In the post-modern world, it has become human nature to expect our heroes to be perfect, despite overwhelming evidence that they never are. In the world of antiquity, the Greeks had no such expectations. To the contrary, it wouldn’t be Greek mythology if the heroes weren’t deeply flawed. And get this—there was no cure! If the hero failed to learn the lessons offered up by his flaws—well then—the story was a tragedy. Success didn’t come from genius and rarely from talent. Only if the hero recognized the truth and wisdom in his weakness would the story end well. The plays of William Shakespeare were pretty much the same deal. If the heroes hit the Aha! moment before it was too late, the play was a comedy. If not, a tragedy. There were not that many comedies.

The lesson is always this: Weakness was not the cause of the tragedy; rather, the hero’s relationship to the weakness became the cause of his undoing. At the heart of the hero’s adventure was the idea that potentially tragic flaws or weaknesses must be embraced by the hero and included as elements of his authenticity—as part of who he was. To forget or deny this reality was the catalyst of tragedy.

In what passes for our civilized world, too many people spend too much time and too much money searching for “the cure,” rather than getting on with building a life that matters. Worse still, if you do this, you could be trying to “cure” yourself of a virus for greatness!

Builders don’t deny their flaws, nor do they allow them to paralyze action. They might feel embarrassed or overwhelmed by them at times, but they still don’t marginalize themselves or the problem. They don’t even “overcome” their “disability.” They manage it, include it, cope with it, and don’t let it stop them. In many cases, so called “disabilities” become embraced as the building blocks of greatness, of success that lasts.

In Chuck’s case, he conceived of a way to include his dyslexia in his planning for life in many ways. First, he realized he could exchange his strengths with those of other people. He created a team—a study group of students who could be subject matter experts in each area of endeavor. The collected competencies rendered individual weaknesses less relevant. In fact, his team could get the work done even faster and more effectively than other teams with members who each believed they were experts at everything.

This once-floundering college freshman was Charles Schwab, now internationally known for reinventing financial services. The San Francisco-based firm that he founded in 1971, and which still bears his name, has more than a trillion dollars in customer assets.

What started out as an embarrassment were the seeds of Chuck’s genius. Few captains of industry have the courage to admit it, but it’s clear that many who have struggled with so-called learning disabilities have been among the most gifted CEOs, artists, and educators.

Among well-known dyslexic citizens, there are literally dozens of examples: George Washington, Agatha Christie, Albert Einstein, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, William Hewlett, Paul Orfalea (founder of Kinko’s), F.W. Woolworth, Alexander Graham Bell, Richard Branson, Cisco’s John Chambers, CNN’s Ted Turner, and dozens more who were quick to recognize what other leaders often take too long to learn: Their weakness can be an asset. For Chuck Schwab, his struggle forced him to get help and to rely on others to help him achieve his goals from the beginning. He never assumed—as many entrepreneurs do—that he was, or should be, good at everything.

“In some respects, the positive side of this learning issue thing was probably my early recognition that I wasn’t strong in every component of reading, writing, and all those kinds of things,” said Schwab.

“I could manage—with effort—the little chunks of text you see in a memo or a newspaper,” Schwab said. “But a long book or a speech was almost impenetrable.” Using a script for public speaking was often completely impractical for him. “The usual way you see a speech typed is all in uppercase, but for me that made every paragraph look like illegible gray blocks of type.”

To cope, he would have each phrase typed in a different size and style—some large, some small—some bold, some underlined—“so when I looked down at the page, the words wouldn’t all run together.” By the end, what would look “like a ransom note to most people was much clearer for me,” Schwab said.

Anyone who has seen Schwab speak in public or watched his nationally televised commercials might never notice his discomfort. “I won’t do anything that I don’t strongly believe in personally,” Schwab insisted. His solution is to work hard at communication and speak from his heart rather than a script.

