I’m always impressed by people who overcome adversity to achieve the stuff they really want to do. Economic, social, psychological or physical adversity.

That last one used to be called ‘disability’ or more recently, being ‘differently abled’.

I was chatting to a bloke recently who works for a really big Information Technology company based in Europe. With enormous respect in his voice he told me about a small group of programmers in his company.

The distinguishing feature of this group is that they’re all blind.

Think about that for a moment. Blind computer programmers – they have Braille keyboards but can’t see any monitor screens. As my mate explained, they retain the equivalent of whole screens full of coding (the raw data of programming) in their heads.

I wonder if they’re able to do it because they don’t have the distraction of a lot of visual information cluttering up their memories?