David Anderson
VP of Global Development at AAR CORP, TEDx Speaker & Author
Wrote a pledge of allegiance to his own success in a south Chicago living room, then repeated it thousands of times on the way to Goldman Sachs.
About David
David Anderson is the Vice President of Global Development at AAR CORP, a $2 billion, Fortune 1,000 aviation services firm with 20 locations worldwide. He works with prime ministers, global executives, and wealthy individuals to develop the aviation sector in the Americas, Africa, and emerging markets. He was previously the International President of Kelikaien (Keep Global), a Chinese green environmental products firm with 6,000 employees and 16 locations, and he was selected as a Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum. He is a Senior Advisor to the Honorary Consul to Moldova.
Anderson's career runs through investment banking at Goldman Sachs in New York, investment management at JP Morgan in Chicago on a $5.6 billion portfolio, a tech company he founded, School Loan 411, and an aide's post in the Executive Office of the President at the White House. He was the keynote speaker at the TEDx Disruption conference in Austria and is the Amazon bestselling author of The Delusion of Passion: Why Millennials Struggle to Find Success. He graduated with honors from Chicago State University and took part in Harvard University's Explorations Program. His proudest accomplishment is taking his grandfather, a Korean War veteran, to the White House West Wing.
Anderson flew into the studio to join George Wright III and John Harding for a conversation about personal mission and overcoming adversity. He told the story of the January night in south Chicago, caring for a mother with schizophrenia and a brother being recruited by gangs, when he wrote his pledge of allegiance to his own success. He walked through the six hundred books, three jobs, and eleven interviews in one day that carried him from Chicago State to Goldman Sachs, and closed with a challenge to set an audacious goal beyond yourself in the next two weeks.
Key ideas from David’s conversation
Write the pledge before you know how you will keep it.
Anderson did not know how or where he would succeed when he wrote his pledge. He made a decision to have his life guided by something, and the mission followed. Start with one line you can believe today, then add to it over the following days.
Put your energy entirely into the one thing you can change.
Anderson could not fix his mother's schizophrenia or leave the neighborhood. All he could change was what was inside himself, the same discovery Viktor Frankl made in a concentration camp. Name one thing you cannot control and one you can, and work on the second.
Repetition is how you unprogram the stereotypes about where you are from.
Every story about what someone from your background must be like has to be unprogrammed, and Anderson says the only way is speaking to yourself and writing things down. He has repeated his pledge thousands of times. Along the way you collect private victories nobody else sees.
People will always doubt what is possible; commit anyway.
Chicago State's career office told Anderson flatly that nobody gets to Goldman Sachs from that school. He got in through a Harvard pilot program, then eleven interviews in New York in a single day, and became the first from his university to land there, during the Great Recession.
A written mission is an anchor that holds when the tide moves.
With nine or ten inboxes and every social feed pulling at attention, an unanchored life drifts like a boat left on the water. Anderson says a written mission and a planner kept his goals for the week on the page whatever hit — money, teenagers, aging parents.
