In November 1997, I was working in the institutional department at Merrill Lynch, navigating a hyper-analytical, text-heavy world where an Ivy League degree was the baseline currency. I hid two things: my severe dyslexia and an academic record that didn't belong in that building. Every day, my job required me to accompany our investment banking clients, high-profile corporate executives, and our superstar research analysts around Boston to meet with the top investment managers. I was drowning in self-stigma, terrified that one misread spreadsheet or misspoken word would expose me as a fraud in a world built for the neurotypical elite.
Then came the Virgin Express initial public offering.
The standard Wall Street playbook dictated that a CEO fly into town and bow and grovel in the private offices of Boston's mega-investors like Fidelity and Wellington. But Sir Richard Branson refused to do private meetings. If the most powerful mutual fund managers in the world wanted a piece of his airline, they had to leave their corporate towers and schlep over to the Boston Harbor Hotel to hear the pitch.
I got a kick out of watching these egomaniac power brokers swallow their pride and trail across town. But nothing prepared me for the presentation itself. Branson turned a high-stakes, numbers-driven investment banking pitch into pure theater. I recently asked an old colleague if he remembered the scene. His reply nailed it:
"Branson's dramatic entrance was preceded by a dozen beautiful women with red lipstick, bright red miniskirts, tight red tops, jaunty red hats and red high heels. He wore black pants, a black open collared shirt and a black jacket. He was beaming. Branson did no one-on-one meetings, which ticked off the big investors."
He didn't follow their script, and he didn't sit across a desk while they picked apart his spreadsheets. He stood before the elite of the Boston financial world, beaming, and he owned the room. The big investors grumbled about not getting private meetings, then bought anyway. The offering was a massive success, ten times oversubscribed, and raised nearly $100 million.
At the time, I didn't know Branson was dyslexic. He didn't talk about it widely until his autobiography came out the next year. So there were two dyslexics in that ballroom, and neither of us knew about the other. He was the master of ceremonies with his entourage in red. I was in the back keeping my head down. Colleagues called me aloof. It was my armor. I took his entrance as pure confidence. Years later, having spent my own career steering people away from anything related to my dyslexia, it became clear that I was watching a louder version of the same thing. The showmanship was his armor.
Today, organizations like Made By Dyslexia, a charity Branson has championed, tell dyslexic kids to wear their dyslexia like a badge of honor and treat it as a superpower. I struggle with that polished, corporate narrative.
No one handed Richard Branson or me a superpower cape. By his own account, when he left school at sixteen, his headmaster told him he would end up either in prison or a millionaire. When I graduated from high school, my path was just as uncertain. I was handed a one-way ticket to the Caribbean in a pre-cellular, pre-internet era, cut off and forced to sink or swim. We weren't told we were special. We were handed low expectations and left to figure it out alone.
If dyslexia yields anything like a superpower, it doesn't come from a magical glitch in how our brains process letters on a page. Maybe the real gift comes from the invisible struggle: the scar tissue, the resilience, and the determination built by years of surviving a world that wasn't built for you.
Virgin Express struggled for years and was eventually sold to a rival. Branson moved on to the next thing, as he always has. I don't know what made him that way. I know what made me. It was decades of hiding, and the slow work of learning to fail and getting back up. Some of that left me stronger. Some of it just hurt. Telling a struggling ten-year-old he has a superpower skips the part where he has to survive his childhood first, and not every kid does.
We could all use a little Sir Richard, but please, no superpower capes.
