The Dyslexic Advantage (15 page)

Not surprisingly, Douglas's self-esteem suffered: “I always felt defective, which caused the sorts of things you'd expect in a kid, like superdefensiveness and hostility, because I felt like I was failing.”

Douglas labored to get by on extra effort and sheer force of will, but the results were disappointing. It was only when he reached middle school that he realized that despite his difficulties with rote and fine-detail tasks, he also had special strengths. One of his most important strengths was his ability to think and communicate using stories. “Pretty early on, I started writing stories to answer problems instead of doing what the assignment actually asked. So if you look at my junior high school papers, what I was doing for most of my classes was writing short stories. I was never going to be able to remember all the details that would be required to lay out a terse step-by-step outline. But I could remember the story arcs.”

Douglas gradually realized how widely this technique could be used, but he was slowest to realize its relevance for math. “The breakthrough came in high school when I failed algebra. My dad's a Ph.D. in physics, and my brother's a Ph.D. in math, and one of my sisters is a practicing physicist working in nuclear power plants, so everyone but me is great in traditional math. When I failed, it forced me to look for something I did unusually well because I had to find some way to balance how awful I felt. I realized I could tell overall stories better than most people, and when I looked through what I had done wrong in algebra, I realized I was playing exactly to my weaknesses. I was not trying to make the math into a story. I was trying to memorize ‘step A, step B, step C' by rote without creating any meaningful story about how they were connected, and that maximized my likelihood of failing.”
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Though school remained hard, Douglas began to make slow but steady progress. After graduating from high school he went on to the University of Tulsa, where he discovered a special fondness for studying the big ideas and forces that shape our world, and for interdisciplinary approaches to those topics: “I have always been interested in the overlap between psychology, sociology, and history; the three work together to constrain what we can do, how we can do it, and how we view ourselves.”
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Unable to limit his focus to one subject, Douglas dual-majored in economics and sociology. In his spare time—which he claims to have had plenty of, as a self-described “can't-get-a-date geek”—Douglas picked up another skill set that eventually played a big role in his life: he became an expert at cracking computer programs and in computer security.

After college, Douglas combined his interests in big-picture questions, learning and cognition, and computing by pursuing a Ph.D. in cognitive science at Princeton, where he performed groundbreaking research on learning, decision making, and artificial intelligence. When we asked him what motivated him to study cognitive psychology, Douglas responded, “Pure vindictiveness. I'd spent a lot of my life thinking through tips and tricks and different ways to solve problems, and I thought it would be interesting to think through how you could model that problem solving—how to think about it and how to formally describe it.”

As he studied these questions, Douglas realized that his insights into his own thinking could be useful for others, too. “When I investigated human problem solving, one of the things I studied was people learning math and programming—partially out of a sense of irony—and I found that even ‘normal' people who are pretty good at the traditional rote skills do better if they form stories, with starting and plot elements and end of a story, for even things like writing programs. Now, no one I studied did this to the extent that I did, but I demonstrated a huge problem-solving improvement when you teach ‘normies' to do what I did instinctively. That's something traditional schools could definitely teach to make their students more successful.”

After earning his doctorate, Douglas went to work as an information scientist for the RAND Corporation, a prestigious think tank that researches public policy questions. At RAND, Douglas combined his expertise in decision making and computer security to perform studies for clients—including the U.S. government—on computer security and “information warfare,” or attempts by hostile entities to cripple an information system. Douglas found that his ability to think in stories and to see “the big picture” was incredibly useful in helping him imagine methods of attack that could exploit those weaknesses and to detect gaps in information security systems. Douglas also found that at RAND his big-picture, interdisciplinary, story-based thinking style was a perfect fit. As he told us, “RAND . . . is fundamentally a narrative place, so you're telling policy stories about what ought to happen, backed up by data, and that plays really well to my strengths. I can work with the people who do the data analysis itself, and I can say, ‘Oh, here's where we're going.' I didn't understand that at the time, but that skill of being able to say, ‘You know, I think we're going to head over there . . . ,' was actually super useful—especially when I left to go into business.”

Douglas's unique combination of skills eventually brought him to the attention of private-sector recruiters and to a series of high-level jobs at Price Waterhouse, Charles Schwab, and eventually a small Bay Area start-up with the unlikely name of “Google,” where he served until 2008 as the chief information officer. Since leaving Google, Douglas has worked as president of Digital Music and COO of New Music for EMI Recorded Music, and he's now heading his own start-up company. And he's only just turned forty.

When we were preparing to talk to Douglas, we noticed that in his previous interviews he'd often used analogies to make his points. We asked him whether detecting similarities was a key element of his thinking. “Absolutely, I love analogies. They're my bread and butter . . . if you'll let me use an out-of-date analogy. Often, the things I'm interested in doing arise from some analogy I come up with. I don't understand what I'm doing until I have a few analogies to describe it. The first element of my storytelling is asking, ‘What's the story going to be like?' Then, for each major point, I brainstorm analogies.”

