This is the fifth part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of What Color Is Your Parachute?, a seminal guide to your career. These entries appear weekly, each Monday afternoon, and you’re invited to read along. This entry covers the first part of chapter thirteen in the 2008 edition (earlier editions are roughly similar). If you didn’t participate from the start, feel free to jump back to the first part, the second part, the third part, or the fourth part.

So, here we come to the “flower diagram,” probably the most famous portion of What Color Is Your Parachute?

What Is the Flower Diagram?
You can take a peek at it through Google Books if you’d like.

In a nutshell, the “flower diagram” is a self-assessment, intended to help you figure out what type of work is most appropriate for you. Rather than existing in the form of a test, it merely exists as a small set of questions that help you to nail down what you’re actually looking for. These questions take the form of petals on a flower.

I thought it would be useful to walk through these petals right now and give some general thoughts on each one.

Geography
Where do you want to live? For some, it doesn’t matter that much – for others, it’s vital. Also, the answer to this question often changes as your life changes.

For me, it’s quite important that I don’t live in a major city: no open spaces and lots of tightly packed people make me uncomfortable. Thanks to the internet, though, one can participate in a lot of professions remotely.

Interests
I’m glad that this is only one petal in the flower, though it’s an important one. I talk a lot about following your passions, but your passions can sometimes take you down a very uncomfortable road.

Having said that, I think this is the most important petal on the flower – it’s the leader, but it shouldn’t completely trump what the others are telling you. There are a lot of ways to dig out what your interests are, but the best way I’ve found is to ask yourself what you would do with your time if you had several million in the bank (and after the fun of just vegetating and resting was over).

People and Environments
Some people thrive in an office. Others dream of working outside. As for me, I like a mix of both. I also like people who can keep socializing in the office to a minimum, especially near others trying to work. These are very valuable things for me in a work environment.

How can you find out about this? Ask around. Figure out what really bugs you and ask how prevalent it is in certain areas. Investigate any job you’re serious about very carefully.

Values, Purposes, and Goals
Is this job in alignment with what you are trying to do with your life as a whole? For example, if you’re a devout atheist, it would be very difficult to work for a Christian organization. Similarly, if you’re trying to break into management, a cubicle monkey job won’t match what your goals are at all.

It’s always worthwhile to spend time really understanding the key values of your life and the goals you’re trying to accomplish. They don’t always indicate where you should be going, but they usually indicate where you shouldn’t be going.

Working Conditions
This is another concern that is highly variable depending on the person involved. Do you have any physical requirements, for example? Similarly, if you’re a family person, mandatory overtime probably isn’t worth any price.

My biggest working condition requirement is time flexibility. Sometimes I need to take off time to care for a sick child or take one to the doctor – if I didn’t have the flexibility to do this, I wouldn’t be able to work that job.

Salary and Level of Responsibility
Obviously, this requires some sense of reality. If you lard up the other categories with too many absolute specifics, then you’re likely not going to get the salary you want. Similarly, if you don’t like responsibility, you’re likely reducing what you should expect for a salary. As for me, I enjoy responsibility, but only if it comes with authority – quite often, it does not, and that’s the mix that I don’t care for – that fact has hurt me salary-wise in the past.

Skills
In the center of the flower are the skills. In short, what is it that you do that is notably beyond the basic ability of others? That’s a tricky question to answer, and it also requires introspection. I think my skills mostly revolve around expressing ideas – and humanizing them.

What do all of these pieces add up to? They add up to a truly honest assessment of what you’re looking for. The more time you spend honestly addressing questions like these, the better your job hunting will go.

Next week, we’ll read another big portion of Chapter 13, covering pages 250 to 282. This covers in detail identifying the transferable skills you most enjoy using.

This is the fourth part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of What Color Is Your Parachute?, a seminal guide to your career. These entries appear weekly, each Monday afternoon, and you’re invited to read along. This entry covers chapters ten, eleven, and twelve in the 2008 edition (earlier editions are roughly similar). If you didn’t participate from the start, feel free to jump back to the first part, the second part, or the third part.

Chapter 10: How to Start Your Own Business

This is a pretty basic primer on things to think about before you start a small business. The biggest one, and the one that presents a road block for many people, is the fact that most small businesses earn less than a full time job elsewhere – it takes a lot of drive to really make it succeed.

Bolles also makes a strong case for having a backup plan. What will you do if the business doesn’t take off and you desperately need personal income? In my mind, this is exactly what temp work is appropriate for. A temporary office job doing things like filing papers is the perfect thing to find if you’re trying to get a small business started but you need short-term income.

