His perspective has been shaped by an unusually broad human education.
Before becoming an author, David spent decades at the highest levels of international finance, business, and enterprise.
He ran major financial institutions, including United Gulf Bank, and led businesses and organizations operating across countries and cultures.
His career brought him alongside people carrying unusual levels of responsibility, influence, achievement, and pressure: heads of state, members of royal families, CEOs, entrepreneurs, Olympians, and exceptional performers.
He saw what ambition can build. What leadership requires. What power reveals. What success provides. And what it doesn't.
David's life and work eventually took him across 156 countries and millions of miles.
Palaces and villages. Financial centers and impoverished communities. Boardrooms and hospital rooms. Different religions. Different political systems. Different definitions of success. Different ways of living.
Among those experiences was work with Mother Teresa and those serving some of the world's most forgotten people.
The contrast mattered. One world taught him about achievement. Another taught him about suffering.
Both taught him about humanity.
There has also been another population David has returned to throughout his life: young people standing near the beginning of theirs.
Over decades, he has helped hundreds of high-achieving students and their families navigate educational choices, selective schools, Ivy League pathways, and the larger questions surrounding extraordinary potential.
That work reinforced something he had learned elsewhere. The most important question is rarely: Where can this person get in?
Education became another lens through which to explore character, potential, purpose, experience, and the architecture of a life still largely unwritten.
It is: Who could this person become?
There were also rooms no career could prepare David to enter. Hospitals. Rehabs. Families in crisis. Addiction. Illness. Grief. People trying to begin again.
For years, David had observed suffering around the world and helped other people navigate extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Then suffering became profoundly personal.
Some Experiences Change Your Life. Others Divide It.
On December 1, 2019, David's 19-year-old son, Bennett, died from fentanyl poisoning.
There are moments after which life can never again be described simply as a continuation of what came before. There is Before. And there is After.
Bennett's death did not create David's interest in resilience, meaning, human potential, or the question of who we become. Those questions had followed him around the world for decades.
But now they were no longer questions he could examine from a boardroom, a village, a hospital corridor, or across a table from someone else experiencing tragedy. They were his.
All the ideas accumulated across decades of leadership, travel, achievement, observation, service, and advising others suddenly faced an unforgiving test.
Could any of them survive the worst thing that had ever happened to him?
The question was no longer simply how human beings survive devastating change. The question became how he would.
There was no returning to the life before Bennett died. There could only be the difficult work of discovering what life could become after.
That experience deepened David's understanding of grief, addiction, recovery, meaning, and the extraordinary human capacity to continue becoming even when life has taken something it cannot return.
Bennett is not the reason for David's work. He is part of the truth behind it. And part of the reason some of its deepest questions are no longer theoretical.
Bennett was also the founder of NBF, Nothin' But Family, a music and creative enterprise now carried forward by his brother Mark, MTStreets.
What began with Bennett continues through music, artists, sound, film, story, and the creative work of those who came after him.
The palace and the rehab. The boardroom and the hospital room. The head of state and the grieving parent. The Olympian and the young person wondering what to do with their potential. The celebrated executive and the person simply trying to remain sober until tomorrow.
At first glance, these worlds can appear impossibly far apart. David came to believe they aren't.
Remove the titles. The money. The circumstances. The achievements. The failures. The expectations.
A human being trying to find their way.
After 156 countries, millions of miles, extraordinary successes, profound losses, and more than four decades observing human beings in radically different circumstances:
The circumstances of human beings vary enormously.
The deepest questions of human beings do not.
That work now extends across an expanding library exploring human becoming from very different perspectives, from The Way and 365 Days of Becoming, to Life After Anything and Life After Rehab, to the pursuit of human potential in The Ascent of the Unstoppable, and even the earliest lessons of courage, curiosity, and kindness in Rinty's Big World.