In school, he coped by getting focused on what he deeply cared about, then finding tutors and organizing study groups to get the work done. As an entrepreneur, he actively sought people who were not merely competent, but especially gifted to fill those organizational spots that Schwab himself could not.

“I knew from my own difficulties I needed to have other people who could complement me in different parts of the business that I was developing,” he said. “I have been able, I think, to recognize my strengths and my deficits and build up around me a team of great people in the areas of deficit,” he said. “I think that probably has been the single most important benefit that I received from having this learning issue early on in my life.”

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers sounds like a polished evangelical minister at the podium. But you won’t find him reading a script. Those speeches are memorized. “I struggled in school and it was painful to read,” he admitted. “My teachers thought I wasn’t very smart and I wasn’t sure either. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t keep up.”

His parents found the right tutors and, he sighed, “I had to work really hard.” He dreaded the extra schoolwork, but his Spartan-like ethic helped him graduate second in his high school class, despite the fact that he, too, was dyslexic before there was a name for it.

Don’t bother to send Chambers a long memo or ask him to write one. “It’s a really laborious task,” he said. This effervescent CEO avoids writing, choosing instead to see people and speak to them personally whenever possible. For Chambers, it’s better to rely on humility than luck. His public appearances, web casts, and broadcasts reflect serious practice that consistently produces a compelling, clear message.

Chambers pain is Cisco’s gain. He reaches out to his people and recruits customers around the world with energy and confidence that comes from years of doing it the hard way: “We prepare like we mean it and we never take the efforts of our employees or the challenges of our customers for granted—ever.” Chambers can picture multiple dimensions of a problem even though it’s tough to put pen to paper. “It’s kind of second nature. I can visualize issues and make them clearer and simpler.”

This may be genius, but it’s also a matter of plain hard work and practice. Like the blind man whose hearing seems superhuman, leaders like Chambers have spent a lifetime honing the ability to turn complex ideas into simple, bold concepts as a way of coping with dyslexia. As told by Chuck Schwab: “Frankly, I don’t have the luxury of leaving things complicated—I have to work every day at deciphering things for myself to make them clear. As it turns out, smart people like our customers hate overly complicated stuff, too!” For example, as he struggled to dissolve complexity in the mutual fund business, Schwab had an epiphany. “You don’t have to have a problem with reading to have a problem reading a pile of mutual fund statements from ten different companies.” Schwab’s solution was to invent simple, one-stop shopping for mutual funds—a move that launched a new industry. “There has always been a huge opportunity in demystifying things for clients,” Schwab insisted.

For decades, people like Chambers and Schwab kept their challenges a secret from the public. “I wasn’t sure people would find my problem reassuring!” fellow dyslexic Richard Branson admitted. But ultimately, telling their story provided its own rewards. “I was amazed to see the impact I could have on the lives of people with learning differences,” Schwab said. Both Schwab and Chambers have sponsored and led research efforts to help teachers and parents understand the problem.

The biggest dividend may be what the rest of us can learn from their struggle.

It’s a difficult and nonintuitive step to think of the adversity that you are facing as an opportunity to actually find a way to make the challenge or the flaw itself somehow useful. There is a much bigger prize awaiting you. Like the hero or heroine, you may find that your perceived disadvantage may hold the seeds of your genius.

By embracing their pain, Builders gain something more powerful than just the ability to learn from mistakes or harness the value of persistence. It’s even more than just empathy. Webster’s dictionary defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”^[1]

That doesn’t quite capture it. The special knowledge and skill you can gain from painful personal experience seems to transcend even empathy. Builders who were once thought to have lost the genetic lottery and suffered learning disabilities have instead found that they won a prize: discovery of a special talent and a novel way to break out of the pack. This genius comes camouflaged one of two ways: As something that happens to you that in of itself cannot be changed—like a learning difference, for example, or something you made happen that went wrong that is irreversible except that it is still your responsibility to deal with it. Builders would not wish these potentially crippling challenges on anyone. If they happen to you, dig for the treasure where you fall, as philosopher Joseph Campbell writes. For most people, a stunning failure more often paralyzes than empowers. But for Builders, it’s by far the most common form of pain that pays big dividends toward their lasting success.

