Dyslexia - Day in the Life with Jogn Siefert

Dyslexia is often misunderstood as a limitation, but John Siefert describes it as one of the forces that shaped his creativity, speed of thinking, and approach to leadership. In this episode, John shares how early identification, one thoughtful educator, and a shift in mindset helped him move from remedial classes to advanced learning environments and eventually into executive leadership across the technology industry. He and Taylor discuss neurodiversity, dyslexia, dyscalculia, accessibility, AI, work, identity, and what it means to celebrate the different perspective each person brings.

This conversation is warm, practical, fun, and deeply human. John doesn't frame dyslexia as something to hide or overcome. He offers a different lens: understand it, harness it, surround yourself with people who care, and let what makes you different become part of how you contribute.

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Taylor: 00:00

Welcome to the Day in the Life series on the Accessible Community Podcast, where we explore disability and accessibility in everyday life. Each podcast episode is a new lens to broaden our understanding and drive inclusion. For show notes, go to accessiblecommunity.org slash podcasts. Let's make accessibility part of everyday life. Welcome, everyone, to a brand-new episode of Day in the Life. I'm looking forward to covering dyslexia because so far we've talked about autism and ADHD, and those two fall under the umbrella of neurodiversity. What's a little less known is that dyslexia also falls into that category. So I'm looking forward to discussing that with our upcoming guest. First, we have a gentleman named John Seaford, who I'll turn it over to in a moment. As usual, I'll start with an accessible introduction for myself. I'm your host for this series, Taylor Dorward, and I am a certified accessibility professional. I'm a Caucasian male with messy-style, short brown hair right now and an appropriately trimmed beard, apparently, which is good. I'm wearing a light blue T-shirt and a darker blue patterned, unbuttoned short-sleeve shirt on top. Hopefully that gives you some helpful context as to who I am. With that, I'll turn it over to John, let him introduce himself, and then we'll get into it. Thanks so much, my friend.

John: 01:34

Okay, so my accessible introduction. My name is John Seaford. I'm a 54-year-old Caucasian male with gray and brown hair. It used to be all brown. Now there's a fair bit of gray floating through this thing. I'm wearing a blue polo-style shirt that is probably a little more wrinkled than it ought to be because I'm just not that good at making sure my stuff is perfectly ironed. I am also the CEO of a company called Dynamic Communities, which is the largest independent innovation, education, and training platform in digital and physical event formats for the Microsoft AI business solutions category.

Taylor: 02:20

Awesome. Thank you so much for that. I love feeding into these accessible introductions because, as I said, they're helpful for anyone listening to audio only. For me, as someone with a visual impairment, it also gives me more context for who I'm talking to. It's always nice to have someone who participates in that, so thank you. Sorry I'm not cooler. You told us a good bit about yourself, like what you do at a high level, but could you break it down a little more? Tell us more about what you do and who John is.

John: 02:53

I have been in and out of the technology category, primarily the mid-market and enterprise technology category, for about 31 years. I started my professional career after getting my degrees at San Jose State University, a state school in Northern California, focused on journalism and mass communications and business. It was funny because I really fell in love with the research category, especially research around big information technology. Back then, in the olden days, in the mid-90s, one of the biggest things impacting technology was high-speed networking and wide area networking. This was all very much physical-layer approaches to networking disparate locations, globally, across the United States, and in other places. I started doing research around what was called frame relay, which was a way to transfer data from one point to another point. I started to learn how amazing the technology was in being able to share data and information across vast areas, and that's what got me into the tech space. I did some research in the category. I was doing a presentation one day on telecommunications, and there happened to be some people in the room who worked for really big magazines at the time. For anybody of a younger generation tuning in, there used to be these things called magazines that people used to read before the internet took off. Anyway, I was recruited at that point to come work on one of those magazines. That magazine was called InformationWeek. At the time, it was a fast-growing magazine for the technology space. I got recruited in, and I thought they were going to want me to focus on research or analysis of the category. They said, no, we want you to come in and be a sales guy. I said, a sales guy? I put myself through college selling clothes at Nordstrom. I don't think I want to do that for my job. It was really funny because the person in charge told me to get over myself. He said, get over yourself and come in here and be a salesperson in this organization. We think you can do amazing things. So I said, okay, and ended up taking the job. Amazingly, it lasted about 15 years. What started as a sales position ended 15 years later with me leaving as a senior vice president, running about a $120 million global business for the company. It was a pretty amazing ride and opened my eyes to a bunch of amazing stuff. I then took my first CEO job in 2010, running a company called Virgo for a few years. That company sold to Informa, and I stayed on with Informa for about two and a half years as a president, running a global business for them. Then I thought I was going to retire because I had done okay with the exit of Virgo and thought, boy, maybe I'll just hang it up. I'd spent a whole bunch of time on airplanes and wanted to spend some time with my family. That lasted a couple of months because I realized I wasn't very good at retiring. I enjoy doing different stuff. So I did a couple of startup ventures, went and helped a company based out of New York with some transformation work, and then in Q4 of 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing, I felt like I really wasn't doing enough to give back to the industry that had been so great to me. I was asked to come over and take the CEO job at Dynamic Communities, which I mentioned. Now, almost six years later, we've done some pretty neat stuff during that time: saving the original business during COVID, stabilizing it into some strong programming for the Microsoft business applications and AI community, and now really scaling with some neat new things around AI, Fabric, Copilot, and all those sorts of things in the category. So that's a little bit on my background.

