Dave Rendall has spoken on every inhabited continent for the last 20 years — Microsoft, AT&T, the US Air Force, the Australian government, Fortune 50 companies. He has a doctorate in organizational leadership, he's a former stand-up comedian, and he wrote The Freak Factor, a book that argues the thing everyone calls your biggest weakness is actually the foundation of your biggest strength. Before all of that, he ran nonprofits that helped people with disabilities find employment. He's also an ultramarathon runner and Ironman triathlete who competes in between keynotes.

This one was personal. My son was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, and I was diagnosed with Level 1 autism — all around the same time. Dave's video on weaknesses being strengths changed how my wife and I parent our kids. We've been in each other's orbit for six years — he MCs the events I speak at — but we'd never sat down and gone deep like this. We got into why "normal" doesn't actually exist, why your best employees probably have the most anxiety, the survivorship bias problem with reframing disabilities as superpowers, why "Eat That Frog" is terrible advice for entrepreneurs, and why most businesses are accidentally destroying their best people by trying to fix them.

If you're a business owner, a parent, or someone who's ever been told something is wrong with you — there's a lot here.

1. Why "normal" is a fake target — and what Todd Rose's The End of Average reveals about the myth of the average person
2. The Paul Orfala paradox: the Kinko's founder says "everyone should have dyslexia" — how to hold that alongside the real struggles of learning differences
3. Why the survivorship bias argument against neurodiversity as a superpower is actually backwards — and what self-fulfilling prophecies have to do with it
4. How anxiety tested off the charts for Dave — and why elevated anxiety is what separates your best employees from your worst
5. The Dunning-Kruger connection: why the most competent people feel the most inadequate, and why that drives performance
6. Why "Eat That Frog" creates a frog-eating job — and how to design a business where you never eat frogs
7. What Faster Than Normal by Peter Shankman teaches about reframing ADHD as a speed advantage, not a deficit
8. Why partnering with people strong where you're weak isn't just nice — it's structurally necessary for neurodiverse entrepreneurs
9. The real reason business owners burn out — and why it has nothing to do with how much work they're doing
10. How Dave's "affiliation" principle works in practice — the insurance agent story that almost ended in a firing and became a case study
11. Why the first thing most schools, therapists, and managers do — focus entirely on weaknesses — is the exact wrong approach
12. What the StrengthsFinder philosophy gets right that most management training misses