Young Govindappa Venkataswamy thought he had found his purpose in life when three cousins died in the last three months of their pregnancies. His broken heart drove him to devour his medical school training, bent on becoming an OB-GYN. His intent was to rescue people like his cousins, but he never got the chance. Fresh out of medical school, rheumatoid arthritis crippled him, making it impossible for him to deliver babies. He was hospitalized for years and suffered pain that still grips him to this day.

“You don’t spend your life helping people just out of sympathy. You know that the sufferer is part of you,” said Dr. V., as he is known today. Not only does he have great empathy for the pain that his patients endure, but he did not let his permanent disability limit his ambitions. He started over, this time studying ophthalmology to confront a different need. In India, there are nine million blind people—most of whom suffer from cataracts, which are curable with surgery.^[2] Dr. V. opened an 11-bed eye hospital in his brother’s home in Madurai to perform free or low-cost cataract surgery. He even designed instruments suited to his crippled hands, and these tools enabled him to perform 5,000 surgeries in his first year.

Today, his clinics perform over 200,000 surgeries annually and are among the largest single providers of eye surgery in the world, having given sight to more than one million people in India. Dr. V made the process of conducting operations so efficient, it could be done as fast and almost as cheaply as making a burger.

He believes that it may be possible to “franchise” his operations throughout the world, recruiting people and resources to his dream as if it were McDonald’s. They sell billions of burgers through thousands of stores, he tells everyone he meets. “We can sell millions of people new eyesight, saving them from starvation.” The clinics run a profit even though 70% of the patients pay nothing, or close to nothing, and the clinics do not depend on donations or government grants. With his hands hopelessly crippled, you would think he had earned the right to give up. Instead, Dr. V refused to let that interrupt his commitment to save lives. He could not change his condition, but he could change the way he thought about his goal and, as a result, he is changing the lives of millions.

Dr. V’s selfless courage in India cannot help but remind us of Mahatma Gandhi. Consider for a moment the journey of this talismanic icon for peace and freedom. It turns out that had Gandhi not encountered pain in his early years out of college, he might not have transformed his view of the world enough to change history. Gandhi might have settled into a nice, quiet law practice were it not that his overwhelming fear of public speaking forced him to make other plans. Enduringly successful people have found that the answer to their life’s purpose is buried not in passionate love or pain alone, but in the struggle over both together, working in strange harmony.

Gandhi studied law in London, and he loved the idea that the law could settle divisive issues, though on his return to India, he rarely saw it used that way. His passion was real, but in the courtroom, he found himself unable to speak. He left Bombay feeling defeated.

When he was offered a job in South Africa as counselor for a Muslim business, he was delighted. As it turned out, the journey to Pretoria changed his life. He was ejected from a train compartment even though he held a first-class ticket, was beaten for refusing to give up a seat on a stagecoach, and was kicked from a path by a policeman. Indians living in South Africa could not vote, own homes, go out at night without a permit, or walk along a public path. Gandhi’s understanding of their plight was intense and personal. His growing anger summoned a new voice he had never experienced before. The cause had charisma. He may have been speechless in the courtroom, but the pain of his people helped him discover his life’s purpose.

He decided to do things on his day job differently, too. While Gandhi began gathering petitions to emphasize the plight of Indians in South Africa, he at the same time worked on the legal case that brought him there in an entirely new way. Instead of the normal legal fistfight, Gandhi pushed for arbitration. The parties agreed and, in fact, the arbitrator decided the case in favor of Gandhi’s employer. But he didn’t stop there. Even though he had won his case, he pressed his client to accept small incremental payments that saved face, allowed for dignity, and prevented bankruptcy for the case’s loser.

