I thought with the new year knocking on our door I’d share the story below because you’ll likely start thinking about your new years resolutions and goals for 2024.
Here’s the crazy thing I’ve realized, sometimes ours goals get blocked by beliefs we have about ourselves, life circumstances, business or careers that are not true. And…
By simply busting these beliefs it opens up amazing new opportunities.
The story below was intended for the book I’m writing. But, it’s been edited out because of space. It goes to show you how a simple belief about myself got busted and changed my whole outlook.
I challenge you as you think about your new year’s resolutions and goals to investigate what beliefs you might be holding in your head that are not true and are holding you back. Bust them for the new year!
Here’s the story…
I was lost after college.
At the time I decided I was going to launch a fishing magazine I was working on my Master’s in Psychology.
I found my way back to school by way of a strong suggestion from my Mom, who in retrospect rightly saw me drifting at that time in my life and redirected me to a place that had much more potential to lead to something better.
I thought I was going to go to law school after college and practice law.
Looking back, I’m not sure that was what I wanted to do because I didn’t really do anything to set myself up for law school and the sound of having to take the LSTATs to get into law school made me anxious just at the mention of them.
But it sounded good and people bought the story so I stuck with it.
My answer kept the question about what I was going to do with my life after college satisfied for those that asked, so I kept giving it.
After college I worked at a tree nursery. I worked there during the summers to help pay my way through school.
Me next to a decent size Arborvitae that I dug for a customer circa 1995. A year later I founded an internet company.
It doesn’t sound glamorous, but when I originally landed the job, I saw it as a step up having come from working at the local Exxon as a cashier and before that as a full serve gas attendant at the station.
Like many people, I had to take out student loans and pay my way through college. Working at the tree nursery during summer breaks allowed me to earn the money I needed.
I tried the law school path. Well…
I have a learning disability or super ability, depending on your point of view.
Diagnosed with it early in elementary school, it was later described to me as a form of dyslexia.
To this day I am a terrible at sounding out words to spell. I cannot sound out a word to save my life. This in turn made me a slow reader. That in turn showed me down at a lot of school work. And…
Slow reading made me a terrible standardized test taker.
To make up for the learning disability I learned to memorize things. My reading comprehension consists to this day of me taking notes and memorizing the pages.
Then when I need to recall something I just remember where on the page the information is located and I simply read it to myself. I’m not sure that’s exactly how it actually works or not, but it’s the best way to describe it to you.
Once I figured out how to do this tests became a lot easier. I recalled where on the page the text was and boom, the answer was there.
This is how I survived for my whole life.
Turns out over my life I’ve come to love to read and write and do both to this day as much as possible.
It wasn’t that I hated reading and writing for any other reason than it was really, really hard and… incredibly frustrating. I avoided both at all costs.
When it comes to logic, seeing the big picture, seeing how things can play out, how they work together, strategy, math, and understanding the numbers, etc… well that just makes sense to me. Outcomes appear to me in a play by play vision.
Yea, my Mom saved the below. Getting grades like that was a momentum builder for me. If I was good at this, I could be good at the spelling and reading as well.
Math tests my mom saved from school.
I digress, back to the standardized test taking…
It killed me that I was bad at it and the analytical part of myself could not figure out how I could be in the National Honor Society and get a C, at best, on these tests.
It always weighed on me as if I was in some way not quite as good as others.
When you have to leave class in elementary school to get some “extra tutoring” while the rest of your class stays there and does other things, well those memories stick with you a long time.
Later in life I learned that’s not a bad thing.
We’ll come back to this idea in a minute.
The poor test taker thing with law school was a recurring theme, I had terrible SAT’s to get into college. My saving grace was that I was a four-year, two varsity sport, letterman, National Honor Society Student and received the Governor’s award for graduating at the top of my class.
Top law schools at the time, and may still, weighed standardized tests more than anything. Everyone had top academics and sports did not matter that much.
You might be asking yourself at this point how I even managed to be a National Honor Society student?
It was “easy” 🙃. I worked really freaking hard.
Hard work can beat talent. (But, never underestimate talent when you go up against it.)
It wasn’t until two decades later that I stopped beating myself up about my learning disability when I read Malcom Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath.
Gladwell explains that an extraordinarily high number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic/have a learning disability:
- Charles Schwab — Father of financial services
- Richard Branson — Founder of Virgin everything
- David Neeleman Founder of JetBlue
- John Chambers former CEO of Cisco
- Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA
The list goes on, you get the idea.
My learning disability went from being a negative in my life to being proud of it in the single moment I read that part of the book.
I went from the idea in my head that I wasn’t quite as good and embarrassed about it, to being proud of it. It turned a perceived negative all my life into something positive. In fact, a real asset.
IMPORTANT NOTE
If you have a learning disability and didn’t know the above information, welcome to the club, you have great potential and a great future awaits you!
If you do not have a learning disability and are thinking to yourself you are screwed because you don’t, crazy how that even sounds to write, fear not.
Based on the studies, two thirds of successful entrepreneurs don’t have a learning disability, you have great potential and a great future awaits you as well!
Pivotal moments.
It’s amazing how you can go through life thinking you’re in some way inadequate, not quite as good as others, not good enough in some area, for whatever reason, thinking that you can’t be good enough at something to reach your goals.
Then one day you’re presented with new information that busts your belief(s) that forever transforms your way of thinking. And…
It gives you confidence in who you are and that you have more potential than you ever thought.
I call these events in life, “Pivotal Moments”.
They change the course of your life forever.
What belief do you have today, right now, that could hold you back from achieving your goals in 2023? Are they really real? What work can do you do bust those beliefs?
Your move.
This piece is from my 12/6/22, Week 50 update weekly email. Sign up below.