Although dyslexia very often runs in the family it can also ‘strike’ without any suggestion of a dyslexic background. It is fairly common, about 1 in 10 people have dyslexia. It isn’t a disease and so it cannot be ‘cured’, as a matter of fact, it’s a life-long condition, and this means if you are dyslexic, you need to learn to live with it. This does not mean, however, that you have to give up all your dreams; with the right support, a dyslexic person can excel at any role.

As I have already expressed many times it is not related to low intelligence. Interestingly, many dyslexic people have striking skills in other areas (eg. visual memory), which in many cases have developed because of their dyslexia: they were facing a barrier and the way out was developing a skill (which is of course not a conscious process). 

Dyslexia can manifest in many different ways impacting a wide spectrum of skills to varying degrees in the individuals, such as reading pace, handwriting, spelling, reading comprehension, orientation skills, processing information, planning and organising, etc. This is the reason it is hard to address in school interventions because there is no general way of supporting them. 

Dyslexia often co-occurs with ADHD and autistic people also have a higher chance of being dyslexic, as well.  

It is reassuring though that there are plenty of very famous and influential people who were/are dyslexic, most strikingly the Nobel-prize-winning theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Here is an article you can check out more about famous dyslexic personalities: 12 Famous People Who Struggled With Dyslexia Before Changing The World