May 6, 2014
There’s a brand new section to this book this year. Of course, there are always new sections, inasmuch as I rethink the whole book, I rewrite, and drastically change it, every single year. But this is different. The new section is Appendix B: A Ten-Minute Crash Course for Returning Vets.
It took me three months to research and write this. I interviewed veterans, returning veterans, and counselors who work with veterans, and I combed the Internet, reading every article I could possibly lay my hands on.
I discovered veterans, their spouses and family, not to mention veterans’ counselors, have been using Parachute for years. What did they find the most valuable? Stories. The stories they tell, in doing chapter 7, the Flower Exercise. Anyway, I hope new returning vets, and their counselors, will find this new Appendix helpful, and valuable.
This book demands a lot of every reader. Mostly in the way of thinking, and rethinking, what you thought were essential truths about job-hunting, what you thought were essential truths about yourself. But the rewards for this bit of thinking are considerable. Use it, and good health!
This is my 44th year of rewriting this book. Every year. So many readers write to say it changed their lives. That’s extravagant praise, but I understand what they’re trying to say. I am a grateful man, and I will close this Final Word by noting the things I’m personally grateful for.
First of all, I am enchanted by every moment of my life with such a wondrous woman as my wife, Marci. I am so grateful for her brains, wit, and love. I’m grateful for Marci’s grown children, Janice and Adlai, with their families, and Marci’s first grandchild, Logan, now five years old. (I have ten of my own. They are all as dear as can be, to me.)
Then I am grateful for the family that brought me into this world, who loved me and played with me. I had a wonderful Mother and Dad. I had two great siblings: one brother (the famous reporter/martyr Don Bolles), and one sister (Ann). They’re all gone now; I’m the only survivor from those generations.
I had four children; I lost one in 2012 to a sudden massive cerebral hemorrhage, at age fifty-eight. That was Mark. I wept over that, a lot, and miss him greatly. He lived with me for six out of the last twelve years of his life. He was the author of our book Job-Hunting Online. He was a treasure.
I’m grateful for my three remaining grown children and their families: Stephen, Gary, and Sharon, plus their most-loving mother, my former wife, Jan, who shares in all our family gatherings.
As for the living, I want to express my gratitude to my dearest friend (besides Marci), Daniel Porot of Geneva, Switzerland—we taught together for two weeks every summer, for nineteen years; also Dave Swanson, plus my 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 this country, Howard Figler, beloved friend and co-author of our manual for career counselors; Marty Nemko; Joel Garfinkle; Dick Knowdell; Rich Feller; Dick Gaither; Warren Farrell; Chuck Young; Susan Joyce; and the folks over at Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California, now an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group of Random House, plus Crown’s head, Maya Mavjee, who has been very kind to me.
My original publisher, Phil Wood, is gone now. He was my publisher for almost forty years; he was a dear man, and I owe him more than I can say for helping Parachute find its audience, and for letting me have great control over the annual editions. Parachute would never have sold ten million copies, if it were not for him.
I much appreciate my current friends over at Ten Speed, who have also been extraordinarily kind to me: Aaron Wehner (publisher), Lisa Westmoreland, Kara Van de Water, Chris Barnes, George Young, Betsy Stromberg, and Katy Brown. My especial thanks to my readers—more than ten million of you—for buying my books, trusting my counsel, and following your dream. I have never met so many wonderful souls. I am so thankful for you all.
It is not fashionable these days to talk about one’s faith, but I’m going to do it anyway. I am very quiet about my faith; it’s just … there. But I want to quietly acknowledge that it is the source of whatever grace, wisdom, or compassion I have ever found, or shared with others. I have all my life been a committed Christian, a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, and an Episcopalian (I was an ordained priest in that Church for fifty years). I thank my Creator every night for such a life, such a wonderful mission, as He has given me: to help millions of people make their lives really count for something, as we all go spinning through space, here on Spaceship Earth.
Dick Bolles
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 sexual gender. Today, however, our priorities have shifted once again. Now, the distinguishing of sexual 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. This book is a conversation: I’m sitting down with you to tell you what I know. Conversations have rhythms. You emphasize a word here, you speak a word softly, there. There are pauses. The speed of one sentence sometimes changes from the previous. All of this is difficult to reproduce in print, if all the text looks equal. So I use italics, I use dashes, I use parentheses, I use color, etc. to reproduce in print—as much as I can—the rhythms of natural speech.
Finally, I guess some of my spelling (and capitalization) is weird. (You say “weird”; I say “playful.”) I sometimes like writing it as “e-mail,” for example, but other times I feel like writing it as “email.” Fortunately, since this is my own book, I get to play by my own peculiar inclinations and playfulness; I’m just grateful that ten million readers have gone along. Nothing delights a child (at heart) more, than being found at play.
—Dick Bolles
P.S. Over the last forty years a few critics have complained that this book is 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?