Richard Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute?
Find Your Purpose of Life and a Passion for Life | Richard Bolles Interview with Dr. Paul Dyer
Dr. Paul Dyer: For this segment of Author’s Corner, we’re going to be speaking to Dick Bolles, the author of What Color Is Your Parachute, by far the best selling job finding book ever…which has now sold over 10 million copies in many, many different countries, many different languages, people from all around the world. But Dick has written numerous other books including, The Three Boxes of Life and this other book over here, that we’re going to talk about a little bit later…How to Find Your Mission in Life. And I just want to say thank you and welcome and I’m looking forward to chatting with you.
Richard Bolles: You’re very welcome, Paul.
Paul: I really want to begin, maybe, with the story of how this all began. You have a very interesting background. And a number of years ago you had a vision, of course, to write a book about job finding. How did it begin?
Dick: Well, I was an ordained Episcopal minister, and was pastor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and they had a budget crunch. And so, shortly after I had moved out here with my wife and my children, I found myself out of work. And so the dean was quite upset about this, he was my most immediate boss, the dean of the cathedral. So, he went looking to see where else I could find a job and a calling, and he found there was this position open that nobody wanted. I took the job and I had a handsome travel budget and as I was travelling around visiting all of the chaplains on all of the campuses in those nine western states, they all started to talk about a common theme. The common theme was that they were experiencing a budget crunch and they were on the edge of being let go also, in order to balance the budget. They all said to me, what do we do… they were often rather poorly paid and they didn’t have the wherewithal to go back to college and their children were usually preteens almost as a rule. So they said to me…find out how we can change careers without going back to school. Concomitant with that was another question hanging like this sword of Damoclese over their heads was…how do we find a job when we’ve been in the institutional church all our life and we cant adduce experience that the world of work would recognize. So I had to find out how to go job hunting when resumes, agencies, and ads didn’t work for them and I had to find out they could change careers without having to spend a lot of time going back to school. I travelled everywhere and I kept asking these two questions and ultimately, I struck gold. I met a man in Mclean, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. named John Crystal. And John had been on the warpath for years against the so-called employment system of our country. And he was a devout Roman Catholic and so he shared with me all the research he had done and ultimately, I put together all of my notes and I decided to just self-publish them. And I distributed it to all of the campus ministers in my jurisdiction. They all loved the book and they started to show it to friends…I started to get orders from people I’d never imagined had any interest in this…The Pentagon, General Electric, CCNY, UCLA... because they said I had uncovered alternative ways of figuring out what you want to do with your life.
Paul: What is it that separates, in your viewpoint, what you’ve done with Parachute, from everything else?
Dick: I can only answer what people have told me. They like what they hear…that it’s a real human being writing the book and not some automaton or some person that has some image of how he should sound and he tries to sound that way. I am immensely, I have always been, immensely playful from morning until night. So, I put a lot of playfulness into the book. And also I decided to make it a book with a lot of illustrations…I couldn’t afford an illustrator so I went and got these books of out of date lithographs, they were no longer under copyright. And I do think also, the other factor was the updating of it every year. I kept it fresh and current and when I was bored by the book, I rewrote the book. So I joke that… next September, not this September, but next September will be the 40th anniversary of the book… so I joke that I haven’t published a book that’s sold 10 million copies, I’ve written forty books that have sold ten million copies, it’s just that they all have the same title.
Purpose of Life and Passion for Life
Paul: One of the things you and I talked about a little earlier…as I shared with you, a lot of my work is around this notion of calling and this idea of finding your mission in life…as far as I can tell, when you use that term, that’s a synonym for calling or purpose or mission.
Dick: Yeah.
Paul: And one of the things that you say is that you can’t talk about that calling/purpose/mission without talking about spiritual and religious issues. Why is that?
