Tim Ferris
Tim Ferris is a mental health advocate and content creator, known for his honest, relatable approach to living with dyslexia. After being diagnosed later in life, Tim turned what h...
Select an answer to get started
Who are you?
Hello. My name is Tim, Tim Ferris and I'm no one particularly special, not a celebrity or anything like that, but what I do like to do is I love to help people and I love to make people laugh.
What is your background?
My background. Well, you may be able to tell from an accent that I've tried for many years to try to camouflage but I am from Birmingham. Not that that's a bad thing, but it's not the sexiest of accent. But my background was I went to a comprehensive school and gave up at the age of 14 and left and didn't know what to do because I just didn't get school, and school didn't get me. So I decided to give up, which is not the advice I would necessarily give to everyone, but at the time, it was the right thing to do for me, and I just got stuck in and I got a job in a butcher's. I mean, if you know me, you know, that is something that would horrify the very core of everything that I believe in. But what it did do is it gave me a little bit of experience because I had no qualifications. I didn't really have a choice.
What was school like for you growing up with undiagnosed dyslexia?
School for me was hell on Earth being honest. I would come up with every excuse from near death to anything to not go to school. And the times that I did go, I'd probably play truancy. In fact, I think my mother was there more than I was. And, they put me in - it was a comprehensive school. Dyslexia wasn't something I'd even heard of, let alone, I don't think the school had either. But the way they set it up was the word secondary. So if you were in S or E, then you were a really brainy kid. And you can probably guess which one I was in. I was in Y, which was the very last. So it was a real class system that was really unfair. And it was based on whether you were clever or at the time, as I thought, stupid. So it was a curriculum that was set in stone, and if you didn't follow that, then you didn't pass anything. In fact, my English GCSE came back ungraded and I thought at the time that it was probably so good they hadn't as yet thought what grade to give me, but it was actually the fact that it was so bad that they couldn't give me a grade at all. So no, I hated school.