Richard Bolles' Three Boxes of Life

You only live once. How much of what you do each day is determined by the paradigm you are living in? How many of your life decisions were made by uncritically accepting certain premises that you adopted uncritically?

I am not suggesting that we start every day from scratch, questioning everything and trying to make all our decisions "in the now" as we go along. Your thoughts would run haywire. Do I get up or stay in bed? Do I get dressed? What should I wear? Should I eat or not eat? Where should I eat? Should I eat with my fingers this morning instead of the usual way? Should I eat on the floor or on a seat by the door? Should I eat standing up at the counter?

When the alarm interrupts my sleep I turn it off and begin my day. Habits like that are O.K. That's how we keep going. These are not the life decisions I'm referring to anyways.

Rather, I'm thinking about the internal picture we carry around in or heads, consciously or unconsciously, of what a normal life map looks like.

You may know Richard Nelson Bolles as the author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, the job-hunting manual that has helped gazillions of job seekers get re-connected to the employment force over the past four decades. In 1996 the Library of Congress names his book one of the 25 top books that has changed peoples' lives. (You can read more about him here.) His sequel to this annually updated job hunt manual was The Three Boxes of Life.

Here's what one of the reviewers at Amazon.com wrote:

I first read this book when it had been out only a few years, and it turned my head around. I had been brought up, like most children of the 'fifties, to think of life as a series of rigidly defined serial roles: first you were a student, then you were a worker, and finally you retired and got to do all the fun things you'd been putting off for the past 40-odd years. Having worked my way through graduate school, and done a bit of traveling in the process, I of course knew how artificial these distinctions were -- but I still tended to feel vaguely guilty about my "immature" lifestyle and rebuke myself for not "settling down" like a Real Grownup was "supposed to." Bolles set me straight -- in fact I was doing a pretty good job of balancing growth, work, and leisure in my life, and had nothing to be ashamed of. My subsequent work history has borne out the wisdom of his advice: I've been happiest and most productive when my life achieves that same balance; the most miserable time of my life was the nine-year period when I succumbed to the siren song of Silicon Valley and became a money-obsessed workaholic. This is a terrific book, and one that bears rereading every few years, especially when you feel your life slipping out of balance.

Here's another:

Bolles' What Colour is Your Parachute? has, in the short time since its release, become a classic in how to find a job. The Three Boxes is a related but rather different work. The author takes on the broader issues of life planning, which includes not only career, but also educational and personal planning. In some ways, this book is a rebuttal to the traditional college/career/retirement paradigm by showing that people don't have to (and, for that matter, won't even if they wished to) live their lives in the traditional career path straitjacket. The tone of the work is thoughtful but practical. A lot of self-help oriented material nowadays seems to focus on mustering your potential to achieve your dreams. These works have their place, but they fail to answer a preliminary question--how does one know what one wants from life?

The Three Boxes is about the task of actually figuring out what you want, and then implementing what you want. It's remarkably free of needless fluff about the inner person, while filled with practical ideas on "breaking out" of the "traps" of modern career life. This is a book to own. It's an easy and thought-provoking read, presented in light style with interesting graphics.

We all have a picture in our heads of what a "normal" life should look like. Bolles' book aims to provide a more balanced view, and one that is psychologically more fulfilling and healthier.

Bolles's books are an extension of his life mission, which was devoted to helping others in one of the most important areas of life: understanding who we are and being all we're meant to be.

Here's a page of R. N. Bolles quotes from the Brandon Gaille blog. I myself encountered him through an interview in Radix magazine back in the '70s. The interview impressed me at the time because it was clear his religious beliefs formed a foundation for his worldview, but he was engaged in work that focused on an extremely important area of life success: finding employment stability and meaningful work. 40 years later and it's apparent that he has never deviated from that mission.

May your day be immersed with good energy as you move through your paces and do all you set about to achieve. 

Of Parachutes and Job Hunting Manuals

Job hunting is one of those things that is part of life. For better or worse, we can't pay our bills without an income source, and very few Americans go a full lifetime working for the same employer. That's where Richard Nelson Bolles comes in. Bolles was author of the now classic manual for job hunters and career changers, What Color Is Your Parachute?

I purchased the revised and enlarged 1981 edition featuring "The Quickie Job-Hunting Map" and have recommended it to this day in the same manner I did then as someone once said to me, "You don't have to read the book. Just do the exercises in the appendix." I took that advice and it changed my life, not in a religious conversion type of way but in the sense that I had a greater understanding of who I was an what I wanted in terms of a career.

Actually, I'd first heard about the book from an article in Radix magazine, a radical Christian periodical out of Berkeley. The mag had done a lengthy interview with the unconventional Bolles who had self-published his book to help people in a practical way to get re-connected. In the land of misfit toys, we still need to find our place.

One section in the back is titled What Skills Do You Have and What Do You Enjoy? An exercise called The Party is the first to greet you. Bolles has a side sided room drawn on the page. You are invited to a two-day party there and for some reason people of the same interests have gathered in each of the six corners. In one corner you have people who like to work with people -- to inform, enlighten, help, train, develop, or cure them or are skilled with words. In another you find people with athletic or mechanical ability who prefer to work with machines, objects, tools, plants, or animals or to be outdoors. After reading the six categories of people Bolles asks which corner of the room would you instinctively go to? After 15 minutes where would you go next? Though just an exercise, it helps increase your own self-awareness as regards what kind of career would make you happier or more satisfied.

