David Allen, the master of getting thing done, has lived an odd life:
He’s been a drug-taking grad-school dropout, a Zen-inspired karate black belt, and a trainer for personal-growth seminars, all before finding his calling at age 36 as a training consultant for corporations such as Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Mills.
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Allen was a 23-year-old grad student at UC Berkeley in 1968 when he met a psychic named Michael who said he owed Allen a karmic debt over a past-life transgression. Michael began teaching him karate and sharing Zen concepts such as “mind like water. ” (It means that just as a pebble tossed into a still pond creates only gentle ripples, small events need not create big waves in our lives.)Michael’s teachings convinced Allen that the life he was living was phony. He quit everything — school, drugs, his first marriage, his home — and took a job driving a cab. “I was just one wired, raw thing,” Allen says.
Thus began a spiritual quest that eventually led him in 1971 to John-Roger, an L.A.-based mystic who later formed a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness that has courted controversy and attracted such high-profile adherents as Arianna Huffington.
“I knew in the first 30 seconds that he didn’t give a rat’s ass if anybody believed him,” Allen says. “He knew what he was talking about.”
Allen was inspired. He quit his job and moved to Los Angeles. For the next six years, he worked a series of odd jobs — landscaper, vitamin distributor, glass-blowing lathe operator, travel agent, gas station manager, U-Haul dealer, moped salesman, restaurant cook — until John-Roger started a personal-growth training program in 1978 called Insight Seminars.
Insight was based on a popular self-help seminar for young professionals called Lifespring, which employed potent psychological techniques to break down participants’ entrenched thought patterns and replace them with ostensibly more positive states of mind. Although many graduates swore that Lifespring changed their lives for the better, the for-profit company was also slapped with dozens of lawsuits claiming psychological trauma and even wrongful death by suicide.