Taylor: 07:13

Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. That's a really interesting career path. I'm not surprised you got bored of retirement. I feel like I would get bored very quickly too. I have to stay moving, and I can only have so many hobbies.

John: 07:29

That is it. I think we share that gene, my friend. It's funny when you have an active mind. You have a very active mind in a lot of the discussions we've had, and my mind is pretty active as well. When it goes into autopilot, you get bored pretty fast. Filling voids and trying to analyze where things are going is a pretty fun activity when you're doing it in a category you love. I happen to love this category, so I have a whole lot of fun doing it.

Taylor: 08:04

That's awesome. It's great finding that happy medium where you're working, but you're also working on something you care about and you're passionate about.

John: 08:13

What a great way to say it.

Taylor: 08:15

It feels kind of like a work retirement, like you get a little bit of both.

John: 08:19

You get a little bit of both. It's really neat too because a ton of it comes down to the type of people you get to surround yourself with. We're pretty blessed in this category. There are so many amazing people, great thought leaders, people who care and put a fair bit into the things they contribute in this environment we get to work in. That makes getting up in the morning a little bit more fun, right? When you get to do stuff with people you really enjoy being around.

Taylor: 08:48

Yeah, certainly. I think now we have a really good idea of who John is. As many regular listeners know, we usually focus on a certain disability for each episode, and as I said in the beginning, we're going to be talking about dyslexia. Can you explain what dyslexia looks like for you and how it affects your day-to-day life and your work?

John: 09:11

Sure. Does it maybe make sense to take a step back and up on the topic, Taylor? Maybe I can share how I learned I was dyslexic.

Taylor: 09:24

Yeah, absolutely. I would love to learn what your experience was like in the education system with that hidden disability and how aware people were of it at that time.

