“You’ve got to start with your gut, with something you are really passionate about, for a good reason,” says Schwab. “You won’t get there by sitting in a closet and thinking, ‘Boy I know the world must want this.’”
All his life, Schwab has struggled with dyslexia. From his days of struggling to pass English literature in high school, to reading the annual reports of his own company, Schwab has had to learn how to overcome the disorder in order to not only function, but to thrive. “When I read, I can feel myself converting the written code into sounds before I can process it,” he explains. “Fast readers don't go through all that.”
Schwab trained himself to use both dictation and personal computers in order to overcome the hurdles. Yet, even today, he continues to struggle with the experience. “It's painful to think about it,” he says. “You don't like to go back and review the pain. I don't think 20 years ago I would have talked about this. But someone's got to do it, and I felt sufficiently secure that I could.”
Today, Schwab has not only learned to accept his disorder, but he has used it to his advantage, gaining enormous managerial lessons in the process. “Along the way, I’ve frustrated some of my associates because I could see the end zone of a particular thing quicker than they could, so I was moving ahead to conclusions,” he says. “I go straight from step A to Z, and say: ‘This is the outcome. I can see it.’”
On top of his dyslexia, Schwab, like most other entrepreneurs, had to deal with limited resources in the beginning. “When I started in this business, it was pretty crude to say the least,” he says. “I had little or no resources. I have one favorite example of a guy who came in to complain about something. He was from Chicago and had an accounting background. And I said, well, if you’re so damn smart, come out of accounting and start working here. So he came around and started helping me out. It was very difficult. We were mavericks at best.”
Located in between three major California universities in the midst of high unemployment, Schwab says he was able to have his pick of some of the brightest young minds. And yet, he admits, “I took anybody. They were a full collection of people. They took risks in their careers. Some were misfits at other places. I took a lot of misfits in. There were some strange people. Anybody who was a reasonable person and communicated well, I hired. I was one of the first businesses to hire women.”
All the while, Schwab was being told that his ideas on how to succeed in the brokerage business were unconventional and would never work. “The fact that I was out here and scrambling around as a little entrepreneur with no resources was fortuitous,” he says. “I wasn’t encumbered by those old guys telling me what to do.”
Schwab never gave up on his goals. “Faith, hope and charity,” say Schwab. “Hope is certainly a word that has enormous meaning to me – on a number of levels. It is a great word. It is a powerful word. It is a word that I relied on a lot in my career.”
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I must admit that, though a fanatic football fan, I find that most coaches' books leave me cold. Not so the recent offering from legendary Michigan coach Bo Schembechler: Bo's Lasting Lessons (with John Bacon).
