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BC: "Desirable Difficulty"

“You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child or would you?" (Gladwell)

So far in David and Goliath we’ve talked about how often we are misled about the nature of advantages, from my last blog post “Building a Community: Schools”. Now I want to talk about, why sometimes we can call things a disadvantage, but a disadvantage can be become an advantage with people that have disabilities. Gladwell said, “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.” (Gladwell 107)

Since I was born, I have been struggling and trying to deal with a disorder called “expressive language disorder”. It is a communication disorder in which there are difficulties with my verbal and written expression. Generally speaking, it is a specific language impairment characterized by an ability to use expressive spoken language, but my language of comprehension is within normal limits and vocab is very good. Basically, in my head, I know what I want to say/write but I can’t say/write it in the correct way. I had been tested when I was a child and tested when I was 20 years old and at 22, I believe I have been improving but still been struggling with it. I was one of those kids in 1st grade that didn’t know how to read or write that well. Plus I didn’t know how to recite the alphabet. I would get so mad and frustrated over it, because I didn’t know what to do.

But there was a man name Gary Cohn, he struggled with dyslexia; a disorder that makes it hard for him to read fluently and have an accurate comprehension. Cohn said “You know what it’s like, you’re 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.”(Gladwell 122) That’s what it was like for me in public school, but I was shy. Over the years it was hard for me to make friends because I was afraid to speak because if I did, I felt I would have been called an idiot too.

In the end, Gary Cohn became an options trader. How did Cohn do this? He jumped in a taxi and “pretend” role-played, as an experienced option trader with a stranger from a Wall Street big brokerage firm and won a job that he was not even qualified in. Most of us would have floundered in that situation. But Cohn has been playing these games since he was a kid. Cohn said, “ My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure.” (Galdewell 123)

Gladwell goes on and said that disabilities in the best case forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. It also forces you to do things that you might otherwise not ever have considered doing.

But what happened to 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 real good preparation for a career in the business world. Today he is the president of Goldman Sachs.” (124)

So, how can this help me, or anyone that is dealing with a disadvantage in their life? Find out the skill that lays dormant and set it free. Use it as an advantage. Take that advantage and overall fix the disadvantage. For me I am bad at communicating and I hate writing, but I am trying to learn to write and communicate better. Because one of my gifts is to never do anything half assed, which then makes me more focused at getting better at writing and talking. But I always expect failure overtime, but I’ll keep trying until I get it right. The failures will become rewards overtime.