This two-way respect of adversaries—his insistence on “win-win” creative solutions to all sides of a conflict—tapped a passion deep inside him that was the reason he had been drawn to practice law in the first place. It became his fundamental concept—satyagraha, or “holding to the truth.”

From then on, in hundreds of instances, it was Gandhi’s practice to try to bring about a compromise outside of court rather than to drive for a crushing victory. He had found a way back to his passion for the law, and it came from the pain he suffered over the discrimination of all oppressed people. The two together were a powerful alchemy that sustained him through prison, strikes, and social conflicts—from the fair treatment of “untouchables”—to the freedom of India itself.

Although it may seem strange that we’d rely on pain so much as a part of the big picture, Builders have found it to be unavoidable on their road to lasting success. As revealed in the previous chapter, they feel they might as well get some good out of it. But pain may give you more clarity than your passion. The question is, why do we care about what we care about? We don’t care just because we enjoy doing something. There are many things that we enjoy or even lust after, but few provide lasting success.

There are many things we dislike, too, so just finding what eats you is not the answer either. What adds to the mystery is that not all successful people have the same definition of what is painful, just as they don’t really have the same definition of success or happiness. For most things in life, we can’t assume that what hurts each of us is universal, so here is some insight to the upside of pain. What we consider to be painful offers a window to our soul—to see uniquely who we are and what we must do.

Do you love to play music and at the same time find it disturbingly painful to hear a flat note on that CD, or hate to live without music for a whole day? Let’s forget for a moment that friends and relatives think it’s foolish or even dangerous for you to choose music as your next profession. Do you love to write poetry and find it torturous to read a bad sentence? When I say painful, I don’t mean annoying—I mean, does it torment you, keep you awake at night, or get you up in the morning?

When novelist Tom Robbins was asked by a journalist what was the most important thing in the world for him, he simply said, “A good sentence.”

These two examples mean something to anyone who cares about music or writing, but may seem trivial to anyone who does not. That’s part of the test.

At its highest and best level, perhaps that horrible thing in your life—that failure or disability or source of outrage—is the genius. Gandhi could not have found his voice without pain; CEOs Schwab, Chambers, and Branson could not have built their companies without their dyslexia. By their nature, Builders are obsessed with creating or building something—and they’re on a never-ending quest for something of value they can use. When it comes to their flaws, nothing goes to waste.

One of the things that Builders do discard quickly is blame. When you talk with them, what is clearly missing is the natural human tendency to dwell on blaming other people and things for our problems. Builders may explode, grieve, and (privately) blame everything and everyone, but most appear to drop it quickly. Instead, they look at what they can change and deal with that directly without prolonged whining. Wallowing in blame of yourself or others doesn’t actually deal with the problem or allow progress toward the goal.

Builders let go of what doesn’t work when it isn’t working. They don’t make the future pay the debts of the past. They don’t make the next job, or next company, or next lover, pay for their last bad experience. You don’t win by punishing the next boss for what you didn’t get from the last one. You can’t let the past invent your future.

Billionaire Jon Huntsman, author of Winners Never Cheat, learned this lesson on his first job. “My employer in the first business in which I worked was always in a rage over competitors,” he said. “We were in the egg-processing business. He continually schemed on how to make the competition fail. He wasted so much effort on this mission that his company suffered. He insisted his staff fabricate stories about the competition with the news media. He concocted every negative thought and trick possible to make his competitors fail.” Huntsman could feel how much that drained his energy and everyone else’s around him. It wasn’t worth it. His boss “died a pathetic, virtually bankrupt individual,”^[3] he says. Huntsman vowed that he would never waste his life that way.

Builders eventually make the choice to let it go not because they’re in denial, but because they must keep focused on what they’re building. It’s not that everything was forgiven, or that the pain was completely healed, or that all the injustices that may have happened to them have been ignored. They do not try to rewrite history or to wipe the slate clean. They don’t pretend it didn’t happen. They simply decide to dismiss the case and move on. Obsessing on grudges keeps them alive; letting them go forces them to die as you get back to business.