Dick: Well, it’s because of history. Every word that we try to use to describe a more-than-okay job.... we try to describe a job that has fervor and fire to it and causes us to get excited…every word we use is a religious word. When people try to duck the religious vocabulary like calling or vocation, which implies somebody that calls…vocation is just Latin for the same word…. We duck it by trying to go to another word and it’s usually, 9 times out of 10, is enthusiasm, which is a Greek meaning ‘God in us.’ So, I don’t think it’s possible to talk about calling without referring to the spiritual roots because the whole subject from its earliest inception in history has always been a religious word, or a spiritual word if you prefer.
Paul: You have always been open about your own faith perspective. You are overtly Christian in your faith perspective and one of the things that intrigues me is that your work has been enjoyed…appreciated, by people of a wide variety of faith perspectives, and those without any faith perspective. How is it that you have this Christian faith that you talk openly about and it seems to go well with other people.
Dick: I think it’s due to the fact that I’ve always made it my intention in this world, not to try to create a tribe, not to try to find people and manipulate people to believe the same things I believe and so on… I’ve always tried to say, “Here’s my story. If you have a similar story or you can translate your vocabulary to my vocabulary, that’s fine with me.” I’ve never felt the need to manipulate people. From my perspective, I think of reality as a diamond, and it has a million facets to it…you turn the diamond it catches the sunlight and it sparkles and therefore, when you’re with other people, they’re seeing another facet of the diamond, and you’re profiting from what they’re seeing as well as they’re profiting from what you tell them about your own story. So, I don’t just tolerate different viewpoints, I love other viewpoints.
Paul: The more I work with people in this arena, and I’ve done this for a long time, I become convinced that people are sort of driven to find this purpose. Sometimes it’s very subtle…sometimes it’s very overt. I’m curious, if you also think that everyone is driven in some level to find a calling….a purpose, and if so, what is it that’s driving them?
Dick: Well, I would say that God pushes as much of himself as much as he can into all of our lives without compromising our freedom of choice. He won’t do anything that will make us absolutely have to do something. But, because love is the moral foundation of the universe, because that’s the nature of our creator as I believe… He must tolerate freedom of will because you cannot love unless you have the freedom not to love. And so, I believe that God presses his influence, His subtle Spirit into our lives… of everybody, not just my life, not just your life, but everybody’s lives. But sometimes people can hear that, sometimes they cannot. So, I believe everyone is called by God, that is to say he is active…to use current terminology which I abhor… he’s proactive in coming into their lives, he doesn’t wait to be invited. I believe that he’s always trying to press as much of himself under His various guises. Through the mind he presents Himself as truth, to the emotions. He presents himself as beauty, to the will He presents himself as morality. I think He has many guises or facets like the diamond that I was mentioning. But He does try to get into everybody’s life, because He has created everyone to be unique. So unless all of the world is contributing…all of us, what we can…we haven’t fully fulfilled God’s purpose…because His purpose is that everyone is a contributor to the grand design he has for this Earth at least. I do believe that His influence is very strong.
The problem is not what He is doing; the problem is in our responses. Over the years I’ve observed that our responses are three-fold…either we choose to do a careful thinking out of what we want to do with our life and we try to find a purpose by that careful step-by-step process, hopefully that process is guided by the experience of many people. We try this, we try that, it works, if doesn’t work, we refine it…so, when people are presented with some help, inviting that purpose in life, as by Rick Warren and some of the other names that are synonymous with this subject. If they have what we would call a step-by-step process, that is given birth to by experience, they latch on to that and find that very, very useful. Unfortunately, not everyone is in that boat…that’s not the response that everyone makes to the presence of God in their lives, the presence of God’s Spirit. The other two options that I’ve observed over the years are luck and intuition. I know people that literally travel up and down America hoping to find their vocation by essentially stumbling over it.
Paul: But this is sometimes successful?
