His perspective has been shaped across more than four decades of international finance, leadership, entrepreneurship, advisory work, education, behavioral health, recovery, adversity, humanitarian service, and life.
He has spent time with heads of state and people without homes. Royal families and families in crisis. CEOs and people beginning again. Olympians and people fighting simply to make it through another day.
The circumstances of human beings vary enormously.
The deepest questions of human beings do not.
Signature conversations
THE WAY, Who Are You Becoming?
Who are you becoming while you are busy building everything else? This keynote challenges the assumption that success is principally about finding the right path. Instead, David asks audiences to consider the person their choices are creating: leadership, character, courage, time, failure, relationships, meaning, legacy, and the accumulation of ordinary days.
LIFE AFTER ANYTHING, What Can Life Become Now?
Some events divide life into Before and After. David explores what happens when returning to the old life is impossible, and why rebuilding is not simply about surviving what happened. It is about becoming capable of living what comes next.
LEADERSHIP BEYOND ACHIEVEMENT, Who Are You Becoming While You Are Winning?
Drawing on decades around global leaders and extraordinary performers, David explores ambition, character, responsibility, pressure, meaning, and the difference between accomplishing more and becoming more.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF RECOVERY, What If Treatment Isn't the Finish Line?
A provocative exploration of why behavioral-health success must eventually be measured beyond treatment completion, and what changes when we design around successful lives rather than successful episodes of care.
THE ASCENT OF THE UNSTOPPABLE, What Are You Capable of Becoming Now?
A conversation about resilience, ambition, adaptability, disciplined action, and the difference between trying to become invulnerable and becoming impossible to stop. Appropriate for leadership, executive groups, entrepreneurs, athletes, creators, universities, and high-performance organizations.
GLOBAL WISDOM FOR BETTER LIVING, 156 Countries. One Human Family.
What can a palace teach us? What can a village? What can a billionaire learn from someone who owns almost nothing? David draws on millions of miles of observation to explore what changes across cultures, and what remains remarkably human everywhere.
THE LIMITED LIFE, What Would You Do Differently If You Truly Understood How Little Time You Have?
Not a conversation about death. A conversation about life: attention, priorities, relationships, courage, regret, meaning, and what deserves the finite days we are given.
The objective isn't temporary motivation.
It is an idea you're still thinking about on the flight home.
Invite David to Speak