Some call this “completion” or “forgiveness,” but that implies that there is absolution, resolution, or restitution—or at least an adequate apology. Unfortunately, when bad things happen, much of what happens is rarely completely resolved or healed. But, nevertheless, Builders find a way to move on anyway so they can create the future. The root of the word “forgive” is actually to send away—to dismiss.

“‘Dismiss’ is a very strong word,” said Reverend Deborah Johnson. “When something is dismissed, it’s over. When it’s dismissed, you don’t keep going back to it.” That’s what successful people do. They don’t necessarily call it forgiveness, but they do abandon blame as a way of life.

“Now, there’s a funny thing about this notion of dismissing the case. When you’re in a court of law and, at some point, the judge says ‘case dismissed,’ that doesn’t mean case erased. There will still be a record of the case in the books. But what isn’t going to happen is we’re not going to keep going through the particulars of this case. Dismissed doesn’t mean that all the parties in it experience resolution. It doesn’t even mean that a crime didn’t take place.” When the judge dismisses the case, it’s because there will be no more prosecution at this point. “It’s over,” she insisted.

Do we want to build for success or hang on to conflict? Which of these choices do extraordinarily successful people invest in for the long term? Do they spend their days committed to creating conflicts built to last or success built to last? When you become willing to let it go, the cycle is broken and you have freedom. Case dismissed.

“What this requires most is that we let go of the story of what happened and our attachment to it. When you let it go, you’re not dragging your past with you into your future. When you let it go, you’re seeing that you’re bigger than what’s happened to you,” the Reverend contended.

During the Holocaust in World War II, 15-year-old Elie Wiesel had no real hope of escape. He was packed like cold meat in railcars with family, friends, and neighbors, and delivered to Auschwitz. Within moments of his arrival at this infamous concentration camp, he was put in line with his father to march toward open pits where he witnessed the Nazis throw babies and shove children and adults at gunpoint to burn alive. Two steps from the precipice, he was momentarily spared. He would miraculously endure three years of horror that he describes in his brilliant and terrifying book, Night. By the time the Allies arrived, Wiesel’s mother, father, and a younger sister were among the millions of Jews who had been brutally tortured and murdered.

He had every reason to be consumed by hatred. The case against the Nazis will never be dismissed. Still, Wiesel dedicated his life to peace and recovery, winning the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. “Hate will destroy you,” he said. The lifelong mission he set in motion for himself and his Foundation is “to combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice through dialogs and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding, and equality.”

What makes Wiesel’s lesson so especially difficult is that under harsh circumstances, it takes tremendous courage and wisdom not to cast oneself as a victim and leave it at that. And, as a victim, your chances of ever making a lasting positive impact on the world are slim.

Builders claim that it’s your choice to decide whether to be the victim or a beneficiary of what there is to harvest from the most difficult circumstances.

Joe Nichols, Jr., will tell you he had to make exactly that kind of choice. “At 20, my life was a train wreck. I had no future,” Nichols said. The soft-spoken, 41-year-old entrepreneur from Houston insisted, “No one would ever hire me because it was unlikely I’d ever be able to do much of anything.” Eventually, with his family’s encouragement, he finished college, and together they started a small mail stop.

Business was brutal through those first few years. During the long, challenging work days of these early years, Joe found himself a little envious of all the exotic places that his parcels would travel to and arrive from, dreaming that some day he might have the opportunity to visit far-flung romantic destinations. “But in my situation, I was never likely to leave the state of Texas, let alone travel the globe.”

Eventually, he expanded the store, opened a second one, then a third, and 16 years later, the family business now has a profitable chain of franchises across Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. As Hurricane Katrina descended on the New Orleans location last year, his family scooped up all their employees and brought them to Houston. (The team was kept safe and sound—and they were out of business for only four hours!)

Nichols and his family were showered with accolades, “but I don’t know that our actions warrant a pat on the back. There was simply no other choice in those circumstances,” he insisted. “Opening our doors was the natural thing to do and we know that others would do it for us if the tables were turned.”

