The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

as Thaler’s other pronounced trait was a sense of ineptitude. When he was ten or eleven years old, and a B student, his father, a detail-oriented insurance executive, had grown so frustrated with his sloppy schoolwork that he handed his son The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and told him to copy a few pages exactly as Mark Twain had written them. Thaler tried, seriously. “I did it over and over, kicking and screaming.” Each time, his father found errors—missing words, missing commas. The quotation marks in an exchange between Tom and Aunt Polly confounded him. Looking back on it, he could see that his problem was more than a lack of effort: He was probably mildly dyslexic. But people just assumed he was either careless or lazy, or both.

Possibly one of the most relatable childhood descriptions I have found. Except I still lack the accolades.