When we asked him if he preferred to solve problems using interdisciplinary approaches and multiple perspectives, Douglas responded, “Yeah, totally. I just think there's lots of different views on problems, and that by seeing more than one you're better off.”
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Clearly, Douglas is equipped with remarkable I-strengths. As you'll see after you've read parts 5 and 6, he also has remarkable N- and D-strengths. So what about M-strengths, or the kind of spatial reasoning ability that many people think of as the characteristic dyslexic strength? Douglas laughed when we asked him. “I'm abysmal at spatial reasoning. If I close my eyes I can't tell you which way my office door is from where I'm sitting. But what I can do is tell you that it's nine turns from my office to my house, and they're on average three blocks apart. So I don't know where my house is from here, but I guarantee I can get you there.”

Turns out that individuals with dyslexia with powerful I-strengths have many ways of making connections.

Key Points about I-Strengths

I
n the last few chapters we've discussed the critical role that Interconnected reasoning plays in the thinking of many individuals with dyslexia. Key points to remember about I-strengths include:

Let's close by examining how I-strengths have helped another highly talented individual with dyslexia: philosopher, thought leader, author, and corporate CEO Dov Seidman. As a younger student, Seidman struggled greatly in school. In fact, he jokes that his only two A's in high school were in physical education and auto shop. Then, in college, his approach to learning was revolutionized by his serendipitous encounter with philosophy. As Seidman told us, “I fell in love with philosophy. With my professors' encouragement, philosophy helped me overcome my dyslexic challenges. Unable to read hundreds of pages, philosophy rewarded me for the careful consideration of one idea, and my disability transformed into a strength.”

Philosophy, at its roots, is the search for gist—for context and connections of all kinds. It focuses primarily on big-picture views rather than fine details, and Seidman found both that his mind was perfectly suited to philosophy and that philosophy was developing his mind in exciting ways.
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The methods and disciplines he learned through its study taught Seidman to see “through the words to the ideas that lay beneath them” and to focus on general principles—what we've been calling gist.

Seidman found he had a natural ability to create frameworks for understanding the world, addressing how we as humans seek alignment in our relationships and among competing interests. Seidman went on to earn simultaneous bachelor's and master's degrees, summa cum laude, in philosophy from UCLA. He later earned a B.A. with honors in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University.

Seidman then decided to test his blend of skills and interests at Harvard Law School, and immediately following he took a job in a large law firm. In his book,
How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything . . . in Business (and in Life)
, Seidman describes what happened next: “Toiling away in the law library, it dawned on me that someone somewhere had researched the very issue I was working on, and inevitably knew more about it than I did (which was zero). I saw an opportunity to make legal knowledge accessible to a large number of people in business at a low price.”
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Let's pause for a moment to review what occurred. Seidman was performing the kind of routine legal research that thousands of young attorneys perform every day without ever deeply questioning what they're really doing or why they're doing it. But Seidman was different. His mind had become attuned to looking more deeply at the work he was engaged in, and this “philosophical habit” led him to step back from his task to search for its gist and context.

Seidman's search revealed two things: how redundant it was for him to research a topic that countless lawyers had previously researched, and the opportunity this redundancy provided to create a company that offered expert legal research on a wide range of topics. That's how Seidman's company, LRN, was born.

As LRN grew, Seidman made another important discovery: “[T]he core of our efforts lay in helping our clients put out fires by responding to legal challenges that had already arisen. I began to believe that we could be of better service by helping them . . . prevent these legal problems from arising in the first place.” In other words, rather than simply focusing on their immediate need for research, Seidman again stepped back to search for the underlying sources of that need.

As Seidman analyzed the causes of his clients' problems, it struck him that they weren't ultimately best understood from a legal, regulatory, or compliance perspective but from the perspective of organizational and individual behaviors and the values that root and guide those behaviors. As Seidman told us, “the ancient philosopher Heraclitus once said character is fate, and corporations are analogous to individuals in having a character, patterns of behavior, and the capacity to earn a reputation.” These realizations led Seidman to conclude that the key to preventing corporate legal problems was to teach corporations to do everything they did—from managing employees to producing products to dealing with clients—the same way a person of good character would. In other words, Seidman combined the perspectives of philosophy, law, and business to create a new way of viewing the interactions, behaviors, interests, and obligations of individuals and corporations, which would lead to better corporate behaviors and to better business outcomes.

Seidman's impressive I-strengths—his abilities to detect relationships between concepts and events, to see the benefits of adopting different perspectives, and to look behind what's immediately apparent to see the deeper and broader significance—have all been crucial to his success. Seidman has been named one of the “Top 60 Global Thinkers of the Last Decade” by the
Economic Times
and “the hottest advisor on the corporate virtue circuit” by
Fortune
magazine, and his company has helped more than 10 million people in more than five hundred companies worldwide. That's the power of Interconnected reasoning.