A speaker who struggled with reading comprehension in school shares how being labeled slow shaped his self-belief, then argues the real problem isn't you, it's the test. Your differences aren't defects. They're advantages in the right environment.
Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. It was me in the classroom as well. Jim couldn't sit still. Jim was constantly distracted. The funny thing is, as a kid, I had no clue how much that actually impacted me. I thought, okay, yeah, well, I can't do anything about it because my reading comprehension was so bad that I just went to a lower school. And that is why many of us always felt like that fish having to climb But if you put that same fish in the water, it will thrive and it can do amazing things. So I really want you to know that you are not the problem and you are not broken. And being different isn't being less. That is a limiting belief that a lot of us have. But different is the actual beginning of discovering your advantage and discovering what you can get out of life.
