I                                   Segment 1: If you do a brain scan on a person with dyslexia, the images that are produced really strange.In certain critical parts of the brain-those that deal with reading and processing words- dyslexics have less grey matter. They don't have as many brain cells in those regions as they should. As the fetus develops inside the womb, neurons are supposed to travel to appropriate areas of the brain, taking their places like pieces on a chessboard. But for some reason, neurons of dyslexics sometimes get lost along the way. They end up in the wrong place. The brain has something called ventricular system, which functions as brains entry and exit point. Some people with reading disorder have neutrons lining their ventricles, like passengers stranded in an airport.

                         May be you were the cool kid on the playground when you were four. Then you entered kindergarten and all your peers started reading, and you can't figure it out. So you get frustrated. Your peers may thing you're stupid. Your parents may think you're lazy. You have very low self-esteem, which leads to an increased rate of depression. Kids with dyslexia are more likely to end up in the juvenile system, because they act up. It's because they can't figure things out. It is so important in our society to read.

                         You wouldn't wish dyslexia on your child, Or would you?

                        When you ask a dyslexic to read when he or she is having scan, the parts that are supposed to light up might not light up at all, the scan looks like an aerial photo of a city during a blackout. Dyslexics use a lot more of the right hemisphere of their brain during reading than normal readers do. The right hemisphere is the conceptual side. That's the wrong half of the brain for a precise and rigorous tasks like reading. Sometimes when a dyslexic read , every step will be delayed, as if the different parts of the brain responsible for reading were communicating via a weak connection.

                        One of the ways to test the presence of dyslexia in a small child is to have him engage "rapid automatized naming." Show him one color after another- a red dot, then a green dot, then a blue, then a yellow dot and check the response.See the color. Regcognize the color. Attach a name to the color. Say the name. That's automatic in most of us. It's not in someone with a reading disorder; somewhere along the way, the links between those four steps start to break down. Ask a four year old: Can you say the word "banana" without the buh? Or say,Listen to the following three sounds; cuh, ah, tuh.Can you combine them into "cat"? Or take "cat," "hat," and"dark." which one of those words doesn't rhyme? easy question for most four-year olds. Really hard questions for dyslexics.Many people used to think that what defines dyslexics is that they get words backwards- "cat" would be "tac," or something like that-making it sound like dyslexia is a problem in the way the words are seen. But it's much more profound than that.

                                    Dyslexia is a problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds.The difference between bah and dah is a subtlety in the first 40 milliseconds of the syllable. Human language is based on the assumption that we can pick up to 40-millisecond difference, the difference between the bah sound and the dah sound can be the difference between getting something right and getting something catastrophically wrong. Can you imagine the consequences  of having a brain so sluggish when it comes to putting together the building blocks of words, those crucial 40 milliseconds simply go by too quickly?

                                 "If you have no concept of the sounds of  language- if you take away a letter, if you take away a sound, and you don't know what to do, then it's really hard to map the sounds to the written counterparts," Nadine Gaal, a dyslexia researcher at Harvard, explained. It may take you a while to learn to read. You read really slowly, which then impairs your reading fluency, which then impairs your reading comprehension, because you are so slow that by the time you're at the end of the sentence , you've forgotten what the beginning of the sentence was. So it's leads to all these problems in middle school and high school. Then it starts affecting all other subjects in school. You can't read. How are you going to do on maths test that have a lots of writing in them? Or how you're going to take exam in social studies if it takes two hours to read what they want from you?

                           "Usually you get a diagnosis at eight or nine,"She went on."And we find that by that point, there are already a lot of serious psychological implications, because by that time you've been struggling for three years.

                           Dyslexia doesn't necessarily make people more open.Nor does it make them more conscientious. But the most tantalising possibility raised by the disorder is that it might make it a little bit easier to disagreeable.

                           Segment 2: Can dyslexia turn out to be a desirable difficulty? It is hard to believe that it can, given how many people struggle with the disorder throughout their lives- except the strange fact. An extraordinary high number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. A recent study by Julie Logan at City University London puts the number somewhere around a third. The list includes many of the most famous innovators of the past few decades. Richard Branson, the British billionaire entrepreneur, is dyslexic. Charles Schwab, the founder of the discount brokerage that bears his name, is dyslexic, as are cell phone pioneer Craig McCaw; David Neeleman, the founder of Jet blue; John Chambers, the CEO of the technology giant Cisco; Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko's-to name just a few.The neuroscientist Sharon Thomson-Schill remembers speaking at a meeting of prominent university donors- virtually all of them successful business people- and on a whim asking how many of them had ever been diagnosed with learning disorder."Half the hands went up," she said. "It was unbelievable."

