Confirmed: Shane Hipps Still Has His Marbles
In my last post I told you I was dyslexic. A fact I spent much of my life trying to hide or pretend wasn’t there.
I didn’t realize till much later in life, it actually became a source of one of my greatest strengths and the reason why I can see things others can’t. It helped me develop my “x-ray vision” as it were.
When you’re dyslexic, you can develop other strengths you don’t know about until much later in life.
In many ways, I was lucky.
My mom happened to be a psychologist and she took me to see all kinds of specialists. I saw every specialist you could imagine for ten years as they tried to help me manage this problem.
When they tested me, they found my ability to organize objects was scored way down at the 10th percentile. Translation: I was a mess. My desk was a mess. Everything was a mess. I had no ability to organize space.
But when they tested my auditory memory, I was in the 98th percentile. Which is good. Really good. They could give me a list of 15 numbers and ask me to repeat them back, and I could do it in exactly the right order. No problem.
Visually impaired people tend to develop a more acute sense of hearing. Something similar had happened to me.
When someone gives you a book and you can't access the information in it, you have to retain everything the teacher says.
As a result, I had developed an incredible short-term memory and an almost perfect auditory memory. I could remember everything that was said. I just couldn't read very well.
But that wasn’t all.
Right before I went to college, one of my last specialists did a final test on me.
They were trying to figure out how I could make it in college… and this person told me the most amazing thing I’d heard up until then.
The assessment specialist sat me down and said to my mom, “Shane has just as many marbles as anyone else. They're just arranged in a different way.”
My mom remembers that moment. It was like the color came back into my face.
I had been through so many specialists. I was so dejected, so discouraged, so sad that I was just dumb and I didn't know if I could make it in life... my face was pale white.
But in that moment, the color returned.
For the first time ever, I felt like I was almost possibly smart enough to maybe fit in with my peers.
I held my head in my hands and I asked, “Is there a way to get them arranged in the right way? I just want to get the marbles arranged in the right way.”
My mom replied, “You don't need to rearrange the marbles, because you’ve tested very high in something called ‘crystallized thinking’ rather than linear thinking... which is a pattern of thinking very different to how you get trained in order to do reading, writing, and mathematics.”
In other words, I had developed a capacity for and a pattern of thinking that very few people had.
It was a way of thinking and perceiving the world in a completely different way than linear thinking, which is how most people think... and is how we decode and encode the printed word.
This is one of the reasons I can see things other people can't in human systems. My perception works in a different way to everyone else. It’s my superpower.
This is why I do strategy differently. It's why I can detect, predict and anticipate unintended consequences... because not everything is linear.
Often it's patterns and fractals.
It's crystals that grow in many directions all at the same time.
And no, I’m not talking about the Breaking Bad type of crystals.
My brain was programmed to think in patterns, fractals and crystals... for survival over decades.
Today my dyslexia is one of my greatest assets. It allows me to do what I do, and see things others can’t see.
As long as it’s not in a book.
