What Happened to Your Parachute?

0atwong • 19th Jun 2006 • Conversation Pieces

Good book/advice on helping you find the right job for you.

What Happened to Your Parachute?
In 1991, the Library of Congress surveyed more than 2,000 readers and crafted a list that it grandly called “25 books that have shaped readers’ lives.” The list included many of the usual suspects: The Bible, of course. “Don Quixote.” “The Catcher in the Rye.” But there at the bottom, lodged alphabetically between “War and Peace” and “The Wizard of Oz,” was a business book — the only such book on the list, and the only volume, fiction or nonfiction, whose title poses a question: “What Color Is Your Parachute?”

Richard Nelson Bolles, now 72, offered up that inscrutable question 30 years ago when he wrote the first edition of “What Color Is Your Parachute?: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers” (Ten Speed Press). It was one of the first job-hunting books on the market. It is still arguably the best. And it is indisputably the most popular, measured by its status as one of the best-selling books of all time: 288 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 6 million copies in print, between 15,000 and 20,000 copies sold every month.