Over the years, Mager had also been an accomplished unicyclist, banjo player, ventriloquist, crime novelist, and tap dancer. Mager is credited with revolutionizing the performance improvement industry with his groundbreaking work, the Criterion Referenced Instruction (CRI) framework. Mager was able to observe discrepancies with performances due to lack of information. One of his initial responsibilities was that of a company clerk which involved him interacting with new recruits. One such experience occurred in 1943 when Mager was drafted into the military. He likened his life as the ball and the different experiences in his lives as the pins of machine that would bump and jostle him eventually to his current research in the Instructional Design field. In his book, Life in the Pinball Machine: Careening from There to Here, Mager makes an analogy of his life to a pinball.

Mager's ‘true love’ his wife, is a professional classical musician. Eventually he found ‘his love’ the banjo, and has even been part of a banjo band. At one time he played the violin, then the clarinet and even the saxophone. Music also formed part of Mager's explorations as he jumped from one instrument to the other.

Subsequently, Mager switched to writing with his right-hand. To add insult to injury, in his time, being left-handed was considered a heinous act and often resulted in a sharp rap on the knuckles. This made him one of the smallest in his class. This was as a result of him being skipped from fourth grade to sixth grade. As any other little boy, Mager had aspirations of becoming a fireman, policeman, detective, cowboy and even a rocketship pilot.

Robert Frank Mager was born in the summer of 1923 shortly before The Great Depression. Concerned with understanding and improving human performance, he is known for developing a framework for preparing learning objectives, and criterion referenced instruction (CRI), as well as addressing areas of goal orientation, student evaluation, student motivation, classroom environment, educational change, performance technology, and instructional design. Robert 'Bob' Frank Mager (J– May 23, 2020) was an American psychologist and author.

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