Commentary

My academic journey was never easy. Reading and writing didn’t come naturally to me, and by middle school I had been placed in special education classes. I have dyslexia, but at the time my parents didn’t make much of it. We had gone to a Waldorf school, where reading starts later, and they figured I’d catch up eventually. They always told me, “You’ll be just fine.”

There was one person, however, who didn’t share their optimism. I’ll never forget sitting in a sixth-grade meeting with my parents and our guidance counselor, Sharon Newman. After a round of tests, she looked at my parents and said, right in front of me, that they shouldn’t expect me to ever be able to support myself. She advised them to start putting money aside for my care. Thankfully, my parents didn’t take her word as prophecy.

In high school I relied heavily on oral presentations. While my reading and writing lagged, my listening comprehension was exceptional, well over 90 percent, double the average for my age. My IQ tested at 145. This confused teachers, who didn’t know what to do with a student who could grasp complex ideas with ease yet struggled to put them on paper. By junior year I was told again not to bother applying to college because higher education wasn’t built for someone like me. I took that as a challenge. I applied anyway, was accepted, and went on to earn a degree from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

But my entrepreneurial spirit had started long before college. As a kid I ran lemonade stands, took lunch orders for my parents’ employees, and tried to sell them food I had made. My parents were entrepreneurs themselves. They ran a clothing company out of our barn that eventually grew from selling dresses at the farmers market to showcasing at massive trade shows at the Javits Center in New York. By the time I was in high school, I was flying across the country on weekends to help with those shows, sometimes traveling more than my parents did, even to different states to handle logistics while they were running a show somewhere else. I loved working. I loved doing hard things.

In college I tried to launch a music company. Then I started a recording studio that rose and fell in my early twenties. After that, I became a performance poet, featured on HBO’s Def Poetry and opening for acts like The Roots and Michael Franti. I toured the country performing at universities. Then came ten years growing medical marijuana, followed by thirteen years running vegan restaurants in Los Angeles. In 2018 I added farming to the mix.

Along the way, I’ve had plenty of other ventures, some that flourished and some that failed. I know what it feels like to have a million dollars in the bank, and I know what it feels like to be overdrawn and unable to pay the electric bill. That is the life of an entrepreneur: waves of gain and loss, risk and reward, faith and fear.

Recently I sat on a panel about entrepreneurship in the food space. There were five of us. One was autistic. Two had ADHD. Another had dyslexia. One had never graduated high school. That struck me. Was it coincidence, or is there something about learning differently that equips people for this path? Entrepreneurship is not linear. It is not clocking an hour and being paid for an hour. It is pouring endless amounts of effort into something that may never pan out. It is pushing yourself to the edge of your capacity, trying to convince others to join your vision, and keeping faith when no one else believes. It is staring at a near-empty bank account and refusing to let that dictate your sense of possibility.

Forbes once put it bluntly: “A students work for C students.” I have never seen a study to prove it, but from what I have experienced, there is a lot of truth in that line.

Of course, learning disabilities and dropping out of school do not automatically create entrepreneurs. We all know plenty of people with ADHD or dyslexia who never turned those challenges into enterprises. But there does seem to be a pattern. Those of us who grew up struggling in traditional classrooms had to learn to see differently, to adapt, to create new systems for ourselves. Maybe that same skill set—thinking outside the box, enduring failure, keeping faith in the unknown—is what allows us to survive in the lonely, unpredictable world of entrepreneurship.

Because that is what it takes: the ability to keep going when nothing makes sense, when the hours are endless and the rewards nonexistent, when everyone else has given up but you still believe. Eventually, sometimes after countless failures, it all comes together. The idea clicks, the money flows, and the dream becomes real. That is the life of an entrepreneur. And perhaps it is no surprise that so many of us are the ones who didn’t fit neatly into the classroom rows, who were underestimated, who learned differently.

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