Bolles is also a big fan of finding a mentor and consistently tapping that mentor for ideas and help as you try to get things started. It’s sometimes hard to find a mentor – my best tactic has usually been to find someone who is in the same area that I’m trying to get started in, but separate enough that we won’t be competitors (they work in a different specific niche or in a different locale).

Honestly, though, this is the weakest part of the entire book. If you’re interested in starting your own business, you’re much better off jumping into materials specifically about entrepreneurship.

Chapter 11: Entering the World of 50+

Mostly, this is a short paean that no matter how old you are, the best thing you can do is stay active, mentally and physically and spiritually. I can’t agree more with this statement: I actively put money into retirement, not so that I can start sitting in my rocking chair and wait for death to claim me, but so I can spend the later years of my life tackling some new challenges, free of the bondage of a boss and a nine to five day.

Chapter 12: How to Get “Unstuck”

There comes a time in everyone’s life (and maybe more than once) where we find ourselves wondering why we’re stuck. Why can’t we make any forward progress? What’s stopping us from moving forward?

Bolles argues that this usually happens when we begin to realize that some sort of change is needed in our life, but we’re afraid to make that change. Quite often, if we’re making that realization, it’s a sure sign that we really do need to make the change, but we’re held into place by the parts of ourselves that resist change – the “safekeeping” parts of ourselves.

One sure sign of your “safekeeping” self is that you’re listing lots of reasions why you shouldn’t do something, even though when you concentrate on it, there are many positive and compelling reasons for doing it. To an extent, I find myself doing this whenever I look at a writing career.

The solutions? Realize that you’re doing it, start doing research on the changes that are needed, and listen to music, particularly classical music (for brain activity purposes – seriously). That last one seemed sort of crazy at first, but I thought about it – I tend to be creative when I’m listening to music, but I tend to do repetitive, ordered tasks much better when I’m not. There is a connection there.

Next week, we’re going to dig into the thirteenth chapter and do the infamous flower exercise. This appears on pages 239 to 250 in the 2008 edition – yes, only twelve pages in a week. That’s because the flower exercise is pretty intense – I plan to work through it next week, and I hope you’ll give it a shot, too.

This is the third part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of What Color Is Your Parachute?, a seminal guide to your career. These entries appear weekly, each Monday afternoon, and you’re invited to read along. This entry covers chapters eight and nine in the 2008 edition (earlier editions are roughly similar). If you didn’t participate from the start, feel free to jump back to the first part or to the second one.

The second section of What Color Is Your Parachute?, which we’ll be covering this week and next, deals with change: changing location, changing careers, starting a new business, and so on. Let’s dig in.

Chapter 8: How to Pick a New Place to Live

When I first read What Color Is Your Parachute? so many years ago, this chapter really stuck out at me like a sore thumb. Why would one write about finding a new place to live in the context of a job hunting book? Shouldn’t you find what you want to do first and let that lead you to where you want to go? It made little sense, and so I shrugged and moved quickly on to other exercises.

What I found as an adult is that the area where you choose to live has a lot of bearing on the level of happiness you’ll enjoy. It’s an issue that my readers have experienced as well – living in a particular location just to facilitate a career often leads to unhappiness. In fact, Bolles makes a list of reasons why people would want to move, and most of them have nothing whatsoever to do with careers. Most have to do with family, personal satisfaction, and safety.

If you feel that the place you’re living now isn’t right for you, move on. Define what exactly you want and then search for the place where you can find it. Bolles suggests canvassing far and wide for opinions, from all of your friends to people you meet in the supermarket, and do it with an open mind. Research the suggested places online and find out more about them, particularly in terms of fulfilling your personal needs. Once you’ve found a location that suits you, travel there to get the lay of the land.

One key part of this is being thorough. Don’t just pick a place to live on a whim or an emergency need or you will assuredly find your way towards unhappiness. Bolles argues on behalf of researching the place as much as the job; in particular, if you can find a job in a lot of areas, research the place before finding the job.

For me, I truly wish we lived in a more rural area than we do. We live on the edge of a pretty small town. Our front yard looks like suburbia – our back yard looks like a farm. I actually yearn to live in a place where I can see perhaps one more house from anywhere on my property and I can be left completely alone to do what I wish – though I do admit that my current environment affords me a lot of personal freedom. Given the lack of expense in such rural living and the fact that my wife’s job and my writing career are relatively transportable, this is something we’re considering down the road when we have our bankroll built up a bit.

