SP: I can remember playing Trivial Pursuit with a girlfriend and her friends and being so terrified to read the questions off the Trivial Pursuit card in front of other people because I though I'd make a mistake or say the wrong word.

BP: And yet you graduated valedictorian of your high school class.

SP: I developed a lot of coping skills. In high school if it was my time to read out loud in class I might pretend I didn't feel well. I'd also find the smartest kid in the class and ask them to explain the novel to me, so I'd understand what was going on.

Even in college I continued to struggle. I really hit a wall with the amount of reading involved. I used to convert words into pictures. For example, imagine a parrot flies along; the parrot lands on a car; the car explodes; and the smoke and feathers rise in a figure eight. That represents a word for me. That word is polycarbonate. Poly is the parrot, the car is a car, the explosion is like a bomb, and the 8 is an 8. I used to convert about 10,000 words into these pictures every semester. So I always lived in fear my whole life that somebody would discover that I couldn't keep up with the pace of work and school.

I ran into the same challenges. I worked in marketing and advertising. I'd be there late at night or I'd come in on Sundays and print out emails so I could underline and circle words as I read them. I had trouble remembering the names of people I worked with and how to spell their names. So, I used to keep the business cards of the owners of the company in the drawer of my desk and I'd pull it out and figure out how to spell their name. This is even after a year of working with the people. And I got laid off because they said that I couldn't keep up.

So I became a carpenter which is a visual field. But I was still struggling as a carpenter. I was just very down on myself and I didn't know what to change.

But I came across an article in Fortune Magazine which said the Dyslexic CEO. It talked about these very intelligent, successful, CEOs who'd made it in life with severe learning disorders. I looked up learning disorders in the phone book and I went it for this full day of evaluation. At the end of the day the evaluators came in and they said, "We wanted you to know before you left today, that your I.Q. is in the 99th percentile, but your ability to read and decode words is in the 14th percentile."

It was the first time my entire life had ever been explained in that way. And I got into my pickup truck and cried all the way home. It was just a changing point in my life -- a turning point.