Read What Color Is Your Parachute? Online
Authors: Richard N. Bolles
What Color Is Your Parachute? (3 page)
I think a lot about gratitude. I didn’t get here, alone. I do not stay here, alone. I am not inspired, alone. I am not able to write, alone. Everyone of us is part of a community; I like to say I’m a member of an earthly orchestra (I’m the piccolo player).
I thank God that I am still in splendid, vigorous health, that I still have all my marbles and wits about me, that I love to write more than ever, that I love to help people more than ever—and that I am enchanted by every moment of my life with such a wondrous woman as my wife, Marci. We laugh together, all day long.
Now I know that life is serious: we only get one shot at it, so far as we know. And that should lend a solemnity to life, that prevents us from just taking it casually. I have experienced my share of tragedy, on this Earth; sometimes I felt that I would never recover. So I empathize with everyone going through hard times. But still, there is a lot of humor to be found, day by day, in the ridiculous way we humans sometimes behave. I love laughing. I particularly love laughing at myself. So does Marci. Laughter keeps us young.
I’m grateful for my family, and I want to name them here: I’m grateful for my dear sister Ann Johnson, and for my own dear children, and their families: Stephen, Mark, Gary, and Sharon, plus their most-loving mother, my former wife, Jan, not to mention my former stepdaughter, Dr. Serena Brewer, whom I helped raise for twenty years. I’m grateful also for Marci’s two grown children, Adlai and Janice, with their marriage partners respectively, Aimee and Marcel, and Marci’s one-year-old grandson, Logan. I love them all dearly.
My especial thanks to Marci for playing hostess to the Five-Day Workshops we conduct quarterly, in our home in the San Francisco Bay
Area. It is a rare woman indeed who will let twenty-one strangers come be guests in her home for five days at a time, as she cooks breakfast and lunch for them all, while radiating grace and individual concern for each, throughout.
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I want to express my gratitude also to my dearest friend (
besides Marci
), Daniel Porot of Geneva, Switzerland—we taught together two weeks every summer, for nineteen years, and still talk regularly; Dave Swanson, ditto; plus my other 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 the U.S., Howard Figler, beloved friend and co-author of our manual for career counselors; Marty Nemko; Joel Garfinkle; Richard Leider; Richard Knowdell; Rich Feller; Dick Gaither; Warren Farrell; Margaret Dikel; Susan Joyce; and Gerry Crispin.
Speaking of dear (and I was) there is this dear man, whose mischievous picture you see here. His name is Jim Kell.
He died this month (as I write). At least twelve thousand job-hunters will know his name instantly. That’s how many of your e-mails he answered over the years. Patiently, thoroughly, helpfully. He was never paid a cent for doing that. It was his offering, and his pleasure. He told me, many times, how he went about answering them. He would read them each night before retiring. Then he would rise at 4 a.m., meditate a while, then read them once more to see what insights his mind had come up with while he slept, and then pray to “The Great, Good God” as he used to say, to ask for inspiration as to what he could say that might be helpful. Many of you have written me, over the years, to say how helpful, indeed, was his answer to your e-mail. What you may not know is what a divine sense of calling he had, and what a wicked sense of humor he
displayed. He was always so much fun to be around. Now he has gone, peacefully, to his well-deserved rest. The word is bandied about much too idly these days, but if you ever wanted to meet a real “saint,” you had only to meet Jim, and you instantly knew. (Unless you were a dunce.) We will never see another one like him.
Another dear friend who died earlier this year was Sue Cullen. She was from the same place as Jim, and they in fact knew each other well. Sue taught
Parachute
for some twenty-six years, and was the most loving, gentle soul you would ever want to know. She died tragically young, leaving a bereaved husband and grown family. I will miss her like crazy. But I end up being so grateful for her life. She was a treasure. I spent dozens of days in her presence. I wish it had been hundreds.
In closing, I want to publicly acknowledge our Creator. A lot of folks don’t believe in God; but I have been a man of faith all my life. I mention this here because all I do, springs from that. He is the source of whatever grace, wisdom, or compassion I have ever found, and it is He who has given me my burning desire to help others. I am grateful beyond measure for such a life, and such a mission as Our Creator, known to me through Jesus Christ, has given to me. I am grateful to Him for being 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, the crusading newspaperman Don Bolles, killed by a car bomb at high noon in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, back in 1976—now memorialized in one of the rooms at the new Newseum building in Washington, D.C.
