turns out to be a strength. The ones who struggle most are often the ones who never learned to delegate.

My general philosophy here is strengths-based. We all have strengths and we all have weaknesses. Most of our culture works the opposite way.

If a child comes home with an A and two Ds, most parents and teachers say, “Look, you’ve got two Ds, you need to work on those.” A strengths-based approach says, “Look, you’ve got an A. What would happen if you really doubled down on that?” They’d become amazing at that subject.

It’s a crude example, but it’s how I coach. I help people understand their strengths and their weaknesses. In a way, it’s about understanding the territory of their weaknesses better than their strengths, so they can delegate, outsource or find other ways of getting support in those areas.

I do this too. Right now I have someone helping me with my marketing, including some of the executive function side of it.

Why Asking for Help Can Be So Hard

People who’ve grown up with dyslexia, or any kind of neurodivergence, have often been made to feel very different. For me, that came from teachers and peers.

It’s really hard. You feel isolated and alone, like there’s something wrong with you and you can’t do things as well as other people. You learn that from a very young age.

So there can be a fundamental “I’m not good enough” belief in there. When you delegate something or ask for help, you’re inviting someone into the part of your world where you feel you’re not good enough or not worthy.

That’s why shame is such an intrinsic part of this for many people who are neurodivergent, or who feel different for any reason. And I think we all feel different in some ways.

3. Keeping It Simple

If long documents and dense language are hard work for you, you get good at cutting through to what actually matters. That’s useful when you’re explaining a vision, pitching to investors, or helping a team agree on what’s next.

I’m very slow at typing. That’s why I often think out loud into voice notes, which is how this blog started, sitting under a tree in the park, out of the wind.

Unlike some people with dyslexia, I’m pretty articulate. People tend to find my writing style, which is quite colloquial, easy to understand and helpful, and I get a lot of praise for it these days.

But that’s been hard work. I was reprimanded so often for my work as a kid that I’m still really sensitive to criticism about it. So I’ve learned to make things super clear and to communicate in a way that doesn’t make assumptions.

4. Working With Your Brain, Not Against It

Dyslexic people often build their own tools and habits to get things done. Those workarounds can end up being better ways of working for everyone.

My calendar

I’m an absolute beast when it comes to my calendar. About 26 years ago, in the early 2000s, way before smartphones, I spent around £600 on a PalmPilot so I could keep tabs on everything I was doing. That was a lot of money at the time.

I used it religiously, and I’ve been the same ever since. I can’t remember the dates and events I’m committed to, so everything goes in my calendar. That means I don’t have to hold any of it in my head.

These days it’s Google Calendar. I colour code it and I’m pretty sophisticated about how I use it.

Building structure and being meticulous

I was a software developer, a business analyst and a project manager, and I did well at all of them because I had to create structures around myself to remember things.

I also had to be meticulous. Copying sentences off the board at school, I had to look at every single letter. I couldn’t just look at the word and write it down, because I wouldn’t get the spelling right.

Other tools I use

• AI tools like Claude: I use them heavily
• Dictation: speaking into my computer or WhatsApp and having it turned into text
• Read-aloud software
• Screen colour changes: using the standard Mac accessibility settings
• The OpenDyslexic font: on my Kindle, my browser and other things. It doesn’t work for everyone, but the letters are heavier at the bottom and it makes reading so much easier for me
• Saving contacts by where I met them: I’m probably not going to remember someone’s name, but I’ll remember where we met, so I can search for that in my phone

There are probably loads more tools and habits I use that I can’t remember right now.

What Do I Still Find Hard?

Dyslexia doesn’t go away, and it would be dishonest to pretend everything about it is a strength.

In many ways I feel like I’ve grown out of dyslexia, but I clearly haven’t.

• Reading: when my son was seven, he could read three or four times quicker than me as an adult, with better comprehension. Reading and comprehension are still a struggle.
• WhatsApps and emails: keeping up with them is a real challenge, because it takes me ages to read things.
• Voice notes: people sometimes switch to them for me, but they’re not necessarily better. They take a lot of focus to process too.
• Distraction: when I’m reading, the smallest thing will distract me. I’m really sensitive to how a document looks and how it’s formatted.
• One thing at a time: if there’s background noise or people talking to me, I can’t read. I need space to focus, which is challenging these days.

There are just so many words coming at us now, in WhatsApps, emails and everything else. On some levels, my reading and comprehension are still down at the level of a young child.

Naming the hard parts matters. It’s much easier to build support around something you’re honest about than something you’re hiding.

What Would I Say to a Dyslexic Founder?

Stop trying to fix your weaknesses first. Find your A and double down on it. Get to know your weaknesses well enough to get the right support around them, whether that’s delegating, outsourcing or finding a different way of doing things.

Being dyslexic shapes how you think, and in business, thinking differently is often the whole point. The work is learning which parts of how you’re wired to lean into, and which parts to get support with.

If you’re a dyslexic or neurodivergent founder and you’d like support building a business that works with how your brain works, that’s what I do in neurodivergent business coaching. Book a free discovery session and we’ll start there.