When cassette recorders became available in the early 70's, my world changed.
At the age of 28 I discovered the answer to a question that I had lived with all my life until that evening in a Phoenix Holiday Inn. The question, "Why am I unable to read and retain information?" I remember vividly the excitement I felt as I set in my hotel room listening to Earl Nightingale's 1st cassette in the series Lead The Field.
Not only was I able to listen to books and information provided by Mr. Nightingale, but when I turned the player off, I discovered that I had retained 97% of the information and was able to verbally express it to others immediately, without further preperation.
After 28 years of being unable to decypher the information contained in the words written in books, an educational process seemingly simple to others, I discovered by accident and my own curiosity about a new technology, that I had a form of dyslexia, a problem never diagnosed during my formative school years or even through college and the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School and Basic School, where I had been labeled a "slow learner".
What happened then became an obsession. I began to make up for 28 years of being a poor student. Eventually I would have a collection of cassette recorders and players numbering in the 20's and 30's always within reach of me. If a subject I wanted to learn was presented me, I would literally read aloud and record complete books onto cassettes, not knowing what I was even saying at the time, and then play the information back, sucking the very essense of the knowledge written by others into my once closed mind and "super" absorbing the information.
I had truly discovered Freedom from the feeling I had carried with me all my previous life, "God looks down from above and chooses who will be 'smart and successful', and I had been frowned upon".
My own personal Miracle had occurred! It was up to me to exploit the opportunity. At 42, my cassette recorders and I managed to squeek through an MBA program and collect the associated degree. By then of course, the phone didn't ring off the hook, but I had received a piece of paper I had longed for many years.
I've spent thousands of dollars on audio books and educational recordings the last 40 years and I am now a devotee of You Tube and The Teaching Company, where so much information I once missed is readily available to me.
Which brings me to today. There are many people out there who want to learn subjects that I've become well versed in, but they simply don't have the time to learn. So I've started a series of audio and video productions which I hope will be beneficial to others. I hope to sell them at reasonable costs, using the new media, and take little profit per item, multiplied by large quantities of sales.