Book Nook: Business Cards and Shoe Leather - How Dyslexia Helped Me Found One of the World's Premier Business Cooperatives

Stage fright plus dyslexia is a lethal combination that could have ended the career of successful entrepreneur and businessman Larry Vaughn. But the embarrassment he endured as a result of one unforgettable speaking engagement forced him to face — and later embrace — the language problem that had plagued him for a lifetime.

In Vaughn's new release Business Cards and Shoe Leather: How Dyslexia Helped Me Found One of the World's Premier Business Cooperatives (with co-author Ruby Peru), he details how his small-town upbringing, which emphasized hard work and interpersonal skills, helped him launch successful businesses without being able to read, and how those with the unique brain wiring caused by dyslexia can find ways to thrive in today's fast-paced climate.


I had a chance to interview the co-authors to learn more.

Larry Vaughn:
Why did you decide to write this book?I’ve always wanted to write a book and tell my story (I’ve always been a pretty good story teller) but was extremely limited on what I could do. When the technology of spell check, Siri, and being able to talk to my iPad and create the text, I said now’s the time. I knew I was going to have to have help writing my book, so I found Ruby and in our conversations I knew she was the one to help me tell my story! Most everyone knew I couldn’t read very well and was an absolute terrible speller. In my 50’s I was absolutely humiliated when I was ask to give a presentation in front of my peers in a digital counsel group and I couldn’t read the grease board, at that point I never wanted to go through that again or the thought of anyone else for that matter. The book took me two years to write and I told no one. My entire family and friends were shocked. The comment from everyone was “The man that can’t read, write or spell wrote a book!” That was the sock factor I wanted!

How have you been able to be successful in business with limited reading skills? A lot of it was just pure determination of wanting to succeed in life! Also I was able to visualize problems issues and ideas in my head faster than anyone else. It seems like I’ve always been able to convince people to help me with some of my struggles (I guess that’s where the salesman part of me comes from) of reading writing and organizing my thoughts down on paper. I Learned early on to hire someone to help with my weaknesses and let me spend my time and effort on my strengths.

How can people who have dyslexia learn to not just survive, but thrive in their occupation?Don’t be embarrassed of your weaknesses and struggles, I waited way too long to bring mine out into the open. In general people want to help people and whenever you can build a community or cooperative of people communicating and helping each other everyone will succeed! I have personally experienced this by help building one of the largest digital printing communities in the world, DSCOOP.



Ruby Peru:
How did you get involved in this book?
Larry found me through my ghostwriting website, www.rubyperu.com. When we spoke, I knew this would be an interesting assignment because having been a words-oriented person all my life, it had never occurred to me that in any crowd of people there are probably a few, like Larry, who go through life without the ability to read. Especially in today’s culture, with so much emphasis on text and email communications, this is a major handicap, yet a lot of people like Larry still manage to become successful. I wondered—how do they do it?

The answer turned out to be something we can all relate to: they capitalize on their strengths and try to hide their weaknesses. What's sad, though, is that people of Larry’s generation (who grew up before dyslexia’s existence was common knowledge) feel shame around their illiteracy and go through life feeling like they have a “terrible secret.” I hope this book helps those folks to realize that they’re not alone and that dyslexia is nothing to be ashamed of.

Is there anything that you learned about dyslexia through the process?I learned a lot about dyslexia through the process of writing this book. In fact, when I did research on the subject, Larry and I both learned a lot. Nowadays they call dyslexia a “learning difference” instead of a “learning disorder,” which isn’t just a polite way of talking about it. The reason for this is the fact that dyslexia’s handicap in terms of literacy is just a symptom of having a brain that’s wired differently. Sure, dyslexics tend to have difficulty reading and writing—ranging from slight to extreme—but they tend to also have better emotional intelligence than average and tend to be better at building relationships with people and perceiving relationships among things, which is useful for inventors, engineers, mechanics and others who need to comprehend machines or other complex systems. They tend to be intuitive about seeing the “big picture” in business and community.

Larry’s intuitive powers have led him to be very successful in business, although he also talks in the book about how his trust in his own intuition has also led him astray. His book isn’t about tips for dyslexics as far as how to read, it’s really a book about how the other aspects of dyslexia—intuition, emotional intelligence, big-picture thinking—can be harnessed for success. Larry finally taught himself to read at age 55, which I think is incredibly inspiring, but I think the backbone of his story is that he succeeded in life by focussing on the things he was good at and didn’t bother himself about the things he was bad at.

Of course, today’s dyslexic kids have to work hard to read, and they get a lot of help from technology as they do so, but things are different once you grow up, and I think Larry’s story is instructive in this way. As a young businessman, instead of trying to read and write his own correspondence, he simply spent every spare penny he had to hire someone else to handle it for him. He became a master of delegating. I think this is a great message for today’s “do it yourself” culture. You can often do better by just hiring someone else to make your life easier. It’s a message about community building and teamwork being a key to success instead of the typical American message of “independence at all costs.”