The most helpful exercise for me was the Functional/Transferable Skills Inventory, which could take you all day or longer to complete, but is worth it because by means of this exercise you see how the things you enjoy and are good at have practical application in other settings. No one is "just a mom." They are involved in time management, project management, nutritional services and all kinds of other things.

Parachute, which Bolles continuously revises and updates, is now in its 13th iteration, I believe. And I'm certain you can find it in any library, though I recommend you just go ahead and purchase it if you're able and in need of sorting things out. Knowing what you want to do and who you are is a major component of finding a place where you can do it.

As a companion volume, job seekers might also want to look at another parachute themed job-hunting manual, Who Packed Your Parachute? The cover seems like a straight take-off on the spoof book-covers Mad magazine did one time in the Sixties. The masthead reads, "From the Two Guys who never read the NATIONAL BEST SELLER What Color Is Your Parachute?  The authors, Tony "X" and Danny "Y" were classmates in college whose unrestrained comic natures led them into a game of one-upmanship as they wrote notes to one another on this theme. First chapter deals with resumes. Their practical advice: "Donating plasma is not really work experience."

Keep in mind Dierckens is one of the pair that wrote The Duct Tape Book, which actually was a best seller. He's funny, and even if you're not job hunting, this book will bring it's share of smiles when you read it.

Tony Dierckens, whom I just met this week for the first time, is from Duluth here and has made a living writing and publishing books in the categories of humor and regional history. With regards to parachute, they cover the gamut of material covered less frivolously in other books. Topics include the cover letter, interview attire, telephone interviews, dealing with personnel managers, follow-up letters and how to interpret rejection letters. Advice: "Changing your address may be the only way to avoid rejection letters."

For the record, Richard Nelson Bolles continues to give seminars and cites Dierckens' book as highly entertaining. I can't promise that this one is in your local library, however.

Enjoy your weekend and make the most of it. There are only 51 left this year after Sunday

Featured eBook of the Day: The Breaking Point and Other Stories

Looking for a Job? How To Make A Parachute

In the early 1980’s when I had returned from a year in Mexico I needed to find a way to plug in to the job market. A book that was exceedingly helpful to me that year was Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? Peter Drucker praised it and so do I. The sub-title is A Practical Manual for Job Hunters & Career Changers.

Now when I discovered this book, the advice I was urged to follow was this: skip the book and do the exercises in the appendix. Sure enough, this was superb advice at the time because those exercises helped shape and affirm a strong sense of self-concept that proved to be the real key in my career success.

Like the Oracle at Delphi, whereupon the wise counsel “Know Thyself” was inscribed, Bolles directs us to the only valid start-point in a career. Who am I and what can I contribute? Without clarity here, the whole process of interviews, resumes, applications gets pretty grainy.

A recent BusinessWeek story (April 30, 2009) stated that there are 3 million job vacancies in the U.S. right now. This is fairly significant mismatch, in part due to some unusual factors. The housing crisis has made it challenging for many people to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. Another problem is that a lot of today’s unemployed are untrained in areas where there are needs. Experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are not easily found amongst the ranks of the hammer-and-nail construction layoffs.

The advice that follows may not apply to everyone, but it is something that worked for at least one fellow in the tech sector, formerly employed by Yahoo!, named Jeff Scott. What do tech people do for fun? They go to places like Mashup Camp and play hacker games, among other things. Networking, learning new skills, new tools…

Mashup Camp is a production of Techweb’s Aleternative Events Group which aims to bring Internet developers and attendees into close proximity in an unconference-style event. The first Mashup Camp took place in February 2006. The highlight is a competition to see who can develop the best mashups. (A mashup is a web application that combines data from multiple sources.)

Jeff Scott not only won a Dell E248WFP 24-inch Widescreen Black Flat Panel LCD Monitor, he landed himself a job by means of a mashup he created titled I NEED A JOB. Using Mozenda data harvesting technology Scott essentially sewed his own parachute. The net result: Scott is now publisher and editor of 148Apps.com, an iPhone App News and Review blog launched in 2008.

A PRWeb story explained. Scott designed his Mashup to help people who are now or soon will be out of a job. The mashup takes the text from your resume or a URL pointing to your resume or Linked In profile and processes the text through Yahoo! Text Extraction to get key terms about you, your skills and job experience. Then it processes over 50,000 Craigslist.org listings all scraped from the Craigslist site by Mozenda looking for the best matches for your skills. It then ranks, by city, the best places for you to look for a new job possibly giving you some options you wouldn't have considered previously.

According to Scott the speed with which one can get set up setup for creating, testing and scraping templates with Mozenda was most impressive. “The quick setup and testing is the killer feature,” said Scott. “What Mozenda does isn't unique, it's the way they do it that rocks.”

As they used to say in the old days, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't know if they skin cats anywhere these days, but for sure there are a lot of people in need of good parachutes. I wonder if there's money to be made in writing mashups for job hunters. Or maybe those Mozenda folks can help you write your own. Nowadays parachute makers weave code instead of fabric. The goal, in either case, is a soft landing.