Chapter 9: How to Choose a New Career

Naturally, the flip side to a location search is a new career search. I should point out here that this chapter is brief and dominated by a lengthy table (which shows skills most useful for a wide range of jobs). The real meat of What Color Is Your Parachute? is about choosing a career, but it’s very introspective and dominates the third section of this book; this chapter is much more cursory, focusing on a superficial analysis for career selection.

Because of that, I found the little pieces of this chapter much more useful than the wider picture. For example, Bolles suggests taking a few tests to identify your psychological strengths and talents, but not to put too much weight into these test results – they should merely serve as clues. I’ve taken several of these tests and found that they have a hard time nailing me down outside of routinely pointing to a handful of skills – I’m apparently an effective communicator and a logical thinker.

Bolles also reiterates one key point over and over here, and it’s the one key point that I really took away from this book upon my first reading of it: do what drives your passion and matches your skills, not what others suggest for you or what happens to be the “hot” thing at the moment. This is the single best piece of advice in this entire book for a person about to enter college and unsure what to do. Don’t just choose a major because others suggest that you major in this “hot” field or because someone thinks that a particular major matches your skills. Take their advice, but incorporate it into your own understanding and think about it carefully before casting the die.

This chapter also gives a little taste of what’s to come in the excellent third section of this book. Bolles recommends sketching out what your dream life would be like. What would you be doing? Where would you live? Add as much detail as possible. Why? This exercise reveals the truth about what you really should be doing with your life. For example, if money is no object and yet your sketch involves a giant garage and tinkering with cars, it’s time to consider a job in automotive engineering or, at the very least, as an auto mechanic. Excellent stuff, and it only gets stronger as the book progresses.

Next week, we’ll read chapters ten, eleven, and twelve in What Color Is Your Parachute?, covering starting your own business, growing older, and getting unstuck. In my 2008 edition, these appear on pages 185 to 236.

This is the second part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of What Color Is Your Parachute?, a seminal guide to your career. These entries appear weekly, each Monday afternoon, and you’re invited to read along. This entry covers chapters five through seven in the 2008 edition (earlier editions are roughly similar). If you didn’t participate from the start, feel free to jump back to the first part.

In today’s second reading for the book club, we’re going to finish off the first section of the book, “The Things School Never Taught Us About the Job Hunt.” This includes chapters five through seven, which focus on a lot of the specific mechanics of the job hunt that we’re all familiar with. Honestly, I find these three chapters to be the dullest part of this book because the advice is similar to stuff that appears all over the place. Thankfully, there is some awesome material later in the book. So, let’s dig in!

Chapter 5: Resumes & Contacts – How to Get In to See an Employer

Right off the bat, the following statement is made: “The primary purpose of a resume is to get you in for an interview.” That’s all a resume does, period; when you begin to add anything to the resume beyond selling yourself as well as you possibly can, you’re effectively dulling the sword. Given that the average resume is looked at for eight seconds before the first cut is made, you need that sword to be as sharp as possible. Bolles offers a lot of questions to ask yourself when seeking material for your resume; here are some other resume tips for building your own.

Think of your resume as a business card instead of a biography. Much like a business card, every item on a resume should be evaluated with the following question: does this item help me get invited in for an interview? If the answer is ever no, just delete it – if it’s not a resounding yes, mark it for potential deletion and be willing to drop it to make room for other stuff.

This issue is something that generated a lot of interesting discussion a while back. The logical conclusion of Bolles’ points about resumes is to strive to keep it short. If you actually use this filter honestly, you’ll find your resume getting quite short. Thus, I recommended something of a replacement for this question – just ensure your resume is one page in length and keep trimming fat until it gets there.

Another key part of the job hunt is contacts. Contacts are people you can call up and ask for help in getting your foot in the door for an interview. This is a big reason why it’s good to have a big, broad social network – these people can really help you when the time comes to find a new job. Bolles touches on this for just a few pages, but I find it a very valuable and compelling point – one that’s worth following up on by reading the excellent Never Eat Alone.

I will say that I’ve never been involved in getting a job where a personal contact wasn’t far more useful than a resume. My high school work was entirely directly connected to family and friends. My first job in college was set up by my academic advisor. My second job in college was set up by a friend I had come to know in my first college job. My first post-college full time job was with the same employer as my second college job. My next job after that was basically fed to me by a person I had come to know well in my first post-college job, and that’s the one I’m still working on. In no case had my resume helped at all, other than to draw some severe criticism once about it being far too long and full of useless stuff (drawing out the red pen from a person during my interview).

