Start early and begin raising the bar throughout the day.

I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you’re a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you’ll win – if you don’t, you won’t.

First of all, I try to be a positive role model.

If you are a kid, reading is really important stuff.

I spent twelve years training for a career that was over in a week. Joe Namath spent one week training for a career that lasted twelve years.

It caused more problems as a young kid, because the simple process of perceiving words on a piece of paper was hard for me. Many people think dyslexic people see things backwards. They don’t see things backwards.

Start early and begin raising the bar throughout the day.

If you’re asking your kids to exercise, then you better do it, too. Practice what you preach.

Waving the flag at the 1976 Olympics wasn’t my idea. It was too much apple pie and ice cream. Not that I don’t love my country, but I felt it was my victory up there, I put all the time into it.

Our mission for younger people is to do our best to make exercise cool, hip – the thing to do.

We put so much pressure on kids to excel in school at such a young age.

If I wasn’t dyslexic, I probably wouldn’t have won the Games. If I had been a better reader, then that would have come easily, sports would have come easily… and I never would have realized that the way you get ahead in life is hard work.

If you’re going to dedicate every second to winning the decathlon, what are you doing wasting your time in bed?

I thought everybody else was doing much better than I was.

When the time comes for your brain to process the information, the second word comes up faster than the first one. So when it’s in your head, all of a sudden, it comes out backwards and you think of the word backwards.

Nobody has milked one performance better than me – and I’m damned proud of it.

The biggest problem with dyslexic kids is not the perceptual problem, it is their perception of themselves. That was my biggest problem.

I didn’t only have a perceptual problem, I was also so nervous and so upset. The process just didn’t work. I lost enthusiasm for school and I flunked second grade. The teachers said I was lazy.

I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s. Back then they didn’t even know what dyslexia was.

I always felt that my greatest asset was not my physical ability, it was my mental ability.

I still have nightmares about taking tests.

The truth is everybody does it from time to time. People dial telephone numbers and they get a wrong number only to find that they’ve read the last two digits backwards. Everybody does it, but dyslexics have this tendency to a higher degree.

If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit in the wire that goes between the eye and the brain. Reading is not a fluid process.