What makes me different?

I’ve always walked a slightly different path. Turns out, a lot of that comes down to dyslexia.

As a kid, I wasn’t diagnosed—just labelled. A bit dim, a bit slow. Couldn’t read aloud in class. Struggled with long words. A bit of a rebel. It wasn’t until deep into my military career that someone finally put a name to it. By then, I’d already built my own workarounds. I never asked for special treatment, I never asked for extra time in exams or special coloured paper. My thinking was simple: an incoming missile doesn’t care how your brain processes language, it wont go around and give you time to process, so why should anyone else?

But something shifted when I moved into the technical side of military life. I started to see dyslexia not as a hurdle, but as an edge. A different way of thinking. A visual way. I don’t recall solutions from a manual—I see them. Problems unfold in my mind like a film reel. And when I’m solving something, or designing something, I often pull ideas from completely different worlds: aeronautics, missile tech, even nature. Nature’s the original engineer, quietly solving problems we haven’t even noticed yet.

The design I’m working on now is a mash-up of all those influences. It’s weird. It’s wonderful. And it’s mine. I’ve stitched together concepts that don’t normally sit in the same room, and I’m solving the puzzle piece by piece. That’s my happy place.

That’s where dyslexia becomes my weapon of choice. That’s why nobody before me has thought of this. That’s where my weirdly wired brain becomes my biggest asset.

I know there’ll be nay-sayers. There’s a lot in my design that’s never been done before. There's a lot that’ll need refinement. I’ll hold my hand up—I’m not a naval architect. I’ve got a lot to learn in the next few months. But I believe wholeheartedly that there’s something here worth exploring.

And that’s exactly what I intend to do.