                          There are two possible interpretations for this fact. One is that this remarkable group of people triumphed in spite of their disability: they are so smart and  so creative that nothing- not even a lifetime of struggling with reading- could stop them. The second, more intriguing, possibility is that they succeeded, in part, because of their disorder that they learned something in their struggle that proved to be of enormous advantage. Would you wish dyslexia on your child? If the second of these possibilities is true, you just might.

                          Segment 3: A good example of Peterson's argument is the story of how Swedish furniture retailer IKEA got it's start. The company was founded by Ingvar Kamprad. His great innovation was to realise that much of the cost of furniture was tied up in it's assembly: putting the legs on the table not only costs money but also makes shipping the  table really expensive. So he sold furniture that hadn't yet been assembled, shipped it cheaply in flat boxes, and undersold all his competitors.

                       In the mid-1950's, however Kamprad ran into trouble. Swedish furniture manufacturers launched a boycott of IKEA. They were angry at his low prices, and they stopped filling his order. IKEA faced ruin. Desperate for a solution, Kamprad looked south and realised just across the Baltic Sea from Sweden was Poland, a country with much cheap labour and plenty of wood. That's Kamprad's openness: few companies were outsourcing like that in the 1960's. Then Kamprad focussed his attention on making the polish connection work. It wasn't easy. Poland in the 1960's was a mess. It was a communist country. It had none of the infrastructure or machinery or trained work force or legal protections of a Western country. But Kamprad pulled it off. " He is a micromanager," says Anders Aslund, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for international economics. "That's why he succeeded while other failed. He went out to these unpleasant places, and make sure things worked. He's this extremely stubborn." That's conscientiousness.

                          But what's the most striking fact about Kamprad's decision? It's the year he went to Poland: 1961. The Berlin Wall was going up. The Cold War was at it's peak. Within a year, East and West would come to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The equivalent today would be Walmart setting up shop in North Korea. Most people wouldn't even think of doing business in the land of the enemy for fear of being branded a traitor. But not Kambrad. He didn't care a whit for what others thought of him. That's disagreeableness.

                          Only a very small number of people have the creativity to think of shipping furniture flat and outsourcing in the face of a boycott. An even smaller number have not only those kind of insights but also the discipline to build first-class manufacturing operation in an economic backwater. But to be creative and conscientious and have the strength of mind to defy the Cold War? That's rare.

                     Segment 4:  Gary Cohn grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, in northeast Ohio. His family was in the electrical contracting business. This was in the 1970's, at a time before dyslexia was routinely diagnosed. He was held back a year in elementary school because he couldn't read. But, he said," I didn't read any better the second time than I did the first time."He had a discipline problem."I sort of got expelled from elementary school,"he explained."I think when you hit the teacher, you get expelled. It was one of those disruptive incidents....I was being abused.

The teacher put me under her desk and rolled her chair in and started kicking me, So I pushed the chair back, hit her in the face, and walked out. I was in the fourth grade."

                         He called those periods in his life " the ugly years." His parents didn't know what to do. "It was probably the most frustrating part of my life, which is saying a lot." He went on:"Because it wasn't that I wasn't trying. I was working really, really hard, and understood that part of the equation. They literally thought that I was conscientiously making decisions to be a disruptive kid, to not learn, to hold the class back. You know what's it's like, you're a six- or seven- or eight-year-old kid and you're in a public school setting and everyone thinks you're an idiot so you try to do funny things to try to create some social esteem. You would try to get up every morning and say, today is going to be better but after do that for a couple of years, you realise that today is going to be no different than yesterday. And I'm going to struggle to get through and I'm going to struggle to survive another day, and we'll see what happens."

                          His parents took him from school to school, trying to find that something worked. "All my mother wanted me to do was graduate high school," Cohn said. "I think if you'd asked her, she'd have said, 'The happiest day of my life will be if graduates his high school. Then he can go drive truck, but at least he'll have a high school degree.' " On the day finally he did graduate, Cohn's mother was a fountain of tears. "I have never seen anyone cry so much in my life," he said

                         When Gary Cohn was twenty-two, he got a job selling aluminium siding and window frames for U.S. Steel in Cleveland. He had just graduated from American University after a middling academic career. One day just before Thanksgiving, while visiting the company's sales office on Long Island, he persuaded his manager to give him the day off and ventured down to Wall Street. A few summers earlier, he had been an intern at a local brokerage firm and had become interested in trading. He headed to the commodities exchange, which was part of the old World Trade Centre complex.

