Success Is a Special Need

How a Learning Disability Enabled Me to Build a Terrific Business and a Great Life

By: Jeffrey McCain

Narrated by: Dave Clark

Success is a Special Need is the powerful memoir of Jeffrey L. McCain, who shares his life story of overcoming dyslexia to build a successful business. With personal anecdotes and reflections, McCain recounts how he navigated his educational struggles, developed survival skills, and eventually achieved extraordinary success in the traffic signal industry. This inspiring tale is one of resilience, innovation, and determination in the face of adversity.

“Call it limbo, my days in school. I was a stranger in a strange land. You see, everybody could do something I could not. They could read. More precisely, they could learn to read. They were learning to read. I was not. On good days, I was stumbling. On bad days, I was falling down. I had no idea why. A kid may be born minus an arm or blind or deaf, and that’s rough. But their disability is no mystery, not to themselves and not to others. It is clear, visible, apparent. Me? I looked perfectly normal: ten fingers, ten toes, great hearing, excellent eyesight, strong arms, swift legs, good at sports, pretty popular, and no trouble speaking. To all appearances, I was 100 percent. And yet, invisibly, I was diminished in ways I could not understand.”

Success Is a Special Need is about a kid born to a loving family in LA County, California, who soon discovered he had come into a world where everyone else around him learned to read and write while he just struggled. He pictured himself as 007, a super-secret agent whose job was to evade the countless traps—read aloud, write a sentence on the blackboard—that daily threatened exposure and humiliation.

©2025 Jeffrey McCain (P)2025 Jeffrey McCain