How the bible of career-hunting guides helped this non-believer

These days a lot of people are asking themselves, “How do I find a job?”

Simple:
Get a copy of What Color is Your Parachute?.
Buy it. Take it out from your library.

Richard Nelson Bolles has been writing and rewriting this perennially best -selling career and job hunting guide since 1970.

Last August, after an expected promotion became an unexpected (and indefinite) vacation, I decided to accept this sudden influx of free time (and unemployment checks) and use it to seek out my dream job.

What Color is Your Parachute?, even the 1990′s version at my local library, changed my life. And I haven’t even read the whole thing.

Giving Thanks

One of the things that really appealed to me about Parachute was the caring and compassionate tone. Bolles ends the preface to the 2009 edition with this sentence:

I am a deeply grateful man.

This is profound to me because I’ve found that gratitude is an emotion of the wise. We get pleasure from anything we receive, but gratification describes a deeper feeling that can only come when we have the wisdom to recognize the value of the gift. You can’t get this wisdom without giving. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman says it well:

The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in loss of self-consciousness. Time-stops.

- from Authentic Happiness, pg. 9

Once you know that giving is gratifying, the universe is yours.

It may seem that I am going off on a tangent here, but the idea of service as a path to well-being is central to Bolles’s book and talks about success in a different tone than a self-help book like, say, The 4-hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss.

Digression: Freedom vs Satisfaction – What color is your 4 hour workweek?

There was something bothering me about Ferriss and it wasn’t the extra “S” in his name. His book got me excited and encouraged me to move out of my comfort zone. I wrote about one of Ferriss’s great ideas a few weeks ago and wrote this post bemoaning the fact that someone else wrote about Ferriss in a way that was funnier and more engaging than I would have. So, it is obvious that I admire the ideas I’ve found in The 4-hour Workweek.

But Ferriss’s book, and the approach to happiness it proscribes, lacks something that completely imbues Parachute…gratitude.

Where The 4-hour Workweek offers ways to manipulate the System so that it serves you, What Color is Your Parachute? asks precise questions to help you determine how you can happily be of service within the System. Ferriss encourages my sense of entitlement. He talks less about the spiritual satisfaction you can get out of being of service in a good job, and more about the spiritual malaise that you can escape by getting out of your comfort zone and the grip of employers.

In order to live well, I think it is important to be able to break free from the things that are holding you back, but if that is not accompanied by acts of kindness, the feeling that you are of service to a greater good, then all the freedom in the world will not bring you the happiness that feeling purposeful can.

Before reading What Color is Your Parachute? I did not think I could find happiness in the work-a-day world. Now I know better. There are thousands of places where I could happily serve.

My Top 7  Gleanings from What Color is Your Parachute?

1. Informational interviews – Employers hire people they know first. Be known.
2. Thank you cards – Especially if you are authentically thankful, a thank you note will make you stick in an employers head. If your card is attractive and sits on their desk for a week, then it is likely that they never forget you. When an opening comes up, your more likely to get a call.
3. Know thyself – As a pretty introspective guy, I was shocked that a simple exercise in a book could clarify my skills, values, and desires to a degree that 32 years of thinking hadn’t.  In less than a long weekend, I had created a “flower diagram” that reveals a ton of information about who I am and where I will be happy.
4. There are always jobs – Even with unemployment rates higher than a horse’s eye, the “constant churning of human activity” creates millions of job-openings a month. You may have to settle for a temporary job for now, but if you continue to approach organizations that interest you, your butt will be poised above the seat in the giant game of musical chairs known as the job market.
5. Doing a reflective, “life-changing” job hunt has an 86% success rate, while looking for employers’ job-postings on the Internet has a 4-10% success rate. – Sending resumes out at random works 7% of the time. Answering local want ads – 5-24%. In other words, the methods that seem most obvious are often the least effective.
6. Show up in person – This goes along with #1 and #5. If you have more than a virtual presence in your employer’s field of perception, you are more likely to be remembered.
7. Prepare for interviews - Parachute offers tons of tips for maximizing your chances of having a successful interview. Just a few:
   • The 50-50 Rule – Half the time, you should be listening. This one is a tough one for me because I tend to ramble
   • Give 20-second to 2-minute replies
   • There are only five questions that matter - You don’t need to memorize a list of dozens of possible questions because you can answer them all by knowing the answers to these five questions: Why are you here? What can you do for us? What kind of person are you? What distinguishes you from nineteen other people who can do the same task as you? Can I afford you?
   • Research – Not just the mission statement of the company and the job description, but the personality of the person who makes the hiring decisions.

This list barely scratches the surface.

What Color is Your Parachute? is truly a manual for life.

Big Questions: What is my purpose?, What Color is Your Parachute?, fighting fear, meeting goals