                       " I think I'm going to get a job,"he said. "But there's no where to go. It's all secured place. So I go up to the observation deck and watch the guys and think, Can I talk to them? Then I walk down to the floor with security gate and stand at the security gate, like someone's going to let me in. Of course no one is. And then literally right after the market's closed, I see this pretty well-dressed guy running off the floor, yelling to clerk, I've got to go, I'm running to LaGuardia, I'm late, I'll call you when I get to the airport.'I jump in the elevator, and I say, I hear you're going to LaGuardia.'He says, 'Yeah.'I say, 'Can we share a cab?' He says,'Sure.' I think this is awesome. With Friday afternoon traffic, I can spent the next hour in the taxi to getting a job.'

                       The stranger Cohn had jumped into the taxi with happened to be high up at one of the Wall Street's big brokerage firms. And just that week, the firm had opened a business buying and selling options.

                       "The guy was running the options business but did not know what an options was," Cohn went on. He was laughing at the sheer audacity of it all."I lied to him all the way to the airport. When he said,'Do you know what an option is?' I said,'Of course I do, I know everything, I can do anything for you.' Basically by the time we got out of the taxi, I had his number. He said, 'Call me Monday.' I called him Monday, flew back to New York Tuesday or Wednesday, had an interview, and started working the next Monday. In that period of time, I read McMillan's options as a Strategic investment book, it's like the Bible of options trading."

                       It wasn't easy, of course, since Cohn estimated that on a good day, It takes him six hours to read twenty-two pages.' He buried himself in the book, working his way through one word at a time, repeating sentences until he was sure he understood them. When he started his work, he was ready. "I literally stood behind him and said,'Buy those, sell those, sell those,' " Cohn said, I never owned up to him what I did. Or may be he figured it out, but he didn't care. I made him tons of money."

                       Cohn isn't ashamed of his beginnings on Wall Street. But it would be a mistake, at the same time, to say that he is proud of them. He is smart enough to know that a story about bluffing your way into your first job isn't altogether flattering. He told it, instead, in the spirit of honesty. It was This is who I am.

                       Cohn was required in that taxi ride to play a role: to pretend to be an experienced options trader when in fact he was not. Most of us would have foundered in that situation. We aren't used to playing someone other than ourselves. But Cohn had been playing someone other than himself since elementary school. You know what it's like, you're a six- or seven- or eight-year-old kid, and you're in a public setting school, and everyone thinks you're an idiot, so you try to do funny things to create some social esteem. Better to play the clown than to be thought of us an idiot. And you've been pretending to be someone else your whole life, how hard is it to bluff your way through a one-hour cab ride to LaGuardia?

                       Most important, most of us wouldn't have jumped in that cab, because we would've worried about potential social consequences. The Wall Street guy could have seen right through us- and told everyone else on Wall Street that there's a kid out there posing as an options trader. Where would we be then? We could get tossed out of the cab. We could go home and realise that options trading is over our heads. We could show up on Monday morning and make fools of ourselves. We could get found out, a week or a month later, and get fired. Jumping in the cab was a disagreeable act and most of us are inclined to be agreeable. But Cohn? He was selling aluminium siding. His mother thought that he would be lucky to end up a truck driver. He had been kicked out of schools and dismissed as an idiot, and even as an adult, it took him six hours to read twenty-two pages because he had to work his way word by word to make sure he understood what he was reading. He had nothing to loose.

                           "My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure," he said."The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we came out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of upside than the downside. Because we're so accustomed to the downside. It doesn't faze us. I've thought about it many times, I really have, because it defined who I am. I wouldn't be where I am today without my dyslexia. I never would have taken that first chance."

                           Dyslexia- in the best of cases- forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. It also forces you to do things that you might otherwise never have considered, like doing your own version of Kamprad's disagreeable trip to Poland or hopping in the cab of someone you've never met and pretending to be someone you aren't. Kamprad, in case you wondering is dyslexic. And Gary Cohn? It turns out he was a really good trader, and it turns out that learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation for career in the business world. Today he is the president of Goldman Sachs.

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                       Supporting employment of people with disabilities should be part of national policy: President Halimah

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                               Source: The straits times, Oct 7, 2020

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