How Van Leeuwen Ice Cream's Laura O'Neill and Other Growth-Minded Entrepreneurs Keep Their North Star
Bill Gates was a teenage math whiz . Mark Zuckerberg got into (and then dropped out of ) Harvard. And Elon Musk nonchalantly taught himself rocket science . But don't be fooled. While there are plenty of entrepreneurial icons with impressive academic credentials, there are also plenty who struggled in school.
Richard Branson is perhaps the most famous example. A dyslexic, he dropped out of high school and never looked back. Barbara Corcoran 's educational journey might have been even tougher. According to the real estate mogul-turned- Shark Tank personality, she too had dyslexia and got, in her words, "straight Ds" throughout school.
The obvious lesson from these two ultra-rich, widely admired individuals is that you clearly don't need to be traditionally book-smart to make it big in business. This is an important and encouraging point for kids with lackluster report cards to hear (and one Branson has stressed multiple times ).
But according to both Corcoran and Branson, they took the same larger lesson from their early academic struggles. And it's the kind of solid gold success advice just about everyone can benefit from hearing.
Branson's constantly roving, big-picture mind may have made him lousy at grammar exercises and spelling tests in school. But as soon as he got into business, he explained on his blog recently, he realized his unique brain was a huge asset.
"My dyslexic thinking led me to find new solutions to old problems that businesses were struggling to address," he writes.
Not only could he harness his differences and turn them into strengths, but so could everyone else at the company. "I was also drawn to other people with eccentric characters and curious ways of thinking. And so, we hired people with bold ideas, and we gave them the freedom to execute them," he continues.
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