Finding Your Calling
My latest article, in Sunday's NYT Book Review, looks at the job-hunting manual What Color Is Your Parachute? (I read the 1973, 1983, 2004, and 2005 editions.)
Thirty-five years ago, an Episcopal minister self-published 100 copies of a slim job-hunting guide and gave them away at a conference for college chaplains, many of whom were facing layoffs. Soon he was getting requests for more and more copies. Two years later, the little book had a commercial publisher, the small Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, Calif. "What Color Is Your Parachute?" has since become a classic, the "job hunter's bible," and sold more than 8 million copies. The 2005 edition, with a large grinning photo of its author, Richard N. Bolles, on the cover, was published in November. A lot has changed since the early 1970's, but not as much as we sometimes like to think. Job losses and career angst didn't start with the bursting of the tech bubble or the midlife crises of the baby boomers. Even way back when, white-collar workers, some of them highly trained technical experts, lost their jobs for reasons beyond their control. The first commercial edition of "Parachute" singled out aerospace engineers, whose profession was "being phased out of our society."
The book takes its title from the idea that sooner or later each of us is going to have to bail out of our current job, usually involuntarily, with only our enduring talents to support us: "The time to figure out where your parachute is, what color it is, and to strap it on, is now -- and not when the vocational airplane that you are presently in is on fire and diving toward the ground," Bolles wrote in the 1973 edition.
"Parachute" arrived on the scene when business practices and employee ideals and attitudes were beginning to shift. The postwar "loyalty ethic," in which workers got security in exchange for obedience, was dying. More Americans were starting to look for personal fulfillment in their work, which made them increasingly likely to change jobs, while employers were becoming more ruthlessly pragmatic about layoffs. "The view that there was loyalty between company and worker back then was also a myth," Bolles said in a 1999 interview in Fast Company magazine. "Even then," he said, "the conditions that produced the workplace realities of today were very much in place."
The article's conclusion got compressed a bit for space reasons. Here's the original:
The old work ethic preached that liking your work wasn't important. The new one preaches that enjoyment is essential, even (in Bolles's 1972 formulation) "divine radar" indicating what you should be doing. Parachute's 2005 edition includes a chapter aimed at helping readers identify the transferable skills they most enjoy using and the environments in which they find the greatest satisfaction. Its title, "When You Lose All Track of Time," suggests a purely secular reading of Parachute's search for meaningful work.
Even if you don't believe that a higher power has given you a destiny on earth, every human being has the capacity to find what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls "flow"--the total engagement with some sort of problem solving, from climbing mountains to writing computer programs to knitting, that causes a person to lose track of time. Flow activities give people their happiest moments, and these activities are intrinsically rewarding, regardless of any greater meaning. The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that provides flow.
That message makes Parachute not only practical but intellectually contrarian. Protestantism, claimed Weber, divested work of its earthly delight, making it purely a religious duty. Capitalism, he continued, "has destroyed" that delight "forever."
What Color Is Your Parachute? is an extended, market-grounded argument that Weber was wrong. A century after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was published, the best-selling book about job hunting is an explicitly Protestant guide to finding joy at work.
For more on related themes, see my 1995 review of Charles Heckscher's White-Collar Blues, this oped piece on William Whyte's The Organization Man, and this lecture on the "power of play," derived from chapter seven of The Future and Its Enemies.