Dick: Oh, absolutely. And intuition is best (represented) in the film of Momma Mia, where she has three candidates for her father and when she’s asked by her peers, “How will you know him?”…and she says, “I’ll know him when I see him.” And intuition operates on that level. It says, well… I don’t have to think about this, I don’t have to do a step by step process to try to figure out what the purpose of my life is…I’ll know it when I see it. I think it’s much easier to find out what your purpose in life is if you’re paying attention. And it doesn’t matter whether your pathway is luck, or your pathway is intuition, or your pathway is step-by-step…you still have to pay attention to when it is that you’re coming alive. And part of our task, if we’re going to be a midwife to help people get to this point in their life, part of our task is to get them to notice and create whatever we can…exercises or telling stories from our own experience or whatever. One of my favorite stories is in another book I wrote called The Three Boxes of Life…where a biologist is walking through Times Square and he’s with a friend and they’re chatting and it’s high noon…Suddenly the biologist pauses and he says, “Listen to that cricket.” And the friend looks at him like he’s gone mad and he said, “How can you hear a cricket in Times Square? The DEN is outrageous.” So the biologist reaches in his pocket and pulls out this huge handful of coins and tosses them up in the air and as they bounce on the pavement everyone whirls around and pounces on the coins. And he says to his friend, “See, we hear what we’re listening for.” And so I think part of our attempt to help people find their purpose in life has to be that we teach them what to listen for in their own lives.
Paul: It seems to me that a significant part of finding fulfillment, passion, joy, is learning to do what you do…to use your gifts, your God given gifts and talents for a particular purpose…but not for yourself, actually for others. And even the guy/the gal on the assembly line that is making the car can have that perspective. Does that resonate with you? Does that make sense?
Dick: Sure. Of course.
Paul: It’s an astounding thing that even goes back to the fundamental question we ask, "What do I want to do with my life?” versus, “What do you want me to do with my life?”…Talking to the one who calls in this case. Is that distinction important?
Dick: Yeah, especially if it’s addressed to God and not to one’s parents. I always tell people the worst career counselor they can possibly have is their father or their mother because they’ll say, “Dear, I want you to do this or this with your life. I want you to be a lawyer or I want you to be a banker or a nurse or whatever.” And the question, as you were saying, has to not be simply asking of ourselves what is it we want to do, but it’s asking of someone else for guidance as to what is on their mind…and if that question is addressed to our Creator, it is the key to it all. But all too often, we don’t address it to our Creator, we address it to our parents and the people around us and we try to listen to see what they would respect more….or if we’re thinking about someday, say we’re very young and we’re thinking about someday getting married, we try to think of what vocation could I be in where I would attract a partner such as I want to find. And when it goes awry like that, which is how I perceive it… I think it can become dreadful, because we can spend half our life trying to please other people rather than look hard at all the intuitions and even thoughts from God that are floating around in our minds.
How Do I Find My Purpose
Paul: You’ve said something very interesting in this book, How to Find Your Mission in Life, that I would love to have you expand upon a little bit, and that’s the idea that God is already revealed in many ways…
Dick: …In our members.
Paul: In our members, right. Would you say more about that?
Dick: Well, it’s a screwy theory because you can’t prove it’s right and you can’t prove it’s wrong. But I like it…I think sometimes our imagination, as we suppose, is making creating out of holed cloth, that has no origin…no proof…no sense, yet our imagination is guided by God and so sometimes we’ll come up with stories that we might classify, or certain people, certainly people around us would classify as fables or fairytales, that may just be true. So, I’ve imagined that maybe before our soul comes into this body on this earth we were in conversation with God agreeing what our mission would been once we came to earth…with the condition that when we’re born we have amnesia about this conversation. So, we must start to uncover what that conversation was about. And God has given us two clues…he’s given us certain gifts that are not unique…cause if you can ride a bike, there are a lot of other people that can ride a bike, and so on…but are unique when you string them all together. They are like a string of pearls, and the way you string them all together is not the way somebody else would. And so, the uniqueness lies in the arrangement of the gifts that God has given to us. The second gift He has given to us is not that he has given us all these talents. It’s that He has given us a kind of radar about our vocation and purpose in life which is, we have certain gifts we particularly enjoy and we like to suppose in our ignorance that that enjoyment is purely idiosyncratic…produced by ourselves…with no origins or connection to the Divine, and I don’t believe that. I believe that when we are excited at what we are doing, that it is precisely because the radar is telling us that we’re getting close to the gifts that God most wants us to use. And those two gifts together, I think, help us chart our path toward our purpose.
