Charles Schwab’s Dyslexia: How It Became His Advantage

Charles Schwab, dyslexic founder of the Charles Schwab brokerage, smiling in a pinstripe suit and yellow tie — Photo: The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.

Charles Schwab is the founder of the Charles Schwab Corporation. He opened his first brokerage office in 1971. His big idea was simple: the stock market should be open to everyone, not just the rich.

His company went on to help millions of people manage their money.

For most of that time, he had no idea he was dyslexic. He just thought he had to work harder than everybody else.

School and the hard part

Schwab has said he struggled from his first days at school. Teachers saw him as a slow learner, and he believed them.

He was good at math, science and sports. Golf helped him get into Stanford University. English was another story.

To get through the classic books, he read the comic book versions. He has joked that he does not know how he would have got through school without them.

Stanford was hard. He has said he read at about half the speed of the average student there. He failed English twice, and in his first year he came very close to flunking out.

Taking notes in class was a big problem, so friends shared theirs. His strength in math and economics carried him through, and he went on to Stanford’s business school.

When he found out

Schwab did not have a name for any of this until he was an adult. He found out when his own son was tested and found to be dyslexic.

Seeing his son’s struggles, he saw his own. Understood.org says he was 40 at the time. Other accounts give slightly different dates, but they all agree it was his son’s diagnosis that gave him the answer.

By then he had already started his company.

Charles Schwab’s dyslexic advantage

Schwab has called dyslexia a blessing in disguise. Here is what he links to it.

Big-picture thinking. He has said he could see the whole picture while others only saw what was right in front of them.
Thinking in pictures. He has compared his way of seeing things to a large crossword puzzle in three dimensions, not a straight line. Drawings and cartoons always made sense to him.
Getting to the answer fast. He says he learned to see the solution to a problem sooner than the people around him. That helped him as a leader.
Hard work. Years of having to try harder than everyone else became a habit.

He summed it up for the Los Angeles Times in 1996:

“I’m real good at concepts and visualization.”

Charles Schwab, Los Angeles Times, 1996, quoted by the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity

He also found his own way to keep up. The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity notes that he mostly takes in industry reading as audiobooks.

And he did something with what he learned. He and his wife Helen started Schwab Learning to help parents of children with dyslexia. He has said that if you just sit back and wait, a kid can be lost.

What we take from it

We love that one of the biggest names in finance got through school on comic books and borrowed notes. Schwab did not fix his reading. He built on what he was good at, and then he helped the next lot of kids. That is the kind of rich we look up to.

Charles Schwab’s Dyslexia: How It Became His Advantage

School and the hard part

When he found out

Charles Schwab’s dyslexic advantage

What we take from it

Sources