The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman

Author:Misha Glouberman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Faber & Faber

31. A Decision Is a Thing You Make

A couple of years ago, I got to the point where I felt I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I was doing many projects and a lot of them were really interesting and fun, and sort of well received in the small world in which I operate, but I wasn’t making any money. Also, I had no idea what it all added up to. At first I thought I just needed to figure out how to make money and keep doing what I was doing, but then I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really know where I was trying to get to in my life, and in my working life especially. If someone had said, Where do you want your working life to be in five years? I would have had no way of answering that question. Somehow my life had got filled up with weird experiments and side projects, but there wasn’t anything at the core of it.

I think it happened like this: In the mid-nineties, I had a job in Toronto doing Internet stuff, and I got fired from that job after trying to unionize my office, so I ended up doing freelance web development at a time when that was a tremendously lucrative thing to do. Around that time, I was also really attached to the idea of leisure, so I worked only a few days a week. I made a lot of money, I had a lot of free time, and I really wanted to fill it intelligently with things that were fun. Those “fun” projects eventually started to take over my life, and after a couple of years, it seemed I was working seventy hours a week, not making any money, doing things that were “fun.”

Teaching classes in how to play charades isn’t the most practical idea in the world, and neither is running a lecture series featuring nonexperts, and neither is teaching theater classes but refusing to admit actors.

How could any of these things make any money or lead anywhere? This worried me a lot and it was a terrible time for me in a lot of ways. After a couple of years I sort of felt like, well, I need some results. You can’t just experiment forever. You have to act on it—act on the data that you’ve gathered, or something. I felt upset at myself. I felt that I’d been foolish to imagine that somehow the answer to how I would live and work and make money would present itself if I ran around long enough doing different things.

I decided to go to the bookstore and look at some self-help books about careers. I went and found two or three books that looked pretty good. I took them home and I read them. It was pretty exciting.

I’m a real believer in certain kinds of self-help books. A lot of them, of course, are really, really terrible—like anything—but when they’re good I think they’re great.

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