Author David Myers

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David Myers

Education, Personal Growth, Professional Development, Psychology

David Meyers has spoken at business conferences and to post-doc psychologists at what was then known as the Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy, as well as taught in 2,000 classrooms from first graders to PhD business students on topics that include “The Uniform Structure of Information,” “The Coloring Book for Thinking,” and “Life as a Reading Comprehension Test.”  He is a graduate of Berkeley, holds a Masters degree from Stony Brook and is in the National Federation of Independent Business Hall of Fame.

While editing a theatre magazine, David interviewed luminaries throughout the arts on their common bonds. If all the world’s a stage, how well you comprehend what’s going on determines how well you perform every role you play on it. No one else ever put all of that together, not even Shakespeare or Plato, while David’s vast cross-disciplinary studies enabled him to do so. He was introduced to speak at Dale Carnegie’s annual conference as “the man who figured out our secret ingredient,” and likened him to the old BASF commercial: David doesn’t do sales, leadership, teamwork or any such training; he makes whatever education or training people have gotten or will get work better. He will do that for you, as well. 

Learn more about David on his website and read our review of his book, The Key Skill of All Skills: Learning How to Learn, here.

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BOOKS:

The Key Skill of All Skills: Learn How to Learn (2017)

Book description:

A must for anyone seeking career, education or personal life betterment. Everything you read continually puts what you don’t understand in perspective with what you already know. That’s the active ingredient. Using the right anecdotes and analogies at the right times is trickier than it looks. When you acquire and master that key skill, you retain and use information better, are more productive, avoid Alzheimer’s unless genetically predisposed, and alleviate other disorders. This book isn’t just education, business or personal growth training; it makes EVERYTHING you’ve learned and experienced WORK better for you. Something for the whole family.

Your biggest literary influences: 

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a 100-page Hamlet’s soliloquy in equally riveting prose.

A headmaster’s jaw dropped, who didn’t have enough of any book to go around his classes, because I said ordering any one book was unnecessary. I wasn’t teaching Huckleberry Finn or Oliver Twist; I was teaching the laws of composition and principles of criticism straight out of the work of literary theorist Northrop Frye — laws and principles that were all the more evident from students using different books. Frye’s last book was described in a front-page New York Times Book Review as having surpassed the writings of Freud and Jung as a mapping of the mind.

Last book read:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The book that changed your life:

I read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, dragged to relatives with a copy, then became a legendary local athlete. As Shakespeare put it, “All is ready if our minds be so.” HOW he observed, thought about and responded to events of all kinds guided me in all things. The challenge in athletics and training for it was extending the limit to which one exerts oneself while remaining relaxed. Moving faster, jumping higher, being stronger and performing better followed from that. The challenge in school was applying the way I approached acquiring and mastering athletic abilities to every other topic covered there. Everything ever written that lasts is to help everyone who got both backwards get it straight, one way or another.  “For the unexpected is hard to know and difficult.” Get outside the box first. Thinking there is “The Key Skill of All Skills.”

Your favorite literary character:

The man everyone calls ridiculous in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” by Dostoevsky, like the one in Notes from Underground, is among the sanest ever depicted. He dreams of being taken to a world where everything is as it should be, then inadvertently brings about the Fall by questioning why and how they arranged and managed this, that, and the other; making them skeptical about everything, too; but awakens knowing he has seen that our world can be peaceful and happy, bound now to spread the tidings, ridiculous as that may sound. It was just a dream, they say. Everything written that lasts is also about having gotten that backwards, one way or another, along with what I learned from my first book about how to approach everything in life. When thoughts come before actions continually, the right ones arise at the right times the right way.

Currently working on: 

Polishing up three novellas.

Words to live by:

Be as careful telling the truth as you are telling lies.

Advice for aspiring authors:

The laws of composition are as inviolable as those of science, and as invisible until you learn about them. Stop gleaning the content off the surface of information; follow the underlying structure, breaking it down to its smallest components, which are uniform, the same way you learned everything in school based on common characteristics.

TESTIMONIALS

“David’s program is truly A Microsoft of the Mind. It will enable you to access and use what you know the way computers do, and how to apply that information to every facet of work and life.” 

—Larry Cantrell, Robertson County Alternative Program

“What I found especially intriguing about David’s blog for our Innovation Center is the way the posts continually demonstrate that the same process that works in business makes us more effective in coping with the many practical matters with which life confronts us. The posts reveal that our ability to be innovative depends as much on our command of language as accomplishing tasks in engineering and the natural sciences relies on our mathematical skills. Since many of his references are to analogies drawn from athletics, why not consider reading them as a warm-up exercise to start the day, stretching your mind the way you stretch your muscles before working out, or practicing the skills involved before playing a sport.” —Manuel London, Ph.D., Dean, College of Business and Professor of Management, State University of New York at Stony Brook

“David’s approach to training lets the consultant-guru’s cat out of the bag by suggesting persuasively that what is important is understanding how people observe and communicate what they do. The fulcrum of David’s work is narrative structure. The methods of Plato, Dickens, Blake and others become exemplars of getting in touch with reality.” 

—John Clemens, retired professor, Hartwick College, The Classic Touch and The Timeless Leader

“I introduced David to speak at our annual conference as ‘the man who figured out our secret ingredient.’ Turned out, it was everyone else’s as well. Then I likened his Coloring Book approach to the old BASF commercial: he doesn’t do sales, leadership, teamwork or any other kind of training; he makes whatever training people have gotten WORK better.”

—Rick J. Gallegos, CEO, Dale Carnegie Training Tampa Bay