dChan
Anonymous ID: b35f51 May 12, 2020, 12:37 p.m. No.9143010   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3044

From this Yale article on Gavin's dyslexia and politics:

 

In 2013, Newsom published Citizenville, a book about ordinary citizens using technological tools to reshape the government into a modern, digital-based democracy, which reflects his ideas about the necessity of a modernized, innovative government structure…

 

Of all the learning difficulties he endured, Newsom says that reading aloud was “the most humiliating.” .. That’s when I basically gave up on any reading. I did book reports by literally reading the back of the book and just copying the text, thinking the teacher would never find out.”High school was even worse. “The grades were bad, my self-esteem started to collapse, and I remember faking being sick all the time to avoid math class, which I just couldn’t handle.” …

And I’ll be honest: had it not been for my mother and some remedial training, I never would have gotten into college.” Thanks to those and his outstanding abilities in baseball, Newsom began to receive scholarship offers from a number of colleges and attended Santa Clara University in California on a partial baseball scholarship.

 

“Baseball gave me some self-esteem and confidence, and then I found my bliss and my passion in politics,” he says. Newsom declared a major in political science and turned his life around. “All of a sudden I got good grades, because I loved the subject matter. What I found was that there was a contemporary nature to politics, not political theory necessarily, but what was going on in real life, and as difficult as it was to learn about it, I actually cared enough about it to work a little harder. So I started looking at newspapers like textbooks, and to this day, I’ll still underline newspapers because, otherwise, I can read five pages and not remember one thing I read.” Though he has never read a novel, Newsom devours nonfiction and has a library of countless “Cliff’s Note versions” of articles and books he has read on politics and political science. “Because of overcompensation and the things you learn because you’re struggling, I have remarkable retention. In a political frame, there’s no greater gift, because you can really think on your feet.”

 

With the support of a family friend and other investors, he formed a company called PlumpJack Associates in 1991. Starting out as a wine shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, the business eventually grew to include wineries, restaurants, inns, and retail clothing shops all over California.

Newsom first stepped into the political arena in 1995 as a volunteer for Willie Brown’s mayoral campaign. He later served on a number of boards and commissions, including the San Francisco Board of Supervisors…

 

https://dyslexia.yale.edu/story/gavin-newsom/