John: 09:34

Well, as I mentioned, I'm 54, so I was in grammar school, middle school, and high school during the 70s and 80s. At that time, especially in the 70s, very little research had been done around dyslexia. In many cases, it wasn't really known, and if it was known, it was just considered a disability. That was initially the category I was put in. I first started realizing I was dyslexic when I was trying to learn to read with my mom as a little kid. I would fall asleep almost all the time when I was reading. My parents just thought, he's tired. He was playing all day, and now he's trying to read. What I ended up learning was that I would fall asleep because my eyes were working so hard to translate the letters on the page into words I could read. I never really knew that was the case. I kind of floated through kindergarten through fifth grade. Then sixth, seventh, and eighth grade were middle school for me, and in sixth grade, things started to get pretty obvious that I was different from the other kids in class. We would do public reading, where you had to read aloud a chapter in a book or something like that, and I would literally start to fall asleep while I was reading in class. That was a big indicator. The second thing was basic mathematics, because I also have dyscalculia, where you mix up numbers on a page. I really struggled with basic math: addition, subtraction, division, multiplication. Multiplication was actually easier for me because there was a logic to it, and division was a little bit easier too. But basic addition and subtraction, I struggled with a whole bunch. In sixth and seventh grade, I was put in remedial classes, classes for slower learners and the like. You know how sixth and seventh graders are. All of a sudden, people who were my friends started giving me choice names for going into those classrooms. That was pretty tough. I withdrew a little bit and was pretty sad as a kid that these people I played sports with and did all these things with were now making fun of me. I remember being in sixth grade and thinking, if they're going to be like that, then screw them. I don't need them as my friends. I'll go make new friends. So I started to make some new friends. During that process, there was a woman who was the vice principal of our middle school, and she happened to be doing very early research into dyslexia. I was very lucky that there was somebody with that level of understanding. She was on an association committee doing research with children who had learning disabilities. Her specialty was dyslexia because it was so unknown in the later 70s and early 80s. She started to recognize that when I was doing verbal communication or analytical work, I was progressing much faster than other people in the classroom. I was grasping more complex issues, emotions, and concepts in literature, but I couldn't read it. I would also grasp more complex mathematical equations. I started to understand things in science that a number of other people were struggling to understand. So she looked at this and said, boy, he's having a lot of trouble reading and with basic math, but he's grasping these more complex topics and concepts in science, mathematics, and literature. She identified me as somebody who might have dyslexia. I went through a number of tests with her, which was amazing because my parents didn't have the money to afford that kind of testing when I was a kid. I got to do it all for free through the school. They found out I was severely dyslexic and also had dyscalculia, struggling with numbers. If I saw a phone number, I would have to memorize it instead of reading it because I would struggle with which number went where. That was where it started to come to life for me that there was this thing called dyslexia and that I had it. When you're a kid, it's hard to understand these things. But I had already sort of said, if people don't like me because I'm not as smart as them, which is what I thought at the time, then I don't need them. I'm going to care less what they think. What was interesting was that as the vice principal did this testing with me, I went from remedial classes to advanced classes by the end of seventh grade, into eighth grade, and then through high school because of the way my brain worked. Because my brain didn't work like everybody else's in reading, writing, or mathematics, it was actually problem solving in unique ways and conceptualizing or visualizing things other people struggled to conceptualize or visualize because they were so used to doing things the regular way. My brain had adapted to how it learned and how it would try to fix problems. Then they had me do an IQ test and realized I had a pretty high IQ. They put me into more advanced classes that were more about concepts, problem solving, and unique strategies to fix things, and I did well in them. That was a pretty big transition for me because all those people who were making fun of me for being in remedial classes started kissing my butt because I was in these more advanced classes. All of a sudden, they were asking me for help on things. That was a big life lesson for me in forgiveness because I didn't want to forgive them. I wanted to punch them in the nose when I was a kid. Luckily, my parents were very thoughtful and caring people, and they said, maybe they weren't being mean to you because they didn't like you. Maybe they were being mean to you because you were an easy target based on what was happening in your life. Maybe let it go and accept them back as friends. That worked with most people. With some people it didn't, if I'm being honest, and I think I'm better off without those people in my life. Anyhow, that's a bit of what my journey looked like. Once I had somebody who really cared to help me understand what this meant to me, and who could also recognize the things I was really good at as opposed to the things I struggled with, and then let me focus on the things I was good at, that opened an entirely new realm of possibility for me as a kid and then as an adult as well.

Taylor: 18:04

That's awesome, and that's a great story. It's great you had someone there who could help you through that process. I picked up two main things from that. One is how important early detection is for learning disabilities, but also that there's a huge misconception that a learning disability equates to unintelligence. Like how they said, oh, he has dyslexia, let's put him in remedial classes. That's not really how it works. You can say, okay, this student has this learning disability. How can we adjust the curriculum to help them thrive? It's great you were able to find ways to work on more conceptual problems and figure out strategies to help you in those math classes and things like that. I think those two things are really important, and early detection is key. How important do you think it was that you were able to find out that early in your schooling? Because some people may take a lot longer.

John: 19:08

That's why, when I tell that story, I talk about how lucky I was. I'm a faith-driven guy, so I talk about how blessed I was to be put in that environment. Among all the middle schools in the state I lived in, California, or the country I live in, the United States, how many people had a vice principal who was actually doing research in a category I fell into? I was blessed and lucky. It made me think, hey, there must be a little more of a reason why I'm around if I would have been so lucky as to have that sort of thing happen for me. What I've always tried to do is be very open and honest with people about what it's meant in my life and the impact this woman had in my life. To your point, Taylor, I think early identification of these, I call them superpowers, quite frankly. I don't call them disabilities. Early detection of these superpowers can open your mind, your heart, and your life up to incredible possibilities if you have somebody who cares enough to help you recognize them early on. I truly feel bad for folks who are in environments where they don't have somebody who can help them with those things. So on stages in front of thousands of people, in small roundtables, and in an association I used to run, I openly talk about this and encourage people to take a step back and take a step up and say, okay, if I think differently, if I act differently, if I see differently, if I hear differently than what society identifies as normal, maybe there's more to it. Maybe that's okay. Maybe that's not a negative. Maybe that could be my superpower that I bring to the world and use to do things other people can't do because they don't have my disability, or what I like to call my superpower.