Paul: Many people do have the sense that they know what they should be doing with their life…they know what their purpose is…
Dick: Absolutely.
Paul: … and yet don’t do it.
Dick: Everyone has priorities, and sometimes they’re more important to them than what it is they’re talking about doing, at least for a time being. So they may know what they are called to do. They may have a sense of the purpose for their lives, but if they don’t get to it right away….it could be just ignoring the voice of God, it could be a lot of things but in terms of what it could be that’s good, it could be that they have other priorities that are more important to them…at least at that time in their lives. Maybe those priorities will change, as they get older.
Paul: I really want to ask you about your life in terms of, you know, your own calling. I’m guessing the answer is yes, you’re following your calling…If you were going to describe, what is your purpose in life, what would you say?
Dick: I’ve thought of my calling as simply being comparable to that of a person that does surfing and he takes his surfboard out and he waits for a big wave to come along and then he gets up on the board and rides the wave in, and then when it comes crashing down he picks up himself from the sand and his board and goes back out again. I’ve often thought that my calling is more analogous to that than it is to anything else. For example, I wanted to be a chemical engineer. Why? Cause I like magic. When I first went to MIT, we had a chemistry professor who was a showman and I thought, “This is why I’m going to be a chemical engineer.” I love the magic. But, I made the mistake of going to church which I did every Sunday. And I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral in San Francisco and they had a guest preacher and he was the dean of the nearby Episcopal Seminary. And he talked that particular Sunday about how 900 small Episcopal churches across the country were going to have to shut down that year because they had absolutely no minister that could serve them. I was very good friends with my minister back home, so I went home for the Spring vacation and I said, “You know, I’m very troubled by this sermon I heard.” And he said, “What was it about?” And I said, “Well, it wasn’t about me, but it was about a problem that the Episcopal Church is facing, with these congregations loosing a home.” And I don’t know where I had the wisdom, I’m astonished as I look back because I think…I didn’t learn that until I was forty-five. But apparently I knew it when I was twenty. The wisdom I had…I remember saying to him was, “You’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem.” And I said, “Clearly, I’m part of the problem. I’m emblematic of why young men aren’t offering themselves for the ministry.” So he said, “Would you like to go in and see a seminary?” And I said, “Sure, why not?” But before we went, I realized I was being called. I felt the tug. I said, “I’m just going to trust the Lord to give me the power and I’m going to do it.” I never charted that I’m going to be a chemical engineer then I’m going to be a minister, then I’m going to be an author, then I’m going to be a speaker, and then I’m going to be a workshop leader. I waited and at every point where there was an intersection of choices and I could go down one road or the other, I chose to go down the road that I felt was more…I think, in the guiding principle I had was that I wanted to be helpful to people. And so, part of my calling, I think, is to be w truth teller, with gentleness and empathy. And so, that’s guided my decisions as to where the next wave is that I can get up on my board and surf. Incidentally I can’t surf, I can’t even swim.
Paul: Well, Dick, I wanted to thank you…sincerely thank you for opening up your home to us, spending some time with us, and giving us lots of interesting things to say. I’m sure a lot of people will be interested in getting in touch with the workshops and so forth. What’s the best way that they can do that?
Dick: There’s a URL on the Internet, all-lowercase…. fivedayworkshop@aol.com. I also have a website, which is called www.JobHuntersBible.com. And they can pick up tips to help them figure out what their purpose in life is on that site, without necessarily having to come to the workshop.
Paul: And of course if they want to buy any of your books…any bookstore in America, it’s there. And they can also click right on my website and go to Amazon and purchase your works as well. So, Dick I want to thank you.
Dick: You’re very welcome, Paul.
Paul: I appreciate it.
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