Every person has his flaws and you need to accept that you have them as well. There is no point in denying that. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to fix them. Some flaws are harder to fix than others. It will be harder to fix a handicap than a speech impediment. If you are born without legs, fixing your problem so you can be like everybody else, will be very hard and probably very expensive. Solving your speech impediment can be as simple as taking speaking classes, or choose words that bypass the impediment. Pretending like it doesn’t exist is not going to do anyone good.

It will be hard to ignore the fact that you have no legs, but you can pretend that you have no speech impediment. Just act like it’s the other person fault for not understanding you, right? No, people will catch on quick that you can’t speak as normal people do. They might even laugh at your speech problems. However, if you tell them that you have a problem with speaking. Most people will actually try to be supportive. They don’t always know how to be supportive and might do the opposite of what you really want of them. But that all depend on how you approach your problem.

The first step you need to take is accepting that you have a problem that is not normal. With that, I mean that normal people will not get it and most likely will not understand your troubles. The second step is to find other people with the same problems as you, as they are the only ones that can truly understand your problems. Then it is up to you to find ways to make that problem become an asset to you. Avoid the places or situations where your problem is negative and seek out the places where it is positive.

I can’t tell you how to turn your handicap into a positive thing if I don’t have it myself. I know from experience that people just don’t get it how you feel if they are not in the same boat. People think that they understand my ADD, but then find it weird that I can sit behind my pc for more than 10 hours, but can’t listen to a teacher for more than 10 minutes. It is not the sitting still nor the listening to a person that is the problem.

The problem is that the teacher lost the battle for my attention while the pc didn’t.

Some personal example

There are some problems or handicaps that can be turned into a positive thing. Don’t put a person with ADHD at a boring conference. The best thing that can happen is that he just falls asleep. A person with ADHD would be far better to keep kids busy for a while. He probably will have more energy to outlast the youthfulness of those kids. There probably will never be a dull moment.

A person with dyslexia should not proofread texts. However, such a person will be good at looking at graphs and trying to find a pattern in them. Or look at business reports with the year numbers in it. Where a normal person just sees a lot of numbers, he will see data that can be transformed into information. A normal person can do that too, but it takes energy to keep going. The dyslexic will have no problem to keep going on. He probably does it automatically. I have ADD (Attention-deficit disorder without being hyperactive. (I’m pretty much a massive daydreamer)) and I have dyslexia.

Don’t place me in a classroom and make me listen to a teacher, that would be hell for me. But put a spreadsheet in front of me and a bunch of graphs and I will find patterns in my daydreams. It’s not that I like dreaming about patterns. It’s just that my brain will analyze everything in my field of view even if my mind is in a dreamy state. My problem is that I can’t stop that.

That’s why I became an investor and started to analyze companies. Graphs and numbers all day and my mind can’t simply ignore them. So my brain does all the work, and I can be lazy during that time. I made my handicap into a positive thing. Because of that I now can be better than normal people, just because I seem to have a stronger spirit or more energy. It is not that I’m better than them at my work, it is just that I get distracted by my work and work all day because of that.

It is less fun when I’m actually trying to relax and I can’t turn my brain off. The moment you are in a pub and see people drinking their beverage and you start thinking about what the correlation is between the kind of beverage and the drinking speed. Or trying to determine the ratio of the amount they speak to the amount they listen and then try to overlay that with the number of beverages they drink. Not only is that exhausting, especially when you try to relax, but you have to maintain a conversation at the same time!

I’m not the best conversational partner, but I’m pretty good at managing money. Good thing that I actually don’t like doing most conversations, they are just too boring for me. It’s too easy to find more interesting activities to do. I can’t help it, my brain does it automatically, I kind of love it though. I’m bad with the details, but I’m good at the big picture. My ADD makes me look at 10 different things at the same time, because of that I miss the details but I find out easily how they relate to each other. I just have to find a person with a high sense of detail to do the actual work. That makes me a decent manager. (More is needed to be a good manager, but having a good overview of the task at hand helps a lot.)

My dyslexia makes me look for the oddballs, the things that don’t fit in completely. The things that most people don’t see are the things I see the easiest of all. But that also means that the things that most people find easy to see, I will find it hard to see. Text looks all the same to me. You can switch the position of some letters in a word and I will miss it completely. Sometimes I read completely different words and not notice that the sentence isn’t right.

But if the carpet that supposed to be a rectangle is slightly off, I will be bothered by it until I measure it to confirm that I’m not crazy. Or when someone plays a movie and let the mouse pointer on the screen. I see it in an instant and can’t ignore it. Or trying to read a text while there is a moving ad on the page. Don’t really know if that is my ADD or my dyslexia, but I can’t read the text until I cover up the ad. (It doesn’t need to be an ad, if it moves, it gets my attention. Even a stupid clock is enough to distract me. Speaking about clocks, get so pissed off when an analog clock has a bad tick somewhere in the minute. I will hear it and I will need to find out at what second it does it. Maybe I do have a sense of detail after all, too bad it is the wrong kind of detail.)

If you don’t have any handicap that leads to these problems, then you probably think I’m crazy. But if you do, then you probably are going like “Well at least I’m not the only crazy one around here.” Being crazy is not a bad thing. You can make that craziness into a positive thing that gives you the advantage. I don’t think that someone without legs knows the feeling of being cramped into a chair that put your knees into the seat before you. Nor do small people (I think).

With my size, I didn’t get why people hate putting stuff on top of the freezer until I see a short person jump to get something I can reach without a problem. I also didn’t get why some people slightly bend forward when entering a door, until I walked into a house that was built for small people. People that can’t walk will also not know the feeling of stepping on lego. They probably think that those plastic things won’t hurt much and just break under your foot. But I can tell you when I play with lego, I will put my shoes on! Or just sit on the floor and just shuffle to the place I need to be.

It is hard to understand someone else’s problems or handicaps. If you can’t understand them, then you cannot help them. But in most cases, you help them not by finding a way to hide it or remove it. You help them by turning it into a positive thing. Because then, the normal people seem to have the handicap. Do you need to analyze 2 graphs and 2 texts? Then give the 2 graphs to me and give the texts to a ‘grammar nasie’. We both think we got the good parts. Those graphs will look like puzzles to me and I will feel like Sherlock Holmes and that ‘grammar nasie’ won’t be able to resist setting all those typos right. We both might enjoy our work.

Have you been able to turn a handicap or one of your problems into an asset? Leave a comment how you did it. I think many people will find that information useful. If you got a problem that needs to be solved, then post that as well. Someone here might have already solved that problem but didn’t put it into words yet. I think that linking to a blog post about that is appropriate in this discussion.