Chapter 6: Interviews – The Employer’s Fears

Bolles offers a ton of excellent advice about interviews here, well worth reading over and thinking about if you find yourself in an interview situation. As usual with What Color Is Your Parachute?, there are at least a few that will leave you saying “Hmmm…” and perhaps even disagreeing, but I do think they’re all worth thinking about. Here are three points that really leaped out at me from this section, with my thoughts on them.

In an interview, determine to observe the 50/50 rule. Basically, the interviewer and interviewee should each be speaking about half the time in an interview. If you feel like you’re talking too much, try to draw the interviewer into conversation. Why does this work? Conversation gets the interviewer involved, and everyone likes to talk and share their thoughts when they feel that they’re wanted, plus it gets the interviewer intellectually involved in your interview. I usually try to incorporate a question back to the interviewer in at least every third question I answer, simply to try to start a conversation.

Employers don’t really care about your past, they only ask about it to help predict your future. That means you should help them out. When questions about your past pop up, speak about the traits of that past experience that tie directly into what they’re looking for. Do not spend time slamming your previous employers, even if that place was the most poisonous place on earth – just simply state you were ready for new challenges. After all, that’s the truth of the matter, isn’t it?

Most interviews are won or lost in the first minute or two. Your personal appearance, your courtesy towards others, and your general values are apparent very quickly in an interview, and they’re usually key parts of it. Dress well (and especially, be cleanly), treat everyone with respect and courtesy that you see, and be humble. In my interview experiences, I can think of two instances where the first minute completely destroyed any hope for a candidate – one involved personal appearance (dressing extremely casually and shaking hands by just touching palms like a dead fish) and the other involved ego (an extremely proud candidate who quickly took on the tone of a braggart).

Chapter 7: Salary Negotiation – Getting Paid What You’re Worth

I had a hard time reading this chapter because recently I was involved in interviewing a person who used the exact strategy that Bolles recommends here – and we failed to come to terms with an excellent candidate and hired the second candidate. He told us during the interview that he had expectations of significant salary growth, then he coupled it with a very high starting salary request. We could have met one or the other of these – but not both.

Nevertheless, Bolles does make some good points. Don’t even bother talking about salary until some form of job offer is on the table, then try to get them to state the first salary number in the negotiation. Use that number (and market research) to state a range for a counteroffer, with your lower number in your range being just inside what you think their potential range is. The end result will be a palatable salary for both you and your employer, because you’re effectively boxing in the higher end of the salary range.

From my perspective, it’s far more important to find a workplace you like than a salary you like. I’d be perfectly happy making $20K less if it meant I would be in a workplace where I was comfortable and happy, because it’s a place where you’ll likely spend half of your waking hours. Don’t undervalue happiness in the workplace – if you’ve found a place that meshes well with you, don’t play hardball with salary negotiation and let that job walk away from you.

Next week, we’ll read chapters eight and nine in What Color Is Your Parachute?, covering finding a place to live and choosing a new career. In my 2008 edition, these appear on pages 139 to 184.

This is the first part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of What Color Is Your Parachute?, a seminal guide to your career. These entries appear weekly, each Monday afternoon, and you’re invited to read along. This entry covers chapters one through four in the 2008 edition (earlier editions are roughly similar).

The book starts off by listing three essential life skills: how to choose and find a job, how to choose and find an appropriate partner, and how to think and make good decisions. I think it’s very rare when people succeed at all three – most of us usually have difficulty with at least one of these. I know personally that I didn’t give adequate thought to my career choices earlier on – and perhaps that’s why I find this book so interesting.

Chapter 1: The Five Best Ways To Hunt For A Job (And The Five Worst)

Most of the worst ways to find a job are rather obvious: using the internet, sending out your resume at random, answering ads in trade journals, answering ads in your local newspaper, and going to private employment agencies. All of these have one thing in common: there’s no active connection between you and the potential employer. All of these connections are passive – it’s quite easy for someone to just toss your resume in the trash can because there’s no investment. There’s also minimal investment from you – you’re just tossing stuff out there to see what sticks. If neither one of you are invested in the connection, it’s mere luck that causes one to be made.

If you want a job, you have to create that sense of investment with a potential employer and also with yourself, and the five best ways to find a job are all focused on creating that sense of investment: finding a job through family or friends or a social contact, knocking on the door of the place where you want a job, calling employers very specifically in the area that you want to work (by yourself as well as in a group), and doing a life changing job hunt.

That last one, the life changing job hunt, is the one that is the most effective, because you spend the time to figure out what you really want. When you’ve really got it figured out, you’ll be invested deeply in it yourself and you’ll chase it with a deep passion. In combination with the other tactics (and combination is key), you’ll have a huge advantage in moving forward to find the job you really want. This book is mostly about that life changing job hunt.

