Steven Spielberg’s Dyslexia: How It Became His Advantage
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Steven Spielberg is one of the best known film directors in the world. He has been telling stories with a camera since he was a kid.
What most people did not know until 2012 is that he is dyslexic. He did not know it himself for most of his life. He was diagnosed only about five years before he spoke about it, when he was around 60.
So the career came first. The explanation showed up decades later.
School and the hard part
Spielberg grew up in the 1950s, when almost nobody talked about dyslexia. He has said he learned to read about two years behind the other kids in his class.
Reading out loud in front of the class was the part he dreaded most. Other kids teased and bullied him, and he has said junior high was the toughest stretch. Some adults at school decided he was lazy.
He was not alone, though. He found a group of friends who did not quite fit in either. He has said none of them had the words to talk about what was going on. That group of friends later helped inspire The Goonies, which he produced.
When he found out
Spielberg was diagnosed with dyslexia as an adult, around 2007. He kept it private for a few more years.
In 2012 he talked about it for the first time, in a video interview with Quinn Bradlee for the website Friends of Quinn. He described the diagnosis as the last piece of a puzzle he had carried around his whole life. It explained a lot about school.
Steven Spielberg’s dyslexic advantage
Spielberg does not describe dyslexia as a superpower. What he describes is how he coped, and coping turned into a career.
He started making films at about 12, as a Boy Scout. He has said making movies was his great escape from feeling different. Behind a camera he felt skilled. He has also said movies saved him from shame, because he stopped blaming himself for something that was never his fault.
“I never felt like a victim.”
Steven Spielberg, Friends of Quinn interview, 2012
He is still a slow reader, and he says so plainly. It takes him about three hours to read what most people get through in a little over an hour. That matters in his job, because directors read scripts and books all the time.
Here is the upside he points to. He says he remembers almost everything he reads. He has also said going slowly lets him notice things in a script that a fast reader might skip. He has learned to adjust, and he does the reading without feeling ashamed of the time it takes.
Then there is plain persistence. Spielberg left college in 1968 to work in film. In his 50s, he went back and finished his degree.
His message to young dyslexic people is simple. You are not alone, you will have dyslexia for life, and it will not hold you back.
What we take from it
We love that one of the greatest storytellers alive reads at about a third of the usual speed and gets more out of the page anyway. Slow is not the same as stuck.
We also notice he got his answer at 60 and still called it good news. It is never too late to find out why school felt like that.