I was listening to a business radio program where Sir Richard Branson was interviewed regarding how he excelled in business. He did not attend college or have an MBA, and to add insult was diagnoised with dyslexia. Despite all this he founded a number of businesses and is currently listed as the fourth richest person in the UK.
What I found interesting as I listened was how he turned a negative into a positive. True he had dyslexia but he felt this actually helped him by limiting his focus which allowed him to concentrate on one thing at a time.. Rather than a wealth of alternatives, narrowing the field of vision caused him to see things in the simplist of terms. And then the interviewer mentioned something I had heard on a number of occassions, but now saw in a different light: That a disproportionate number of successful people have been found to have dyslexia. I don’t know how scientific my conclusions are but it does seem that limiting alternatives (being a slow reader or having difficulty reading) narrows the chess pieces on the board so you are forced to be creative with the limited information you have. Called it forced simlification or narrowed focus but the way the game is played seems to work the same to get things down to their simplist form.
Next, he was willing to try a number of things and burrow down into them in the only way he knew by trial and error. I will admit to a bias toward experimentation, because learning as many things as possible leads to building a knowledge base that later can be applied in a focused approach to what you finally decide is your life’s work. As he put it on starting an airline after his record company:
“My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them…from the perspective of wanting to live life to the full, I felt that I had to attempt it.”
True, not everything worked and later to keep his empire afloat he had to sell his record company but one thing built upo
n another from trains, planes, wirelss phones, cola, Vodka, and even space travel he has kept building companies and products.
Being willing to simply try and keep trying to build upon an idea in a pared down, direct focus manner has been his recipe for success. And, to some degree has made him maybe the Thomas Edison of our time.