What Color Is Your Parachute? (2 page)

May 26, 2010

I’ve been thinking. Next year’s edition of this book will mark its fortieth anniversary. That’s how long this book has been out, and in fact that’s how long this book has been on best-seller lists. Its sales are closing in, now, on eleven million copies sold, in twenty languages, in twenty-six countries. It is the best-selling book in the world on the subject of job-hunting, career-changing, and just generally figuring out what you want to do with your life, from here on out.

The remarkable thing is, I had no such intentions for this book, when first I self-published it. I just wanted to help some of my friends who were in something of a life crisis, to say the least:
out of work, trained to do only one thing, with skill-sets the world no longer wanted.
So, I did a lot of research to find for them alternatives to the traditional ways of job-hunting or career-changing, and then typed out my findings (there were no computers in those days) in a little hundred-page book, which my local copy shop reproduced.

But in 1972 I met a wonderful bookman, Phil Wood, who owned a little publishing company in Berkeley, California, called Ten Speed Press, and he wanted to publish my book commercially. I said yes, and so we have, since November of 1972, put it out through his publishing company, updating it every year but one. No words can express how wonderfully kind Phil was to me, over the years, as now have been
the folks over at the Crown division of Random House, in New York City, who bought Ten Speed Press from Phil, a year ago. I continue to research, and I continue to write, updating the book, faithfully.

Looking back, a lot has happened over the past forty years, obviously. Big changes in the world, big changes in the economy, big changes in the job-market, and—big changes in the publishing world, too. In case you haven’t heard, the form of
the book
—as a thing printed on paper—has been undergoing a major challenge. While three thousand books continue to be published every day of the year,
¹
according to experts there are as many as three times that number that are now published digitally, electronically, rather than on paper. So, in the excitable media you will see doomsday articles with such titles as “The Death of the Book, As We Know It?” Well, not exactly—yet.

But things
are
changing in the publishing world, and increasingly paper books and digital books are appearing side by side. Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Google’s Android, and Sony’s PRS-700 are accelerating that change.

In the time ahead, I will be a participant in that change; part of me is, after all, “a techie.” My college education was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard, and my major was physics.

Still, the changing form of
the book
is, IMHO, nothing to get downcast about. Changing
form
is what books do. Down through history, books have alternatively been written on stone, clay, tree bark, wax tablets, parchment, and papyrus. They have been written as volumes, codices, scrolls, and individual leafs. It was apparently the Arabs’ idea to copy books on paper, and Gutenberg’s idea to produce many copies of the same book. The Printed Book, as we know it, began in 1455, shortly after the invention of the printing press.

Skip to the present. When I wrote the first edition of
Parachute,
back in 1970, there were thirteen books in print, in this field which we may loosely call job-hunting, career-changing, careers, or lifework planning. None of them sold very well. But after seeing the popularity of
Parachute
(which even I didn’t see coming, and still can’t explain) publishers have since been publishing literally thousands of job-hunting or careers titles.

So, this brings us to the question that I have been turning over and over in my mind, this year in particular: with the availability of all the
electronic information about the job-hunt that is
out there
these days, why
do
so many job-hunters still want to hold in their hands a book printed on paper, to aid them in their job-hunt (I’m thinking, of course, specifically of my book); why isn’t the Internet, with its succinct answers to specific questions, quite sufficient for the job-hunter? Why have eleven million people gone out and bought a book? Doesn’t that strike you as strange?

I guess my first response is that
basically I haven’t a clue
. But, on further thought, five thoughts or hunches occur to me:

1. I think some job-hunters want a printed book because we love to touch things. A printed book can be touched, handled, and carried about. You feel possessive of it. It is, in fact, yours (you bought it). That’s a delight to your mind. And the feel of the paper it is printed on, is often a delight to the fingers. (
   Parenthetically, one human resource expert told me that when dealing with mailed-in resumes, it is the employers’ fingers that first tell them to be favorably or unfavorably inclined toward the job-hunter whose resume they are about to read. It all depends on whether they like the feel of the paper the resume is printed on, or not.
   )
   

2. I think some job-hunters want a printed book because they love three dimensions. An e-book or a print-out of job-hunting information from a website, has two dimensions: height and width. A book adds a third dimension: depth. That’s both a fact and a metaphor.
   

3. I think some job-hunters want a printed book because they like all their information on a topic to be gathered in one place. Using the Internet is often like standing on Mount Olympus and calling the winds from the four corners of the earth to gather before you. One packet of information arrives from the East. Another from the West. Still another from the North, and then the South. A book, if it is broad enough yet focused, has already gathered the information from the four corners of the earth, and presents the gathered information to you, as a
   fait accompli.
   All in one spot.
   

4. I think some job-hunters want a printed book because a book often plays a role in that job-hunter’s life that is normally reserved for a person. It’s more common to speak of a book, rather than the
   Internet, as a kind of Personality. In my own case, I meet people every week who say, “Oh that book saved my life” or “That book turned my whole life around”—the kind of language you normally use about a person.
   

5. I think some job-hunters want a printed book because a book preserves memories. You read it, use it, put it on a shelf, and as you walk by it in later years, you smile at the memories it evokes when your eyes fall upon it. The book has a history, not of its own, but of you. You are in that book now. Especially if you underlined and marked it up. Whenever I speak some place, people will come up to have me autograph a copy of my book. And often it is a dog-eared copy, all marked up and underlined, of an edition from ten or fifteen years ago. They want me to autograph
   that
   , even if they’re also carrying a copy of the current edition. That old edition has a history in their lives that the current edition does not. And they treasure that history. Hence they treasure that book.
   

I never tell a job-hunter they
ought to
use a book. Each of us ought to get our information in whatever form feels most congenial to us. But if observers of the common scene are puzzled as to
why
they see so many job-hunters buying a printed book for help, despite this digital age and Age of the Internet, maybe some of the above reasons help explain that mystery. Or, maybe not.

[Full disclosure: I am the author of a job-hunting book. Or did I already mention that? I’d take what I have to say, on this subject, with a grain of salt, if I were you.]

—Dick Bolles

P.S. This book is substantially rewritten and updated every year, as you probably know. People ask how I keep up, so let me briefly tell you. I come from a newspaper family, and have a voracious appetite for information. I read four newspapers every day (the
New York Times
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
,
USA Today
, plus a local paper), three news or business magazines every week (
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
,
Time
, and
Newsweek
), and I relentlessly search the Internet, daily. Also, four times a year, for five days in a row, I do nothing but interact with job-hunters, gathered in my
home. I stay very up-to-date on the current problems men and women are running into, out there in the job-market.

I do not think of this any longer as just
a book
. It’s much more
a living organism
, evolving, changing, growing. It takes on a life of its own, each year. I love this work. It’s thrilling and exciting, and you never know what’s going to happen next.

And what have I learned, when all is said and done? I have learned that when any of us turns into a job-hunter or career-changer, as we inevitably do, we need two things above all else: we need hope—desperately. That includes encouragement and inspiration. And we need tools for discovering our truest vision for our own life, plus practical strategies for finding that vision, that work, and that mission.

Hopefully, this book will give you both.