As a retailer and investor, Theo Paphitis is one of the best-known business leaders in Britain thanks to his time on Dragons’ Den. He left school at sixteen after failing his exams and got a job as an office clerk in an insurance underwriter. His job was to write the risks on slips of paper and get them to the right assessor. At school, his inability to write well hadn’t really mattered. Now a spelling mistake could be extremely costly.
‘In those days, there were no computers. There were typewriters, but you had to write the ‘line slips’, the crucial bits of paper that went to the underwriters at Lloyds of London, by hand. I couldn’t hide the spelling. I couldn’t hide not being able to see the letters clearly. I knew the bloody alphabet, but in the moment, I just wasn’t seeing everything.’
At school, he’d been able to fudge and bluster, but that wasn’t going to cut it in the strait-laced world of insurance. ‘My whole life, I’d assumed I wasn’t bright because I couldn’t read as fast as everybody else. I’d always had an inability to absorb written instructions and I assumed that was a problem with just me.’ This feeling was reinforced because he had the same problems in Greek – Theo was born in Cyprus – as he did in English.
‘That’s what convinced me that it must be a problem with me. It’s the same reading music, and because I thought these were issues with me, I knew it was down to me to find solutions to get around them so that people didn’t think I was thick.’
The workaround on this occasion was buying himself a calligraphy pen as that forced him to take greater care with his spelling. When he confided in one of the secretaries at the firm that he was having trouble, she bought him a pocket dictionary, coincidentally from a nearby branch of Ryman’s. He still has it to this day as it has huge sentimental value, because that secretary, Debbie, soon became his wife.
For people who struggle at school, the world of work can sometimes seem like a playground. When I meet dyslexic kids who are struggling, I let them know that if their brains aren’t built for academia, they might be built for business. It was certainly the case for Theo.
Read more in The Dyslexic Edge: https://amzn.eu/d/5geOVxE
