There is a dream David Thiermann has been carrying around since a couple of weeks ago, and he wants to tell you about it.
He was on a white horse, riding bareback up a steep sand dune with his father and his father’s girlfriend. The horse was powerful enough to carry all three of them, and it would lunge forward three or four steps and then slide back two or three in the loose sand, but it kept going, and eventually they made it to the top.
At the summit, an old man — David puts him at 93 — was waiting with a jar of honey. But the honey was black. When David asked about it, the man said: “I figured out how to teach flies to make honey.”
Then David was somehow in New York City, standing next to a parking meter on a busy street. He started playing it with his hands — percussion, like any instrument — and the sound was beautiful enough that all the cars stopped, all the people on the sidewalk stopped, and stood there listening. A police officer finally came over and told him he needed to stop because he was creating too much attention.
David pulled out his attorney’s business card and handed it to the officer.
That was the end of the dream.
I tell you this not as a detour but because it tells you something essential about the man.
David Thiermann has spent 40 years helping people figure out what to do with their lives. Over 5,000 clients, by his count — enough files to fill a rented storage container in Santa Cruz, each banker box holding a whole human story: grandparents, early memories, the years that shaped them, and then, at the end of the intake process, a single game he played with every single one of them.
But the dream tells you what the career counseling never quite says out loud: that this man has always believed a parking meter can be an instrument if you’re paying attention. That an obstacle can be a sound. That when someone in authority tells you to stop making beautiful things, the correct response is to produce your attorney’s business card.
He does not give this advice. He lives it.
“I’m an improviser. End of story. That’s it. That’s who I am. Everything I do is improv.”
That’s David this week, arriving at something he says he’s been trying to find the words for. When people ask who he is and what he does, he’s always reached for something clever or descriptive — career counselor, consultant, musician, connector. But the word he’s landing on now is simpler than all of them.
Improviser.
It means, he says, that he can’t memorize a script. He tells this with real glee: a client once asked him to play the dysfunctional alcoholic father in his feature film — a small role, just two lines. David practiced those two lines with his partner Marilyn hundreds of times. When the director and the camera arrived, he forgot both of them entirely and had to read off the page.
He has enormous respect for anyone who can do it differently. He can only work in the present tense, with what the room gives him.
This, it turns out, is not a limitation. It is his entire methodology.
The business license says 1987. Santa Cruz. General consultant.
But that’s not actually when it started.
It started in 1965, when David was 19 years old, newly arrived at a leprosarium in Tanzania with no Swahili, no plan, and roughly a thousand patients who needed something to do. He was, by his own description, a naive idealistic kid trying to figure out how to help. What he noticed was that the patients needed employment — something to make, something to sell, something that returned them their dignity.
He saw a man playing an African thumb piano. He bought it. He asked the man to make another one. Then another. Then twenty different kinds of musical instruments.
He called the operation Ufundi Makete — Swahili for “skills near the leprosarium.” He was 19 years old and he had just started his first career counseling practice, though he wouldn’t have called it that for another 22 years.
When he did take out the business license in 1987, his strategy was pure improvisation.
He got out the AT&T Yellow Pages and went through the index, A through Z, putting a small check mark next to every category that sounded like it might be fun. He ended up listed under 37 different categories. When a client called, he’d ask: “How were you referred to me?” And when they said the Yellow Pages, he’d ask which section. He tracked the responses, year after year, until he’d narrowed 37 categories down to about 10 that were worth keeping.
Career planning and development turned out to be the one that fit best. Not because he planned it that way. Because the room kept giving it to him.
(He also, at some point, listed himself under Spiritual Consultants. What happened when he did this is a story for next time. He promises it will blow your mind.
Here is what David did with every one of those 5,000 clients.
First, he wrote down their entire life story. Not a summary — the whole thing, starting with their grandparents. What the family was like. What the neighborhood was like. Which years shaped them and how. He went forward through every year of their life up to the present.
Then he played a game.
He asked them to pretend they were already dead — looking back over their lives from some point in the future. And from that vantage point, he asked them to tell him, year by year, how they would ideally like their lives to have turned out. If they could have had it exactly their way. If they could have had it all.
“It’s amazing,” he says, “what people come up with when you allow them to visualize, ideally, how year-by-year they would like the rest of their life to turn out.”
He is not describing a therapy exercise or a journaling prompt. He is describing what happens when you remove the pressure of the present tense — all the practical objections, the fears, the voices that say be realistic — and let someone speak from the future they actually want.
That future is usually much bigger than the one they came in with.
You want to know what that game produces?
Meet Dr. Paul Gahlinger.
When Gahlinger first sat across from David in Santa Cruz, he had already been a bush pilot as a teenager in Canada. He’d spent years traveling the world. He’d earned a PhD in medical anthropology and a master’s in public health and epidemiology from UC Berkeley. He was, at the time, a professor of biostatistics at San Jose State.
He was bored.
David ran the surveys and biographical inventories. The results came back pointing toward one category: poultry veterinarian.
“I don’t want to work with chickens,” Gahlinger said.
There was another category in the same column. David looked at it.
Surgeon.
He persuaded Gahlinger to go to medical school at UC Davis. During his third year, Gahlinger was still flying — a Cessna 172 with an extra fuel tank strapped into the backseat. He flew it from UC Davis up to Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic. He landed in Ireland with ice on the wings and roughly a gallon of fuel left.
He flew around the pyramids in Cairo during a sandstorm. He sold the plane to someone in Cairo and kept moving.
His first job after medical school was medical director of Johnston Atoll — a remote Pacific outpost where the United States government sends its chemical weapons to be diffused. Gahlinger walked the grounds with four hypodermic needles on his belt, in case something went wrong and he needed to inject himself.
Then he decided to fly his own plane to Peru to study shamanism. On the way back, air traffic control told him he was a thousand feet higher than he actually was. He flew into a mountain in Guatemala. Having been a bush pilot since his teens, he knew what to do: he ran the plane through a line of trees to slow the fuselage, knocked the wings off, and walked away. His girlfriend was with him.
She was, David reports, quite impressed.
Gahlinger eventually wrote the definitive American textbook on illegal drugs — 172 substances, requiring research trips to Africa and around the world. He is currently an occupational medicine physician at a hospital in Fresno, married to a woman from the Philippines whom he is putting through nursing school. David sees their photographs on Facebook.
“Every time I see those photographs,” he says, “of people who are just so happy together, it gives me hope for the human race.”
This is what career counseling looks like when the counselor is an improviser. You don’t plan the destination. You look at what the person can do, where their energy actually lives, and you name the door. Whether they fly through it in a Cessna 172 with a gas tank in the backseat is up to them.
Somewhere in Santa Cruz, in a rented storage container, there are over 5,000 client files in banker boxes.
In each file is a life: grandparents, childhood, every year up to the moment someone sat down across from David Thiermann and played the game. The one where you pretend you’re already dead, and tell the truth about how you wanted it all to go.
David didn’t set out to become a career counselor. He set out to help a thousand leprosy patients in Tanzania have something to do with their hands. He set out to check 37 boxes in the Yellow Pages and see which ones rang. He set out to improvise.
At 80, he would tell you that’s still the method. That every next chapter starts the same way: not with a plan, but with a question.
What would you say, if you were looking back from the end?
What would you want to have done?
Where we go next
Next week: the story of what happened when David Thiermann listed himself in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants. Maybe?
David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He has worked in a leprosarium, been an administrator, restaurateur, percussionist, career counselor, and now, reluctantly, a subject.
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About the Author
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).