Chapter 2: The Nature of the Job Market

This chapter addresses most of the whining I hear from people who don’t like their jobs or are having a hard time in the job search. Although a lot of points are offered up, a few really stood out to me.

No one owes you a job. It doesn’t matter how great your resume is, no one owes you a job. It’s up to you to step up to the plate, go out there, and do the footwork to get a job. I know a lot of people who just show up to work and sit around, believing somehow that they’re owed a job, and if they’re fired you hear no end to the belly-aching – the same is true for at least a few friends of mine who seem to be engaged in perpetual job searching.

There’s always a “bogeyman.” Over the last several years, it has been job loss to India and China. Right at the moment, it appears to be the falling dollar and peak oil. Just remember that we were all panicked about Japan in the 1980s, for example. I find such sentiments to be amusing – of course we should facilitate some response to the falling dollar, but running around shouting “DOOM!” is not the appropriate one, and we also shouldn’t expect it to cause everyone to lose their jobs.

You can quit at any time. I see a lot of people simply married to their jobs. They’re very unhappy, but they can’t quit for whatever reason they’ve made up in their head. The truth of the matter is that they’ve either put themselves in a financial position where they’re afraid to make some sort of a leap or they like enough aspects of their job that they’re just upset about a small handful of negatives. I have found that building up enough financial security that I could leave my job and not worry too much about it has been amazing for my sense of freedom and independence.

Chapter 3: How to Deal With Handicaps

Part of the reason I wanted to read this book again in great detail is because there are so many little strokes of genius throughout it. The first one is in this chapter, where it suggests a really interesting exercise for job hunters with some sort of handicap. The book provides a list of about 250 action verbs, and then it invites the reader to separate these into two lists – ones you cannot do and ones that you can do (or at least potentially can do).

This activity is wonderful because most people with handicaps that might still be reading What Color Is Your Parachute? will have a much longer list of things they can do than things they cannot do. That’s incredibly empowering, as it takes the focus away from the handicap and puts it on the skills a person has, which is where the value is anyway.

For non-handicapped readers, there’s really only one point that should be brought out of this chapter: the idea that a handwritten thank you note is incredibly valuable to send after any interview, whether it be good or bad. A note like that shows that you actually care about the position in a personal way, which speaks a lot about your character to the people doing the hiring. You’ll also stand out distinctly from the horde that doesn’t bother to send one.

Chapter 4: How Much Help Is The Internet?

If you start using online resources a lot and think about them critically, the answers in this chapter aren’t surprising. The internet is very good for connecting with people (and maintaining connections) as well as doing research into your potential career choice. Where it fails is in direct job applications: most of the online postings I see are usually met with a pile of spam-filled submissions and nonsense. Plus, most online job postings seem to already have a candidate in mind and the posting is done as part of procedure.

Thus, use the internet to talk to people and do research, but don’t use it as your primary mechanism to actually find a job. Use those people that you’re connected to and the other techniques identified as good ones from the first chapter.

I will say that every job I’ve ever had came about as a result of a personal connection with someone, either directly with the employer or via a friend who connected me to the employer. The internet only helped with doing some preparation for interviews and also with maintaining friendships and associations.

Next week, we’ll read chapters five through seven in What Color Is Your Parachute?, covering resumes, interviews, and salary negotiation. In my 2008 edition, these appear on pages 59 to 138.

This Monday, the first entry in the book club reading of What Color Is Your Parachute? will be posted, so if you’re interested in participating, you might want to dig out your copy. I will be reading the 2008 edition of the book, but the changes from earlier editions are pretty minimal and you should be able to pretty easily follow along no matter what edition you have. If you’re not sure about participating, read my review of the book and it may help you make up your mind.

The schedule I plan on having nine entries in this edition of the book club, one a week for nine weeks. These will always go up on Mondays, so that you can read the piece on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I plan on spending two weeks (i.e., two entries) on the first part of the book, two on the second part, and five on the last part because I think the writeups for the last part will be far more involved and interesting. This book is a quick read, with lots of pictures and such, so don’t be shy if it seems like I’m suggesting a lot of pages to read in a week. It averages out to well under ten a day, and many of those pages are littered with images.

Ready? The first entry, to be posted on Monday, will cover chapters one through four, up to page 59 in my 2008 edition of the book. It’s about fifty pages, but very lightly written and with a healthy dose of pictures. Try reading a chapter a night and you’ll be good to go!