From bullied to brilliant: How Temple Grandin embraces autism

Well, when I first started out my work in the cattle industry, designing equipment

I designed the front end of every Cargill beef plant in North America. I think that's doing pretty good for somebody they thought was stupid

Autism can range from just being kind of geeky and not that social

to somebody that has much more severe problems like epilepsy, may not speak

And it's all called the same name. That to me is overgeneralizing

A lot of these super good employees would probably be diagnosed today as autistic

I'm seeing a lot of smart kids being labeled autism. Kids that we need in the workplace

And parents and teachers are getting too hung up on the label. They don't think the kid can learn how to do anything

I've seen bad stuff just recently where they won't let special ed kids take shop class

because of liability. I had people that designed and built equipment for me

that if they were kids, they'd be special ed kids and they owned the shops

and they had 20 patents to go along with them. Hi, I'm Temple Brandon

I am Distinguished Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. My most recent book is Visual Thinking

The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

I had very severe speech delay and very severe symptoms as a young child

So I was very lucky to get into really early intervention. But there's a lot of people that they discover that they're autistic when their kids get diagnosed

And it will explain why they're so socially awkward. When I was in high school, I was bullied and bullied and bullied

That was the worst part of my life. The only places I was not bullied was friends who shared interests So the only places I was not bullied was riding horses model rocket club and electronic circuit building

And I often get asked, what would I tell my younger self? Well, I'd tell my younger self in high school that things are going to get better

when high school is over with. What's given my life meaning is having an interesting career

When I first started in the 70s, in the Arizona cattle industry, being a woman was a much bigger barrier than autism

Autism was just about a non-issue. And I got along really well with the work crews out in the field

Most of the problems I had was middle management. It was not the big bosses that owned the places

One of my very good mentors was Jim Oore, a contractor. He had seen some of my drawings. He seeked me out

He had a little tiny construction company, maybe two employees for steel and concrete work

And the jobs that are shown in the HBO movie, Jim and I built those jobs together

We worked together for 10 years. When I first started working with cattle, I looked at what cattle were looking at when they moved through chutes to get vaccinated

And at that time, I thought everybody was a visual thinker. I think in pictures. It's what's called an object visualizer

Everything I think about is a picture. And it was difficult for me to understand why other people didn't notice

that the cattle would refuse to walk over a shadow. They'd balk if they saw a reflection off the bumper of a vehicle

That's just so obvious to me. I thought everybody thought that way until I was in my late 30s

And it was a shock to find out that some other people thought in words

And not everybody's thinking works the same way. Research shows there's actually three kinds of thinking

There object visualizers like me where everything you think about is a picture like a photograph And then you have the visual pattern thinkers These are your mathematicians

They think in patterns. And then you've got your word thinkers that think in words

And then you've got mixtures of the different kinds of thinking. So let's discuss what the different kind of thinkers might be good at doing

My kind of mind, the object visualizer, will be good at mechanical devices

because you can see how they work. art photography and animals and the thing that we cannot do is abstract math i can do arithmetic

i understand things like pi times the radius squared for sizing hydraulic cylinders and i

then i see the hydraulic cylinders when i say that now your visual spatial thinker who thinks in

patterns they're going to be your it people your computer programmer chemists physicists they

calculate how to do things and then of course you have your verbal thinkers that think in words

where they're much more linear in their thinking. Verbal thinkers are going to gravitate towards things like sales

where you have to be very good at talking. They'll gravitate towards writing, legal, teaching

Autism, you tend to get an extreme thinker. You might get an extreme mathematician

You'll be a top physicist. Einstein didn't talk until age three. He probably would be in an autism program today

Or you can get these extreme word thinkers. that are very, very detailed oriented

very good at doing quality assurance, for example. We need all the different kinds of minds

And I've talked to a lot of business leaders. And the first thing I tell business leaders is

you've got to understand that people think differently and that they can work together in very complementary ways

If you want to successfully hire neurodivergent people with autism, dyslexia, or ADHD

are going to get the jobs done for you. We need to get rid of the conventional interview process

They need to have opportunities to come in and show off the work and show the work to somebody who would appreciate it rather than just interviewing based on how well they talk Because you can have a super good computer person that not very talkative but that person may be your best programmer

So many people like me have had to go in back doors into jobs. A back door is anything that doesn't involve a standard interview or applying online

Everything I did was back door. One of my first jobs was writing for our state farm magazine

and I met the editor at a cattle event and I got his card

I saw that door and then I produced an article. We need to make sure we leave those back doors open

because there may be some of the most visionary people. I worked with skilled trades people

that were definitely undiagnosed autism. They're retiring now because they're my age

And what concerns me is who's going to replace them because that kid that should be fixing elevators

or inventing mechanical devices is playing video games in the basement instead of working for your company

There's some beneficial things you can learn from video games, and that's true, but not playing them for 10 hours a day

When I was a young child, I'd spend hours tinkering with little parachutes

and tinkering with little kites, getting them to work, trying lots of designs

I like to build things. Kids are not doing that. Kids today are not getting opportunities to learn from mistakes

and they're being so overprotected, they're not getting exposed to enough different things

I've had educators say, what would I do to change the school system? I'd put all the hands-on classes back in

And that would give a lot of the kids like me more opportunities to find things that they would be good at

I got interested in the cattle industry because I was exposed to it as a teenager

If you are given enough opportunities to try a lot of things

then you'll tend to gravitate towards stuff that you're good at. Get smarter, faster with videos from the world's biggest thinkers

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