I rely on apps for help with spelling and grammar as if they were old friends. Now I’m a tech entrepreneur
I’m 10 years old. Minutes into a maths lesson and my palms have already begun to sweat. I’ve positioned myself in the back row, but the teacher walks up and down the aisles of the classroom, peering over our shoulders. I don’t understand the rules. The teacher’s voice becomes a blur, and I stare at the numbers on the board, willing them to make sense. I wasn’t a shy child, if anything I was bold and kind of brash, but I couldn’t ask for help. I didn’t have the language to explain what the numbers were doing to my brain.
Soon I’d have a name for what I was experiencing – dyslexia – and I’d begin to find ways to accommodate my learning style. As with everything, there are scales here. Dyslexia presents and impacts people in different ways, and I was lucky to be at a great school. But I had to learn to overcome my fear of numbers and words. I had to do battle with my confidence. It’s only now I realise that this was the cause of me honing my greatest skill: learning to learn. Discovering more about different learning styles was a gamechanger – and where my love of artificial intelligence technology was born.