Coaching practices for Richard Bolles Career Advice

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Richard Bolles Career Advice, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I keep catching myself making calls based on how they’ll make me look rather than what’s actually best for the thing I’m building
• I finally know what I should be focused on, but good opportunities keep landing in my lap and I say yes to all of them
• When I’m facing a big decision I realize I have no one wise and honest to think it through with
• I keep nailing down the exact plan before I’ve sorted out who’s actually in the boat with me, and then the plan shifts and the wrong people can’t adapt
• I’m pulled in a dozen directions and none of them is clearly the thing

Practices that may help

1. Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
   An informational interview is a low-stakes conversation with someone in a role or field you’re curious about — you ask questions, they share experience, and no job is on the table. Richard Bolles’s What Color Is Your Parachute? popularised this as a career research tool; the evidence is largely observational and practitioner, but it consistently shows that direct conversation with insiders produces better career decisions and unexpected referrals.
2. Channel ambition to the institution, not yourself
   Care more about the organization’s success than your personal legacy.
   Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
3. Warren Buffett’s Two-List Strategy
   The Buffett two-list strategy asks you to write down 25 career or life goals, circle the top 5, then treat everything else on the list as active avoidances — not "do later" items. The story is apocryphal and its precise origin is unverified, but the underlying principle — that near-priority goals steal attention from top priorities — is consistent with how cognitive resources and opportunity costs work.
4. Ruthlessly prune commitments outside the intersection
   Once the intersection is visible, say no to opportunities — even good ones — that fall outside it.
   The Hedgehog Concept
5. Build a personal board of advisers
   Curate a small group of diverse, trusted people who know your work and challenge your thinking.
   Never Eat Alone: Building a Real Network
6. Get the right people on the bus before setting direction
   Prioritize who is doing the work before deciding what to do.
   Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
7. Map your three circles honestly
   Separately answer each circle — passion, best-at, economic engine — before looking for the intersection.
   The Hedgehog Concept
8. Know your two selves (Adam I and Adam II)
   Distinguish the self that wants to build and achieve from the self that wants to be good.
   The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
9. Designing Your Life, Made Practical
   Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
10. Investing in people over status
    Direct discretionary time and energy toward relationships, not just career and acquisition.
    The Good Life: Lessons from the Harvard Study

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