Arthur Fonzarelli was everything Henry Winkler wanted to be. “He was confident, he was a leader among his friends, he was good with women,” Winkler says. “He had this confidence.” And he didn’t have dyslexia.

Winkler, best known for playing The Fonz on the popular sitcom Happy Days in the 1970s and ’80s, has struggled with dyslexia his entire life. Learning to live with it may, in fact, be one of the reasons he has achieved unqualified success and versatility as an actor, director, producer and author. Happily married for many years to Stacey Weitzman, with whom he has three children, Winkler is still working on multiple projects, supporting children’s charities and speaking out about the importance of believing in oneself.

Winkler, 63, was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants who had fled Nazi Germany. He was educated at good schools, culminating in an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1970. But it wasn’t easy. “School was unbelievably difficult for me,” he says. “I was told I was lazy and not living up to my potential. And it was only at 31 that I realized I had something with a name.”

Winkler says it took him four years to get through geometry. Reading was a nightmare. He remembers studying hard, trying his best and still not making the grade.

“When I was growing up it took me a long, long time to find my confidence,” Winkler says. “When you have a learning challenge and you’re not keeping up, it works on your self-image. I think the beginning and the end of living is keeping your self-image intact and strong, and as a parent, keeping your child’s self-image strong. Because when that goes, almost everything goes.”

The key to Winkler’s later success may have started with those early battles to build and maintain a healthy self-image. He is not sure to this day how he did it. “All I know is that I would go in my room, I would put some music on, and I guess what I did was a form of meditation. Without even knowing it. I would just sit quietly and drain the anger from a fight with my parents, the lack of doing well in school, all of which made me nuts. Because, of course, a child wants to do well. You prepare. You try. And you can’t even sound a word out. And then I was able to come back and try again.”

Coming back and trying again is a theme that defines Winkler’s professional life, from his early auditions to his late-blooming vocation as an author, which seems to give him great pride. He has co-written 14 children’s books (sales are at $3 million) starring a very funny boy named Hank Zipzer who, as it turns out, also has dyslexia.

“I just thought I would try something I had not done before,” Winkler says. “I knew what it was like to grow up with a learning challenge and [I told] Lin Oliver, my partner, ‘It’s really important that it’s not a woe-is-me story; it’s really important to make the kids laugh.’ So Hank is very funny and he just happens to have a learning challenge, and the kids who don’t have a learning challenge go, ‘Oh my gosh, now I know what’s wrong with Bill next to me.’ And the kids who do have a learning challenge say, ‘How did you know me so well?’ ”

Winkler is also gratified that he is helping kids actually want to read. “Parents who read the books say, ‘My child never read a book before; now he’s read five.’ ”

Winkler admits his success has been hard-won; he started out as a struggling actor with zero confidence and limited skill. He had no idea if he was any good—but he had to try. “It is like fate up against your back, pushing you in a direction,” he says. “Fate’s hands are on your back and they are guiding you to whatever you are supposed to be. I had this powerful desire to be an actor, but I didn’t know how to get there. All I knew is that I wanted it.”

At first, he says “sheer energy” is about all he had. “I hadn’t kicked in with the skill yet. No matter how much of an outgoing personality I had, no matter how many times I won a dance contest, if you don’t have the underlying confidence, then it is like something that eats away at what you are trying to do. It completely eats away at the foundation.”

Still, he went to audition after audition. “And I would never get the job in the beginning,” he says. “I guess the key is, no matter how many times you fall over, you dust yourself off and you keep moving.”

That tenacity paid off when Winkler was chosen to play Arthur Fonzarelli in 1973, opposite Ron Howard on Happy Days. He soon became the sitcom’s most enduring character, and won two Golden Globe best actor awards for the inimitable Fonz.

But acting roles didn’t come so easily after Happy Days, he says. “I was being typecast. I was so well known as a character people would say, ‘He’s really good, but…’ ” Winkler says that’s when he started producing (“out of desperation”), venturing into uncharted territory, a pattern that has informed his career from the start.

“Don’t get typecast in your own life,” he says. “You cannot assume that somebody can define you. You cannot assume that the other person is right. No matter how they say it to you, no matter with how much force they say, ‘Oh my god, you’ll never make it; oh my god, you’re not bright; you could never do this’—that’s one person. I can’t tell you how many people told me I would never be an actor.”

Since then, Winkler’s work as an actor has been extensive, from roles in television series like MacGyver, Law and Order, South Park and Arrested Development to countless movies and plays. But that’s only part of the story; he is also a prodigious producer and director.

His list of credits is lengthy, but the dyslexia persists. “You do not overcome dyslexia,” he says. “You learn to negotiate it.” These days, he says it helps to be hyper-organized, to read scripts very slowly, and to tap into the notion of possibility.

“The moment you think about trying something new, you can either say—like I did the first time someone mentioned writing books to me—‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that; it’s out of the question, forget it.’ You just dismiss it through your lack of confidence and your lack of imagination. The next time the suggestion was made to me, I was in a different place in my mind and my feelings and I just said ‘OK.’ And then you put one foot in front of the other and you wind up at your destination.”

This attitude is at the root of Winkler’s success, both personally and professionally: the ability to keep going, regardless of the obstacles in front of him. This is how he discovered his own talent and his own role as an inspiration for others.

“What I say when I speak publicly is that everyone in the room has greatness in them,” he says. “It’s just that so many of us are willing to second-guess ourselves and say, ‘No, that couldn’t possibly be the truth.’ And children have a wonderful gift. They have to figure out what that gift is, dig it out and give it to the world—and it could be anything.”

Winkler’s own life reflects that ability. He likes to refer to a quote by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who once said, “If you will it, it is no dream.”

“That has become the cornerstone of my life,” Winkler says.