Dick Bolles
P.S. My thanks also to all the folks over at Ten Speed Press here in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. (Ten Speed, now an “imprint” of Crown Publishing in New York City, just moved into new digs out here on the West Coast, at: 2625 Alcatraz Avenue #505, Berkeley, CA 94705.) Anyway, my profound thanks to Phil Wood, who as I mentioned earlier was my friend and publisher for forty years; he is now publisher emeritus; Aaron Wehner, current publisher; and to George Young, Kara Van de Water, Lisa Westmoreland, and Betsy Stromberg. My thanks also
to Doug Abrams, a remarkable man whom I bumped into this year, and now work with; he has been a great continuing help to me. As has Glenn Jones, “my” videographer, who has been putting together the beginning of what will ultimately be a library of videos of me. If that is of any interest to you, you can turn to
www.dickbollesworkshop.com
.
I also want to tell all my readers—more than ten million of you—how much I appreciate your not only buying my books, but more to the point, trusting my counsel, and pursuing your dream for your own life. I have never met so many wonderful souls. I am grateful for you all.
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For more information, you can e-mail
[email protected]
.
I want to explain four points of grammar, in this book of mine: pronouns, commas, italics, and spelling. My unorthodox use of them invariably offends unemployed English teachers so much that instead of finishing the exercises, they immediately write to apply for a job as my editor.
To save us unnecessary correspondence, let me explain. Throughout this book, I often use the apparently plural pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” after singular antecedents—such as, “You must approach someone for a job and tell them what you can do.” This sounds strange and even wrong to those who know English well. To be sure, we all know there is another pronoun—“you”—that may be either singular or plural, but few of us realize that the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” were also once treated as both plural and singular in the English language. This changed, at a time in English history when agreement in number became more important than agreement as to gender. Today, however, our priorities have shifted once again. Now, the distinguishing of gender is considered by many to be more important than agreement in number.
The common artifices used for this new priority, such as “s/he,” or “he and she,” are—to my mind—tortured and inelegant. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in their classic,
The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing
, agree, and argue that it is time to bring back the earlier usage of “they,” “them,” and “their” as both singular and plural—just as “you” is/are. They further argue that this return to the earlier historical usage has already become quite common out on the street—witness a typical sign by the ocean that reads, “Anyone using this beach after 5 p.m. does so at their own risk.” I have followed Casey and Kate’s wise recommendations in all of this.
As for my commas, they are deliberately used according to my own rules—rather than according to the rules of historic grammar (which I did learn—I hastily add, to reassure my old Harvard professors, who despaired of me weekly, during English class). In spite of those rules, I follow my own, which are: to write conversationally, and put in a comma wherever I would normally stop for a breath, were I speaking the same line.
The same conversational rule applies to my use of italics. I use italics wherever, were I speaking the sentence, I would emphasize that word or phrase. I also use italics where there is a digression of thought, and
I want to maintain the main flow of the sentence. All in all, I write as I speak. Hence the dashes (—) to indicate a break in my thought.
Finally, some of my spelling (and capitalization) is weird. (You say “weird”; I say “playful.”) I happen to like writing it “e-mail,” for example, instead of “email.” Most of the time. Fortunately, since this is my own book, I get to play by my own peculiar interpretations; I’m just grateful that ten million readers have gone along. Nothing delights a child (at heart) more, than being allowed to play.
P.S. Speaking of “playful,” over the last thirty-five years a few critics (very few) have claimed that
Parachute
is not serious enough (they object to the cartoons, here, which poke fun at almost everything). On the other hand, a few have complained that the book is too serious, and too complicated in its vocabulary and grammar for anyone except a college graduate. Two readers, however, have written me with a different view.
The first one, from England, said there is an index that analyzes a book to tell you what grade in school you must have finished, in order to be able to understand it. My book’s index, he said, turned out to be 6.1, which means you need only have finished sixth grade in a U.S. school in order to understand it.
Here in the U.S., a college instructor came up with a similar finding. He phoned me to tell me that my book was rejected by the authorities as a proposed text for the college course he was teaching, because (they said) the book’s language/grammar was not up to college level. “What level was it?” I asked. “Well,” he replied, “when they analyzed it, it turned out to be written on an eighth grade level.”
Sixth or eighth grade—that seems just about right to me. Why make job-hunting complicated, when it can be expressed so simply even a child could understand it?
R.N.B.