Taylor: 21:33

Yeah, that's been a fairly common theme throughout these conversations: having that unique perspective. It's been interesting because, obviously, I come from the blind perspective, so I understand that for me, I'm better at understanding auditory things and processing things that way. For example, I can't read very well because of my vision, but I can absorb information a lot quicker than someone who's reading at a normal pace because I can have it in my ear reading at 200% speed. You can process words more quickly audibly than visually. You can focus on the things you can't do, but if you reframe it like you were saying, thinking of it more as a superpower and that unique perspective you now have, that mindset shift has helped me in so many ways. It seems like it has for you as well, especially on the mental health side.

John: 22:32

A big part of it is acceptance. There are still times today when I'm signing a check at a restaurant or something like that where I'll have to look at one of my kids or my wife or somebody I'm with and say, all right, that says this, right? I'll still have to do that once in a while. But the other thing, and I think human beings are amazing creatures, because we are the most intellectually adaptable species on this planet. Not just physically adaptable. We physically adapt. We get taller, we get shorter, our eyes get bigger, our ears get bigger, whatever it is. But our intellectual adaptation is really the most interesting thing about our species because we have the ability to intellectually adapt to massive changes and big things we go through. Before you know it, those things just become how we get stuff done. When we went from a horse to a car, or from a car to an autonomous vehicle, we're adapting to these things intellectually and saying, okay, this is how it is. This is what we're all about now. That same intellectual adaptability for people who have whatever superpower they have becomes, how do you put that superpower to work and adapt how you get things done? Reading, for example. Most people, when they read, I've learned, say the word in their head while they're reading it. The dog jumped over the fence, or what have you. I don't do that. I don't actually read the letters that are there, or say them that way in my head. Instead, I look at the first letter, try to identify the middle letter, and look at the last letter in every word. Then I guess what the word is as I'm reading. What I learned, the intellectual adaptation for me, was that I would contextualize the sentences really fast in my mind. If the word through was there, and I mixed it up and read thought instead of through, because they're similar in the way they look, but the sentence said, I went through the wall, and I read, I went thought the wall, I would know, okay, that's stupid. That doesn't make sense. So it's through. I started to intellectually adapt to how I read. I used to force myself to read the newspaper every single day so I could sharpen this skill. I then ended up becoming the publisher of the largest trade magazine in the world with InformationWeek back in the day, where I forced myself to read the blue-line issues of the magazine before it came out every week. That was like a PDF, a really ugly copy of the magazine. I would force myself to read that every week, and I would read it this way: first letter, middle letter, last letter, to understand what we were going to be writing about and what we were analyzing. The funny thing, Taylor, is I can read a book like 10 times faster than most people can now because I'm not reading it in the traditional way. I'm reading it almost like your times-two way of listening to an audio file. I read really fast when I'm going through stuff because I'm not saying the words in my head. I'm grabbing the concept and the context of each sentence and letting it flow into the next one.

Taylor: 26:38

That's really cool. When you were saying that, I was picturing typing and how it gives suggestions, and then you can tab to complete it. I thought, oh, that seems like how you read. It's conceptualizing it.

John: 26:54

Yeah, that's a great analogy for it. What's been great for me is that it lets me not get hung up on other things that people get hung up on. If there's this little tiny detail that people get wrapped around the axle on, I normally don't. I'm more focused on the context of the concept we're working on, not necessarily whether this thing is spelled wrong or that thing is spelled wrong. I don't really care about that. I care more about the important thing that's trying to get across in the work I do, my personal life, or anything like that.

Taylor: 27:38

Awesome. It's great to see how people adapt to different situations depending on their impairment. What's great is that I'm always learning new strategies and new applications for a skill set. I'll do something, and someone will witness it and say, wait, how did you do that? And I'm like, wait, you don't do that? Then I realize, oh wow, that's another thing I apparently am good at that's not quote-unquote normal. Focusing on the good has been helpful for me, and it seems like it's been helpful for you as well, reframing those barriers into success stories. I feel like that's helpful for anyone, regardless of whether they have a disability or a superpower.

