What Color Is Your Parachute? 2022: Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success

by Richard Nelson Bolles

Julia Cameron recommends that you create a list of twenty-five things you like. She then uses her list to help her make decisions about her life.

Read up on subjects that have always interested you, but you’ve never had enough time to explore.

You’d be amazed at the wealth of resources libraries offer these days beyond traditional books.

If you’re looking for suggestions, I’d read anything by Martin Seligman. I’ve already recommended Learned Optimism, which, as one reviewer commented, “vaulted me out of my funk.” It has excellent chapters on dealing with depression. Or there’s Seligman’s 2012 book, Flourish. Psychologist David Burns’s excellent book Feeling Good has been clinically proven to improve both depression and anxiety.

If anyone promises you a job or guarantees employment, walk away. Fast.

Individuals with ADD often make great entrepreneurs, emergency room staff, graphic artists, product designers, and surgeons.

Look into any career that seems fascinating or even interesting to you. But first talk to people who are already doing that work, to find out if the career or job is as great as it seems from the outside. Ask them: What do you like best about this work? What do you like least about this work? And, how did you get into this work?

When you are moving your life around, you need a firm place to stand, and that place is provided by the things that stay constant about you: your character, your faith, your values, your gifts or immutable skills.

The difference is enthusiasm and passion. Yours. You’re much more attractive to employers when you’re on fire. Maybe times are just too tough for you right now to risk starting with your vision of what you want to do with your life, but try.

You could also make a vision board by cutting pictures and quotes out of magazines (or from the internet) and gluing them onto a piece of paper. The power of this exercise sometimes amazes me. Reason? By avoiding words and using pictures or symbols as much as possible, it bypasses your logical mind and focuses on your creative mind, whose job is to engineer change. Do fun things like this, as you’re exploring a new life for yourself.

what you must do is take the choosing of a career into your own hands, with the help of this book, and then explore the career you’ve chosen down to the last inch, find out if you love it, and then go get your degree. Not because it guarantees you a job, but because you feel passion, enthusiasm, and energy with this choice.

One psychology professor who has had an outstanding career in research, writing, and teaching took a career test in college that pointed him toward accounting. He looked at the accounting curriculum but found it dry and boring. He later realized that the test was probably reflecting the fact that he liked math and his father was an accountant. Accounting was simply a field he was familiar with, not really a career interest. Creative types often get results like “florist” on career tests even if they have no interest in plants; one computer-based test became notorious for recommending that social types who “like people” become funeral directors, much to the dismay of some.

they provide a community for the otherwise lonely job hunter. This is a great gift. No one should ever have to job hunt all by themselves if they can possibly avoid it. We all need encouragement and support along the way.

If you have a particular talent that others would value, check out sites like FlexJobs, Freelancer, Freelance Writing, Guru.com, LinkedIn ProFinder, Sologig (for IT and engineering work), Upwork, and Fiver.

When Frei Otto received the Pritzker Prize for Architecture posthumously in March 2015, it was said that he “embraced a definition of architect to include researcher, inventor, form-finder, engineer, builder, teacher, collaborator, environmentalist, humanist, and creator of memorable…spaces.” Otto was inspired by “natural phenomena—from birds’ skulls to soap bubbles and spiders’ webs.”

Martin Luther King Jr. had something to say about this: The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.

One of the saddest pieces of advice in the world is “Oh come now—be realistic.” The best parts of this world were not fashioned by those who were “realistic.” They were fashioned by those who dared to look hard at their wishes and then gave them horses to ride.

Again, brain researchers have discovered that when making a decision about your life, it helps immensely if you don’t just put a flood of words on that one piece of paper but also add some kind of a graphic, picture, or diagram. Particularly when you’re dealing with a lot of information (known as cognitive load in psychology), graphic organizers can help you more easily remember, understand, and address the information you’re working with. Researchers have discovered that this encourages the right side of your brain to spring into action—the part of your brain that can look at a whole bunch of apparently unrelated data and exclaim, Aha! I see what it all means. Some like to call this your intuitive side, the opposite of your logical side.