4. Tom Cruise Tom Cruise was born fighting. He grew up poor, and his family moved around a lot while his father looked for work. Tom never spent a lot of time any one school because the family moved around a lot. Tom, like his mother, suffered from dyslexia and was put into the remedial classes at school. Tom is right handed when writing, but does most things left handed. While Tom was not an academic success, he focused on athletics and competed in many sports. A knee injury derailed his hopes of a promising athletic career. Tom Cruise then spent a year in a Franciscan monastery, but the priesthood was not for him. While in high school, he appeared in a number of plays, and with his mother’s encouragement and support, pursued a career in acting. Tom focused all his energy on developing his acting career, once again revealing his drive and dogged determination. He never let his learning disability stand in the way of his success.

6. Pablo Picasso Pablo was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain. He was a famous, controversial, and trend-setting art icon. Pablo attended local parochial schools and had a very difficult time. He is described as having difficulty reading the orientation of the letters and labeled a dyslexic, and despite the initial difficulties was able to catch up with the curriculum. However, dyslexia made school difficult and he never really benefited from his education. Dyslexia would trouble Picasso for the rest of his life. Pablo’s father was an art teacher in Malaga, and encouraged Pablo to attend. Pablo enrolled in the school in 1892. Despite the difficulties that his learning disabilities posed, it became clear that Pablo had an incredible talent. From an early age Pablo Picasso had developed the sense of how people wanted to be seen and how others saw them. Over the course of his career he developed a unique sense of beauty and style that seemed to call to people. Pablo painted things as he saw them — out of order, backwards or upside down. His paintings demonstrated the power of imagination, raw emotion, and creativity on the human psyche. As others before him, Pablo Picasso took art to a new level. A prolific painter, some of his famous works includes The Young Ladies of Avigon, Old Man with Guitar, and Guernica.

8. Thomas Edison Born in 1847, Thomas Edison was a brilliant scientist and inventor. He was thrown out of school when he was 12 because he was thought to be dumb. He was noted to be terrible at mathematics, unable to focus, and had difficulty with words and speech. It was very clear, however, that Thomas Edison was an extremely intelligent student despite his poor performance in school. In the late 1860s and early 1870s electrical science was still in its infancy and Thomas Edison was keeping abreast of the latest developments. He was an avid reader of the latest research of the day and frequently contributed articles about new ideas in telegraph design to technical journals. Over the course of his career Edison patented 1,093 inventions. Edison believed in hard work, sometimes working twenty hours a day. He has been quoted as saying, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Hard work and perseverance helped Thomas Edison focus his keen insight and creative abilities on the development of ingenious tools that have laid the foundation for our modern society.

10. Robert Munsch "I almost flunked first grade and also the second, third, forth, and fifth; but my younger brother was in the grade behind me and he was a brain and nobody wanted to have me be in the same grade as him, so they kept passing me. I never learned how to spell, graduated from eighth grade counting on my fingers to do simple addition, and in general was not a resounding academic success. I did, however, all through elementary school, write poetry. Funny poems, silly poems, all sorts of poems. Nobody thought that was very important, including me. When I went to high school, I didn't get along with anybody, read lots of books and decided to be a Catholic Priest."

12. George Patton When he was twelve years old, he could not read yet and he remained deficient in reading all his life. However, he could memorize entire lectures, which was how he got through school.

14. Agatha Christie Had a learning disability called dysgraphia, which prevented an understood or legible written work. As a result, all material had to be dictated to a typist/transcriptionist

15. Hans Christian Andersen Ernest HemingwayEleanor Roosevelt BeethovenDustin HoffmanBabe Ruth Alexander Graham Bell "Magic" JohnsonNolan Ryan Wright BrothersJohn F. KennedyAnwar Sadat Lewis CarrollJohn LennonSocrates Prince CharlesAbraham LincolnSylvester Stallone CherMozartJackie Stewart Winston ChurchillNapoleonJules Verne Tom CruiseJack NicholsonRobin Williams Leonardo da VinciPicassoStevie Wonder Walt DisneyEdgar Allan PoeHenry Ford GalileoMalcolm Forbes General George Patton