Today, the Nichols extended family is the millionaire next door, and Joe was, for many years, an active leader in the Texas Jaycees. He is passionately committed to helping others build their lives despite all odds, and loves to recruit celebrities for events to raise funds for people in need, although his wife teases him about how it sounds like bragging when he drops names at social events.

“So how did you do it?” Mark Thompson asked him during dinner.

“Are you asking about fundraising or our business?” he laughed. At that moment, they were interrupted by the sommelier as he emptied the last of the Moet & Chandon into their glasses, followed closely by three waiters bearing desserts to simultaneously present to each of us, after setting them aflame. They were on the last day of a five-star cruise along the Mexican Riviera.

“No,” Mark continued. “How did this happen to you, Joe?” He was looking at the wheelchair.

Joe Nichols nodded, and his wife, Bonnie, reached for his glass of champagne, pressing it against his fingers and pushing it to his lips. He used a brace on his right hand to spoon his meal into his mouth, but he needed to ask for help every time he wanted a drink. He had become a quadriplegic in an automobile accident, confined to a wheelchair long before he built a thriving business and even found his wife, Bonnie, with whom he now has two kids.

It was just past sunset on a little country road on February 18, 1984. Nichols swerved to miss oncoming traffic on a slick turn after a rainstorm. His car plummeted into a ditch and rolled. He remembers seeing the fire trucks and ambulance descend on him in the darkness. The friend who was riding with him had gotten out with barely a scratch. But when they pushed the car off its side, Joe Nichols fell through the driver-side window in a limp twisted pile of flesh and limbs. “As a quadriplegic, it seemed like life would stop,” he recalled.

You may have the same burning question that we did. Who was at fault in this terrible accident?

He shook his head. “The reality is that I’m in a wheelchair. The more important question now is not who is to blame, but who is responsible for what. I’m responsible for my life.”

Nichols holds himself accountable to his chosen ThoughtStyle, responsible for creating what might still be possible despite his circumstances and because it matters—not languishing in despair because of his circumstances and despite what matters.

“Now if I told you it was my fault, then I would be the victim of my own error.” He had obviously given this speech before. “And if it was someone else’s fault, then that would give me the space to be a total victim.”^[4] Joe figured out there was no future in either position.

“Sure, at first I went through a long period of pain and the full range of grief—the horrible loss of ‘who you used to be,’” he said. “Sometimes, I’d have spasms that would terrify my wife, sending me out of control, off the bed and onto the floor. A few times I’d be in class at the University of Texas and my bladder would let go. Mom would pile books in my lap and race me home. There I was, 21-years old and my mother is still changing me. There were many humiliating moments, but I guess what you do is keep going one more day—no matter how miserable you might be. Eventually, the pain lessens and you realize you’re still here—you’re still alive—and what you thought was impossible last month, well, you’re doing that now. All of that builds confidence.”

The overwhelming lesson we took away from Joe Nichol’s courageous journey is that assuming the role of the victim just leaves one paralyzed in a state of learned helplessness, waiting for someone or something other than ourselves to make it right. That’s not how Builders think. Nichols has remarkable strength, but in one respect, he’s like every Builder we’ve ever met. He holds himself accountable to what he wants to create rather than wallowing in shame or blame about what’s happened. His words, intentions, and behaviors all relentlessly focus on creating a desired future.

Some things cannot be overcome. Many things have no cure. But they can be managed and put to use just as Joe Nichols does. They can be turned from wounds into wisdom by never wasting a moment of what is left of his life—never taking tragic comfort in a victimized belief that he cannot make a difference. He knows that he can.

When you don’t have the use of your arms and legs, every ounce of effort has to count, so this man spends his energy thinking how he will continue to build a successful life for his family, his employees, and his community. No matter how bad things get or how horrible he feels, people like Joe Nichols show us what is possible—and take from us our hiding places.