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Billionaire Charles Dunstone: ‘We should celebrate dyslexia – you’re different but you’re not’ #dyslexia

Sir Charles Dunstone wants you to know that your child can still accomplish amazing things even if he or she isn’t currently excelling in school. The former C student has a billion dollars in assets to help prove his theory.

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Billionaire Sir Charles Dunstion is the chairman of TalkTalk and founder of Carphone Warehouse. He has enjoyed great success in the telecommunications business and is currently branching out into the restaurant business. Dunstion will soon be opening a chain of pizza restaurants and also a chain of burger restaurants. Incidentally, he also has dyslexia.

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One man has over a billion reasons to celebrate dyslexia.

Billionaire credits Dyslexia for his success.

Dunstion maintains that you shouldn’t make a child feel like dyslexia is a legitimate reason for artificially lowered expectations. After all, having overcome it, he credits his dyslexia with his resilience in business. Dunstion also considers dyslexia as a key to imaginative thinking and high productivity because of the creativity it sparks.

Opening a chain of retail shops would be the brave thing these days,” he counters, “because so much is about online.” The great thing about food, “is that you have to be here to eat it. The world has changed. People now spend more money on experiences: going to see something at the cinema or theatre, or to do something — and then they want to get reasonably priced, quality food together.

Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert

Key takeaways

  1. Sir Charles Dunstone, the 52-year-old chairman of TalkTalk and founder of Carphone Warehouse, flunked out of school because of undiagnosed dyslexia at school age.
  2. What someone with dyslexia eats directly affects how their brain reacts.
  3. From dyslexia to a billionaire, Sir Charles Dunstone continues to look to the future as a celebration.
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· Learning Success expert Writes about the learning brain for parents who want plain answers. Every article is grounded in current neuroscience and classroom practice.