Imagine you’re eight years old in a classroom of fourteen other kids, given an audiobook of Charlotte’s Web on CD and told there will be a final exam. You put your headphones on, and your copy is the one someone scratched with steel wool — mercilessly. How long could you sit with that, listening to nothing but noise, before the panic sets in? That was every school day for me. I have dyslexia, though I didn’t have the word for it yet. Ask me to sound out C-A-R-T and something in my brain simply wouldn’t do what other kids’ brains did automatically. But put me in front of a chemistry problem, and I could hear it once and see exactly how the molecule moved. I loved learning. I was terrified of school. Both, every single day.
I got good at hiding it. I’d corner the smartest kids in the cafeteria and interview them about whatever novel we’d just read until I understood it cold, so I’d never be caught not knowing. I memorized every speech I ever gave, so I’d never have to read one aloud. It worked well enough that I graduated valedictorian and went on to McGill, where I invented my own visual language just to survive exams — thousands of images standing in for words, because a picture would stay in my head when text never would. The night before an economics final, I studied nothing but graphs for eight hours, never read a word, and scored a 92 against a class average of 68.
But underneath all of it, I was unraveling. I left college not knowing what was wrong with me, only that some things came impossibly easy and others felt impossible, period. In the working world, it got worse. I was printing out emails at night just to read them. The last company I worked for before I became a carpenter let me go and told me, kindly, that they just didn’t know what to do with me. I’d been there for a year and still couldn’t spell the company’s name.
So, I roofed. I was good at it — it was all visual — but at night I’d come home and try to read Plato and still couldn’t make it stick.
The moment that changed my life looked like nothing at all. I called a friend, because I was standing at the DMV trying to fill out a form for a new license and couldn’t do it myself. There was a long pause on the end of the line. And something in me finally admitted: this isn’t normal. That same day I came across an article about CEOs with dyslexia, and that night, for the first time, I looked up the Stern Center.
I called. The person who answered listened to my whole life story and told me to get tested — she believed the Stern Center could help. When she told me the cost, I didn’t have it. I was 28, roofing, with $200 in the bank and a mother fighting stage 3 cancer. So she told me to write everything down for a scholarship application, and she’d walk it to the committee herself. I got that scholarship.
Six hours of testing later, I finally had language for what had shaped my whole life. My IQ came back in the 99th percentile. My ability to decode words on a page came back in the 14th. For the first time, there was data behind it — proof I wasn’t careless or lazy or slow, just wired differently. They told me I didn’t have to keep roofing unless I wanted to.
I applied for a second scholarship and promised it would be an investment. For two years I trained with an instructor named Elaine, who I can only call a godsend. I remember one evening, sweating through a list of words that started with “app” — Apple, Appear — pounding my fist on the table because I simply could not do it. Elaine told me to breathe, that we’d get through it together, and stepped out for water. In the quiet hallway, I saw another instructor working with a young boy who was struggling exactly the way I was, breathing hard, saying he couldn’t do it either. And I heard her tell him, “I’m with you.” Twenty years apart in age, and that boy and I were having the same exact moment. That’s when I understood what this place actually does.
I finished my two years, and I paid back every dollar of both scholarships, plus 15 percent interest for every year I’d had the money. That was the investment I’d promised. It’s also, I think, what got me invited onto the Board — where I spent six years watching roughly $750,000 in scholarships go to families who needed what I once needed, and where I found mentors who shaped the rest of my life.
Since then: I left carpentry. I wrote a children’s book about dyslexia. My daughter Katy is ten now, and when she was two, I started teaching her the same skills Elaine taught me; terrified that dyslexia would find her too. She reads at the 99th percentile. She finished all of Harry Potter at seven. Everything the Stern Center gave me, I handed straight to her.
Today I work for a robotics company at the leading edge of physical AI. And on most days, somewhere in the middle of it, I think about those cold mornings on a roof in Vermont, and how none of this — my career, my daughter, my life — happens without a stranger on the phone who chose to believe in me. That friend of mine from that same DMV phone call later sent her own son to the Stern Center. He recently won a leadership award at school, and now he tutors other kids in the very subjects he once struggled in. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a second generation of changed lives, already starting a third.