John: 28:27

I finally got to a point, and it was funny because I've been a CEO of companies a few times, I've been a president of global businesses and that sort of thing. What was really interesting was when I learned how many people had jobs that kind of looked like mine who were also dyslexic or had dyscalculia. It shocked me. I thought, oh gosh, that person has dyslexia, this person has dyslexia. I started to recognize, not that I'm as good as some of these people, but similarities in thought process and how we would solve problems or recognize things a little earlier than other people. That was when I started thinking about it more like a superpower. Because I don't think, read, write, or do everything the same way everybody else does, I created a new way to do that for myself. That is my intellectual adaptation to having this superpower. It enabled me to recognize things other people weren't recognizing. I call it filling voids in business. I recognize voids that need to be filled, sometimes before other people recognize them, and that has enabled me at times to have a first-mover advantage in business, to do something or fill that void before other people pay attention to it. The negative part is that sometimes I'm too freaking fast. Sometimes I'm recognizing, oh, this is going to be super important, so let's create this thing, do this thing, or build that thing to help accommodate it. Then everybody goes, wait, we're not there yet. The market's not there yet, the world's not there yet. Then two or three years later, the world is there, and I'm like, oh man, I was too fast. I jumped on it a little too quickly. That's another part of the adaptation for any of us who have our unique superpowers. If your lack of normal sight is your superpower, which enables you to do all these other things amazingly, there's going to be stuff you'll probably pick up on before other people because you're not waiting to read it on a page. You're hearing it, learning it, and internalizing it. It's the same for me in the way I think. For folks like us who have these unique powers that other people don't have, sometimes we have to moderate them because we start going down a path and think, wait, you don't understand what's going on here? Why don't you get that? Meanwhile, we might just be a little early to it. Sometimes we have to slow our pace down a little bit to let all these people who don't have our superpower catch up. That's been challenging for me at times. But at other times, I say, wow, aren't I lucky that I have the ability to do that stuff maybe a little bit faster than those poor people who aren't dyslexic.

Taylor: 31:47

Yeah, I love the way you're framing it as a superpower. As I'm sure you're probably well aware, people with disabilities have a really low employment rate. Something I'm always encouraging people to think about when they're looking for contract work, looking to get involved, or figuring out what they want to do is this: think about what your situation now allows you to do better. For me, I can take in information much quicker. For you, you're able to conceptualize and problem solve a lot quicker and get through these things faster. If you focus on what you can now do better, and then find something you're passionate about where you can utilize that superpower, and if you bring something valuable to the table, there's work out there for you. Obviously, you're going to get into situations where you'll deal with bias or discrimination. Unfortunately, that's always going to happen for many minority groups. But it's good to shift your mindset and think about these skills you can utilize to find that work and thrive the way you do.

John: 33:08

I think you're spot on, Taylor. I learned a while ago from a friend of mine who's also dyslexic. He's a bestselling author and has done very well in his career. He talks about celebrating your different. As opposed to just trying to be better or whatever it is, celebrate your different. Celebrate what truly makes you different. If other people don't get it, that's okay. You will find people who do get it and who want to leverage your different in the way you think, act, work, and do the stuff you do every single day. For me, I just try to surround myself with people like that. My dad would tell me when I was a kid, when I was going through some of this stuff, that you're going to have people who care and people who don't care. He had more colorful language for this, but I'm not going to use his colorful language on our podcast. He would say, you have people who care and people who don't care. Hang out with the people who care, and care less about the people who don't care. Don't get concerned about what they think of you, what their perception is of you, whether they like you or don't like you, or any of that. Just care less. If you care less about what those people think, you'll find that you can start to surround yourself with people who do care and who have a level of warmth, compassion, intellect, and drive that matches the type of stuff you want to do. I still think about that guidance he gave me in seventh or eighth grade today, in business, work, and my personal life.

Taylor: 35:05

Nice. That's a beautiful thing about this podcast, and I feel so honored to be able to have these conversations. I've talked about how there have been common themes, and one of those threads has been finding the right people. Whether I was talking with someone with autism, blindness, ADHD, or anything else, it's always been that same message: find the right people to be around, the people who accept you for you, support you, understand some of what you're going through, offer advice, learn from one another, and share that camaraderie. It's just been great. I think that is one of the handful of themes that tell the truth for everyone I'll talk to, and it's really cool that you're also covering that.

