If you’re a certain age and you lived in the US towards the end of the 20th century, I’m pretty sure you’ll remember Kinko’s, the vast chain of copy shops. If you’re under twenty-five, there’s a chance you won’t even know what a copy shop is. Over three decades, Paul Orfalea, the son of Lebanese immigrants, built the business he started with a $5,000 loan into a billion dollar giant of
US retail. No wonder he’s now in demand as a professor of entrepreneurship at several prestigious colleges in his native California.
As the child not just of immigrants, but of entrepreneurs, Paul always knew he’d start his own business. His father and maternal grandmother were both in the clothing business and his first job was working in his father’s factory.
His teachers had very low aspirations for him. One even told his mother not to worry too much about him because one day he thought Paul could learn to lay carpets! Other teachers might have been surprised by even that level of success: Paul went to eight schools and was expelled from four of them. He was considered so backward that when he was in the third grade (aged eight or nine), he was sent to a remedial class where the other students had Down’s Syndrome. An IQ test result of 130 got him back into mainstream education. Paul isn’t surprised his teachers despaired. His own mother referred to him as ‘the problem child’.
Paul wasn’t just bullied at school by other pupils, the teachers beat him too. ‘Sister Sheila? I flunked her second grade and she paddled the f*ck out of me for two years with a ping-pong paddle. Then I had Sister Madonna and she hit me on the calves.’ Paul got hit at home too. ‘My mother hit me with a strap. My brother used to torture me, and he was good at torture.’
Despite all this, Paul says he enjoyed school, he just didn’t see the point of learning and told me that because
he didn’t see any purpose for algebra, he couldn’t comprehend it. It didn’t help that his mind would wander.
‘I never knew how to control myself. I really did not know. And then I was at this new school and I thought, if I can control myself right now, I could prevent myself from getting in trouble. And it was just like an epiphany.’
He graduated from high school with a major in ‘wood shop’, a solid D average and came eighth from bottom out of a year of 1,200 students. He has a diploma that looks the same as everybody else’s, it just doesn’t have the little extra stars on it like cum laude. It was enough to get him accepted into USC in Los Angeles.
Read more in The Dyslexic Edge: https://amzn.eu/d/bLVjdDb
