Actor/musician/stockbroker/town councilman
Allan Wasserman tells you how to do it all
by Laura Berthold Monteros
As people entered the community room of the Altadena Library on Monday evening, speaker Allan Wasserman asked each one his or her name. When he took his place behind the lectern, he went around the room, reciting the name of each person in attendance.
While this wasn’t lesson number one in “Designing Your Life,” it did introduce the importance of making connections with other people, a theme that would run through his talk.
Wasserman is an Altadena Town Council member, a stockbroker with his own business and several offices, a musician and an actor. Readers may have seen him in West Wing, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, The Office, or a few dozen other TV shows and movies.
He listed three steps for getting what one wants out of life: compromise, make lists, and ask for support.
“I only ever wanted to be an actor,” he said, “but living in the real world and wanting things, I had to compromise.” His compromises included trying several jobs until he found, in his 40s, that being a stockbroker would work both in supporting his family and allowing him time to audition for and take acting jobs.
“Compromise also involves taking risk—you have to decide how much risk you are willing to take,” he said. “Anything you do is right, there’s no wrong in designing your life.”
Wasserman said the second step, making lists, is “the heart of it for me.” He admits to being obsessive compulsive, making sure he does each thing on his list. When he loses interest, however, as he did after several years of taking French, he moves on to something new. He has stuck with “play saxophone,” taking lessons and starting a band that attracts top musicians. He discovered the many jazz and pop artists who live in Altadena and made their acquaintance.
List-making is so crucial that he passed out paper and pencils and asked the audience to make lists of two to five things they would like to do. Then he went around the room, and people read their lists. There were many who wanted to write, one who wanted to make $1 million, several who wanted to learn music or another language, one who wanted to conquer substance abuse and one who wanted to find a home.
Service to others and to religious organizations was also mentioned often. “One of the best things you can do is to do service for something not on your list,” Wasserman affirmed.
“Go back to the list,” he instructed when the last person had read her goals. “Pick one, and write two actions you can do to get it going.” Once again, he called on each person to read what was written.
An amazing thing happened as the lists were read, both the first pass around the room and the second. It was an object lesson in the third step, ask for support.
People discovered that what they had as goals interlocked with the goals of others. One woman wants to teach Chinese, a man in the audience wants to learn it. Another woman wants to learn violin, and a few others know violin teachers. Several of the writers got together with librarian Pauli Dutton afterwards to talk about possibly getting a writers’ group going at the library. Wasserman offered to put people in touch with his contacts.
In the end, the night was about “learning to network, not being afraid, doing it,” as Wasserman said.
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Laura Berthold Monteros writes about Altadena.