John: 35:49

Well, it's really cool that you're helping bring it to life for people who are different. And you know what? Who wants to be freaking normal? Normal is boring, man. Massively boring. To me, one of the greatest things in life and business is getting to hang out with people who are comfortable with their different. When they're comfortable in their own skin about what makes them different and they're willing to talk about it and share it like you are, Taylor, that makes me want to hang out with them more. It doesn't make me want to find somebody who's just like me. I think it's pretty awesome to meet other people who have unique traits about them, whether somebody calls that a disability or a superpower. I consider it a superpower. Your abilities, my abilities, other people's abilities, I consider them superpowers if you can harness them the right way and leverage this intellectual adaptation we uniquely have as humans to do amazing things. But hanging out with normal people? Boring. It's like we're just going to talk about this sports game or that thing over there. Those things are like the lacquer on a wood table. They might look nice, but they ain't the wood, baby. The wood underneath that lacquer is what really matters, and that's what makes each one of us unique and different. If we celebrate that a little bit more and downplay the desire to be normal, I think we're all a little bit happier.

Taylor: 37:35

Yeah, I totally agree. Throughout this series, I've had the immense pleasure of interacting with some very fun characters, so it's been a blessing so far. Going back a little bit, you talked about what you do, and I was wondering if you could tell us more about what you do at Dynamic Communities and maybe walk us through a typical day.

John: 37:57

There's definitely a little bit of bouncing between different priorities in my job. I have something that I talk about a lot. The word spectrum is used in a whole lot of different ways. I use it to talk about activity quite often. I talk about an activity spectrum at work, and the activity spectrum has three different stops: proactive, active, and reactive. The majority of people who have jobs like mine, over the years, I have found spend about 70% of their time being reactive. They're responding to something, reacting to something, trying to fix a problem, or whatever it might be. About 20% of their time is spent active, where they're actually collaborating with somebody else, but oftentimes still collaborating in a reactive way. They're trying to fix a problem or change something. Only about 10% of their time is spent proactively, really considering what voids need to be filled, how to dazzle customers, or how to adapt before the market forces you to adapt. When I look at that activity spectrum, I think there are so many things today making that reactive 70% of the time less and less valuable as a business person. You think about the role AI is playing now, automations and all that sort of stuff. That's doing a lot of that reactive work for professionals. So where it gets tough for a lot of people who don't have superpowers like me and you is that they've gotten so used to being reactive and making a really good paycheck on being reactive. Now you've got systems that can do some of that reactive work for them. They're being challenged to be more active and more proactive in their roles. This is one of the big turning points we're seeing in the market right now, with automation and AI and large language models doing a lot more reactive work for people. That adaptation for people to be more active, and really importantly more proactive, is a challenge. I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing all these layoffs from companies right now, because people have made really good livings by being reactive, but technology is now taking care of some of that reactive work. The real value for employees now is how proactive they are and how active they are in collaboration with other people. I really try to spend a lot of my time on the active and proactive side of that activity spectrum at work. I try to do that with the executive team I work with. I work with super talented people, and we really try to focus on proactive things. I try to focus on ideas. I try to focus on little things that can dazzle the heck out of attendees at the events we do, the partners we work with at the events, and the collaborations I do with some of the executives over at Microsoft. That's what my job looks like right now. Let's not worry about all those reactive things, like responding to an email in two seconds. Let's use tools to help with those things so I can focus more on the ideas, approaches, and concepts that have the potential to be meaningful to people.

Taylor: 41:58

Nice. That's a really interesting perspective, that activity spectrum. For example, I can send an email, but so can an AI agent. An AI agent can't be Taylor. It can't bring my personality to the role, my ideas to the role, or my unique perspective. I like the way you think about that, focusing on the proactive and active side. I think that would be a really good takeaway for a lot of people, regardless of why they're listening to this.

