Dr. David Bach is a Harvard-trained scientist, physician, and serial entrepreneur. After spending a decade maximizing his physical and mental performance, he created the Platypus Institute to bring scientific rigor to, and create commercial applications in, the rapidly expanding arena of applied neuroscience.
Prior to becoming a scientist and physician, Dr. Bach attended Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He worked as a research scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and did his residency training in Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
As a business entrepreneur, David founded and built three healthcare companies, each of which became a $100M enterprise. He has also been a management consultant, a venture capitalist, a competitive martial artist, and a professional cellist.
Dr. Bach has always had a passionate interest in human development. After a successful exit from his third company, David decided to pursue his interest in human development while simultaneously returning to his scientific roots, and with this, he founded the Platypus Institute.
READ DAVID’S BACKSTORY, TOLD IN HIS OWN WORDS, HERE
My passion for human development, and the reason I founded the Platypus Institute, comes directly from my upbringing. It’s an unusual story.
I grew up deeply immersed in the world of science. Both of my parents were scientists, and my father, Fritz Bach, was widely considered to be one of the founders of modern Immunology and the “inventor” of bone marrow transplantation.
Many of my childhood memories involve science: visiting labs on family vacations, analyzing research data as a young child, listening to hours of dinner conversations with Nobel Laureates as they’d heatedly argued about the studies they were conducting.
As you might imagine, the scientific method was drummed into me. My parents taught me: “Never believe what people tell you. Never believe common wisdom. Investigate and do your own research. Look at the raw data. Form your own hypotheses and test those hypotheses.” This way of thinking has permeated my life – and has had a huge impact on me, for better or for worse.
Not surprisingly, after college, I became a scientist and physician. I attended and worked at Harvard Medical School – and spent a lot of my early years in laboratories – looking at cells, looking at data, reading scientific journals, and hanging out with research scientists.
I had a problem, though. I was unhappy, and I really didn’t know how to function in the world other than as a nerd. From the outside, my life seemed to be working just fine. I attended prominent schools and had a promising career. But inside, I was increasingly unfulfilled.
Eventually, I left science and medicine to enter the business world, and, there, partly because I didn’t know how to relate to people very well, my internal challenges escalated. Meanwhile, I began to gain weight and my body got out of shape, which compounded my issues.
Fourteen years ago, three years after starting my first company (which was going nowhere), I decided something needed to change. This moment became the key turning point in my life.
I approached my decision to turn my life around very differently than most people. I approached it the way a research scientist would… applying the scientific method to improving myself.
I began by studying and quantifying every aspect of my life I could think of: I looked at my brainwaves, my heart rhythms, my diet, my thoughts, my breathing patterns, my posture – collecting data and developing and testing hypotheses about how I could become happier or more successful. For example, when I discovered that my thoughts were not serving me, my automatic impulse was to gather data about my thought process… so I spent the next year “transcribing” my thoughts in detail – verbatim, as they occurred in my mind. Within a year, I had transcribed over 1,500 single-spaced pages of my thoughts – which, of course, taught me a lot about how my mind actually worked. (As you might imagine, in those days, the majority of my thoughts involved me telling myself, over and over, how unhappy I was.)
I also started to read voraciously. I read about psychology, and spirituality, and developmental theory. But most importantly, I consumed every research paper I could find about the extraordinary neuroscience breakthroughs which, back then, were just beginning to emerge.
Finally, I studied the vast array of modalities people were using to rewire their minds and bodies, and I tried many of them out on myself.
And all along, I continued to gather data.
Over time, I “scientifically” designed a personal transformation process for myself. As a result of this process, my life turned around… very fast and very dramatically.
For a start, after years of struggle, once my brain had been rewired, my business career took off. I turned my first company around, and, then, after exiting that company, I founded and became CEO of two additional companies that both rapidly grew to be worth $100 million.
I rewired my body as well – losing weight, getting fit, and feeling healthy for the first time in years. In fact, five years ago I was told that if you measured me physiologically, my body had become ten years younger than it had been five years earlier.
My passion for personal transformation… for “rewiring” my brain and body… continues to this day. As of this writing, I’ve explored and applied 77 different technologies and approaches for rewiring my brain and body, and I have devoted literally thousands of hours to studying the impact of those activities on my day-to-day experience, not to mention the basic science underlying human development and peak performance.
As a result of this process, I’ve realized a level of joy, fulfillment, and personal power that was unimaginable to me 14 years ago. More recently, I’ve discovered a community of like-minded people who are as passionately interested in developmental sciences as I am… neuroscientists, psychologists, and a growing cadre of self-proclaimed “biohackers” who, like me, devote their attention to studying how we can most effectively rewire ourselves and optimize our performance in every dimension.
So, it almost feels like I was born to build The Platypus Institute… returning to my scientific roots, studying the developmental sciences that have made such a huge impact on my life, contributing to the world by enabling others to discover and achieve their full potential, and joining together with a community of like-minded neuroscientists who are as passionate as I am about learning how we can most effectively rewire ourselves… all with the goal of stretching the limits of human performance and helping ourselves and others achieve the immense joy, fulfillment, and personal power that is our birthright.
