Richard Bolles - What Color Is Your Parachute?

The 40 thAnniversary Edition of This Book

June 13, 2011

In the midst of these annual revisions, it’s time to pause for a moment and celebrate. Forty years! Yes. For forty years, so far, I’ve been writing, updating, and revising this book, every year. Well, I did miss one year—1975. But otherwise, every year.

It’s been more of a journal, than a book. A journal kept so far for forty years. New entries, new ideas, new events, every year. I often joke with people, when they ask how many books I’ve written over the years. The correct answer is ten. But, thinking only of Parachute , I say, “Forty—all with the same title, though different inside.”

The basic core has stayed the same since the beginning: Where do you go from here with your life? The answer to that has always boiled down to answering just three questions, and they have remained the same these forty years: WHAT, WHERE, and HOW. ( WHAT are your favorite transferable skills? WHERE would you most like to be able to use those skills? And HOW do you find the name or names of that job, and the places that have such jobs, and the people with the power to hire you?) But around that core have spun dozens of new developments, year after year, like planets in orbit around the sun.

A writer’s dilemma is easily stated: how much is too much information? How much is too little? I think there is too much information floating around out there—particularly on the Internet—and if you try to include it all, the book turns into hundreds of pages. So my responsibility is to sift it down, and talk only about the most essential truths. But (a big “but”) I think it is my responsibility to gather as much of the information as possible here on my desk, before I sift it down to what seem to me to be the essentials.

In other words, I define the writer’s task to be that of a fisherman: cast a wide net, haul in a large catch, but then pick out only the best fish from all those taken in the net.

So, throughout the year, I cast my net. I accumulate vast files on all the stuff that has an effect on our jobs and our ability to feed ourselves and our families: the catastrophic triple disaster in Japan; the surging demonstrations by armies of unemployed youths and others, throughout the Middle East; the devastating earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and elsewhere; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; BRIC (the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, and their ravishing appetites for energy and everything else); the stubborn unemployment rates all around the world; the soaring national debt of countries all around the world; the adoption of stringent budget cuts, all around the world; the crippling numbers of foreclosures on homes; the loss of equity in homes; the loss of jobs in particular industries; the credit crunch; the rising costs of gasoline; the rising food prices and shortages; pandemics; famous businesses going belly-up; diminishing pensions; longer working lives; free trade; outsourcing; the iPhone 4, the iPad 2, Android, Web 2.0, social media, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, texting, clouds, LinkedIn, LinkUp, Checkster, Workblast (video resumes), and omnibus search engines devoted exclusively to job openings, such as Indeed or SimplyHired; changing job-hunting techniques; soft skills; social networks; portfolios; behavioral interviews; counselors’ associations; and individual job-hunters’ stories. Plus, four times a year I do nothing but interact with job-hunters and career-changers, gathered in my home, for five days at a time. By such personal interaction, I stay very up-to-date on the current problems men and women are running into, out there in the World of Unemployment.

But then, having cast the widest net possible all year long, when it comes time to write my annual update of this book, I haul in my nets, sort out the fishes, and try to pick only the best. Now my job is not to know, or write about, too much. Now it is my job to write simply, and distill the mountains of information down to the basics. My job is to find the ideas that give the reader hope. For this is, in the end, a Book of Hope, masquerading as a job-finding manual.

Incidentally, I didn’t get here, alone. I do not stay here, alone. I am not inspired, alone. I am not able to write, alone. So, I am filled with gratitude. First of all, I am enchanted by every moment of my life with such a wondrous woman as my wife, Marci. I am so grateful for her. My especial thanks to Marci for playing hostess to the Five-Day Workshops we conduct every three months, in our home in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a rare woman who will let twenty-one strangers come be guests in her home for five days at a time, cooking breakfast and lunch for them all, while radiating grace and individual concern for each, throughout. ( For details, write to fivedayworkshop@aol.com .)

I’m grateful for my only sister, Ann, who died on May 11th, this year. She was a dear. I shall miss her voice, and her wisdom.

I’m grateful for my four grown children and their families: Stephen, Mark, Gary, and Sharon, plus their most-loving mother, my former wife, Jan, who shares in all our family gatherings; and my former stepdaughter, Dr. Serena Brewer, whom I helped raise for twenty years, who now shares her natural-born compassion with the people of Butte, Montana. I’m grateful, too, for Marci’s grown children, Janice and Adlai, with their families. I love them all dearly, dearly, dearly.

In addition, I want to express my gratitude to my dearest friend ( besides Marci ), Daniel Porot of Geneva, Switzerland—we taught together two weeks every summer, for nineteen years; then there is Dave Swanson, ditto; plus my international friends, Brian McIvor of Ireland; John Webb and Madeleine Leitner of Germany; Yves Lermusi, of Checkster fame, who came from Belgium; Pete Hawkins of Liverpool, England; Debra Angel MacDougall of Scotland; Byung Ju Cho of South Korea; Tom O’Neil of New Zealand; and, in this country, Howard Figler, beloved friend and co-author of our manual for career counselors; Marty Nemko; Joel Garfinkle; Richard Leider; Dick Knowdell; Rich Feller; Dick Gaither; Warren Farrell; and the folks over at Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California, now an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group of Random House, and Crown’s head, Maya Mavjee, who has been very kind to me.

Last December we buried Phil Wood, founder of Ten Speed Press and my friend for forty years. He was a dear man, and I owe him more than I can say for helping Parachute find its audience, and for letting me have great control over the annual editions. Parachute would never have sold ten million copies, were it not for him.

I much appreciate my current friends over at Ten Speed: Aaron Wehner, publisher, George Young, Kara Van de Water, Lisa Westmoreland, and Colleen Cain.

My especial thanks to my readers—all ten million of you—for buying my books, trusting my counsel, and following your dream. I have never met so many wonderful souls. I am so thankful for you all.

In closing, I cannot fail to mention my profound thanks to our Great Creator, Who all my life I have known through my Lord Jesus Christ, as real to me as breathing, and the Rock of my life through every trial and tragedy, most especially the assassination of my only brother, Don Bolles, with a car bomb, in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, back in 1976—now memorialized in one of the rooms at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C.

I am very quiet about my faith; it’s just … there. But it is the source of whatever grace, wisdom, or compassion I have ever found, or shared with others. I am grateful beyond measure for such a life, and such a mission as Our Creator has given me: to help people make their lives really count, here on this spaceship Earth.