John: 42:32

Thanks for saying that. I think it's something I've thought a lot about. I've talked about it with really big groups of people, small groups of people, and the like. It's a way to really challenge legacy, because the legacy of good business people is that they can make tons of money by being the best at reacting. They can be the best at being responsive and reactive and all that. Whereas there can be massive value, especially in an AI-driven world, to being active and able to collaborate with other people, look them in the eye and share ideas, and listen to the words they're saying more intently. There's real value to that type of thing in today's world. When so much of the reactive stuff is being handled by AI, the human stuff, the curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, those sorts of things, become a magic that is uniquely human. If we own that as humans, as opposed to longing for the days when you made a big paycheck because you were the fastest at reacting to something, and instead own this proactive and active reality that I think will define the next generation of business leaders, that can be uniquely human and uniquely precious for people no matter what their abilities or superpowers are. That becomes pretty amazing for somebody with autism, ADHD, sight impairment, dyslexia, hearing impairment, all those things. Use them to be awesome. Use them to be active and proactive in environments where all those normal people were so comfortable being reactive because that's how they did stuff. We have the ability to adapt even faster and actually lead this next revolution of innovation, ideas, and more based on collaborating actively and thinking proactively.

Taylor: 45:04

That's pretty cool. Something I've done is use AI to help me be more proactive and active. I'll have it help me brainstorm ideas, organize my thoughts, and format them in a way that colleagues can most easily understand. I think there's a nice blend there where you can still use AI that's doing a lot of that reactive work, but also use it to help you be even more efficient on the proactive and active side.

John: 45:34

Think about that, Taylor. I don't believe most people are thinking about it that way at this point. You are because of your superpower. A lot of people are not because they're wanting to double down on being reactive right now so they can show their value. The way you talk about using AI, I use it very similarly. Sonnet and Opus from Anthropic have literally been like a business partner to me at work because I will brainstorm concepts I have in my mind and then use the feedback it gives me to help frame my active and proactive strategies and concepts. A lot of people are not using it that way. They're fearful of it taking over what they consider to be their greatness, as opposed to leveraging it to expand on their greatness and expand on what makes them different.

Taylor: 46:36

Oh yeah, I love that. I've loved talking to you, John, and learning more about your superpower and how you've used it to accomplish all the great things you've been up to. Before we finish, I would love to give you a minute or two to share one piece of advice you would have for someone trying to learn how to best navigate life with dyslexia. I know that's a loaded question, so you can take a moment to think about how you want to put that.

John: 47:03

It's a great question. I'm going to go back to what my dad said: find people who care to be around you. I'm going to go back to what my friend Christopher Lochhead talks about: celebrate the different that you have the ability to bring to everything with your dyslexia or whatever ability you have in your life. And I think the final thing is care less what people think. We get so jammed up as human beings about what this person thinks, or what they think, or what they said about me when I wasn't in the room. Care less about that and care more about just being you, the heart, the soul, the mind, the intelligence, the different that you bring to it. Care more about that than whether somebody thinks you're cool, or whether somebody thinks you're great at what you do, okay at what you do, or whatever. They'll catch up eventually. They will. The proof is in our existence and what we deliver to people. No matter what people's perceptions are, whether they like me, don't like me, or any of those sorts of things, care less about that and care more about dazzling them and giving them something to eat their words when they talk crap about you. Then smile about it. Don't get so angry. Smile about it and be okay with it. It doesn't mean you don't close the door and get pissed once in a while, but it does mean that our ability to care less about some of those things, surround ourselves with people who care more, and celebrate our different as something amazing, as opposed to something that blocks us from what normal people get to do, matters. Let those normal people be boring and just own it.

Taylor: 49:15

Yeah, absolutely. That's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much, John, for sharing your insights. It's been really illuminating for me. I love to learn as much as I can, so I appreciate you sharing all of that with me. I look forward to amplifying your message and sharing your perspective with the rest of the community. Thank you so much, John. I appreciate it.

John: 49:38

Thank you so much for inviting me, Taylor. Thanks for everything you do in this community to raise awareness of accessibility and what this means, not just from a what-your-keyboard-looks-like perspective, but what it means culturally for businesses and how to embrace the different that everybody who may need something with a little more accessibility can bring to organizations. Thank you for not only spotlighting this, but actually being a champion of it.

Taylor: 50:09

I appreciate that, John. Thank you. And thank you all so much for listening or watching. We'll see you all next time for Day in the Life. Adios, everybody. Thank you, Taylor. Hey there, and thank you for joining us for this episode of Day in the Life on the Accessible Community Podcast. We hope you enjoyed this conversation, and if you did, make sure you're following this show wherever you get your podcasts. That way you get notified each week when we release a new episode. At the bottom of each episode's show notes, there is a link to our podcast feedback form. We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, the Day in the Life series, or the Accessible Community Podcast as a whole. Your feedback helps us continue creating conversations that are meaningful and valuable to you. Thanks again for joining us, and we'll see you in the next episode.