Reading
I don’t know if I had dyslexia growing up, all I know is that I had a hard time reading. It bothered me a great deal to think that people thought it was funny I couldn’t read very well.
I think three things helped to greatly improve my reading. One I involved myself in theatre arts in college, where I had to memorize my lines and those of the actors who had lines leading up to mine. Two, when I was a Mormon missionary, I had to memorize six discussions that I repeated to people interested in joining the church. And three, I started reading Time Magazine when I was nineteen, which took me over five years to be able to understand about 80% of the articles.
Moral of the lesson? Just keep working at what you want to be good at.
And, don’t worry if while you’re working at trying to improve, you think you look funny to others, because in the end IT JUST DOESN’T REALLY MATTER.
Insight
Where did I pick up on the theme of “it just doesn’t really matter?”
I spent the vast majority of my life worrying about what others thought of my poor reading.
Then I was exposed to the idea in philosophy of Opposites: For every thought there is a thought that is its direct opposite.
For example, when I think it matters that I learned to read fairly well, its opposite is: it didn’t really matter how well I read. If that is true, then it doesn’t matter if people thought it was funny how poorly I read. Which proposition is true? Both are true in equal proportion, according to the idea of Opposites. If that’s true, then in my view I win in either case. So, it just didn’t really matter whether I became a good reader, or I remained a poor reader.
If the idea of Opposites is correct, I probably would have achieved much of what I did whether or not I was a good or poor reader. Weird, because much of my achievement in education, business consulting, writing, and radio broadcasting depended on an intense amount of reading. On the other hand, as an entrepreneur it didn’t matter how well I did or did not read. Again one idea balances out the other.
In the end, do what you want to do, for there are as many reasons for doing it as there are for not doing it. The Law of Opposites will follow you in everything you think or do.