10 books like The Proximity Principle

In June 1983 I just graduated from college, did not have a full-time job, and was living in my mother’s spare room. While I contemplated my next move, I scoured the help wanted ads and went to my local bookstore to get guidance. Luckily, I bought a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute.

The approach I read in this book started with “who am I,” not what job I wanted. The book helped me identify my goals, interests, skills, and preferred work environment.

Katharine Brooks has updated the information and content of the book while maintaining the spirit and intentions of the late Richard Bolles. If you are just starting your career journey, start with the most popular and bestselling career handbook.

Getting your dream job is only the first step. You want to start strong and deliver value to the organization as quickly as possible. That is where Michael Watkins’ book comes in handy. When I was the head of talent management for a Fortune 50 company, we gave a copy of this book to each newly hired executive.

This book outlines how to promote yourself and learn your new role faster. It helps you analyze your business situation and choose the right strategy to get things done. Finally, it shares how to build a winning team that delivers results. You want your boss, peers, and subordinates to feel good about you.  This book helps you achieve early wins, energize your team, and build your credibility.

Beverly Kaye is a training and development icon who received the "Distinguished Contribution" award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) for her impact on workplace learning over the past three decades.

Most career development and mobility books focus on getting a promotion or new job. But career mobility can also mean growing, stretching, learning, and transforming, without ever changing your job title, company, or location.

Kaye, Williams, and Cowart do an expert job of helping readers analyze their current situation and make good choices by balancing money and meaning. Whether it is time for you to grow right where you are by enriching your skills, making a lateral move, or stepping back and realigning your objectives - this book will guide you through it.

Burnett and Evans are innovators and Stanford University design educators who created a hugely successful course, Designing Your Life. They have helped thousands of people change the way they think and live.  

As the head of talent development for a Fortune 5 company, I would take leaders on immersion site visits to companies like Google, Apple, and HP and universities like Stanford and MIT to learn how to think like a designer. This helped my leaders develop products and services that customers craved. Designing Your Life shows you how to apply design thinking principles to career development.

Use this book to design your ideal life by learning how to adopt the mindsets of curiosity, bias to action, reframing, and radical collaboration.

This is a classic and for good reason. I love the idea of putting each thing you have to do on its own piece of paper because once you do, you can organize and manage everything on your plate. You can triage and prioritize what needs to happen when, in any area of your life. And the “Someday/Maybe” file is a great way of retaining ideas and plans that aren’t a priority right now.

Even though many of us have an inner critic, the triggering event could be different. What I love about this book is it tells you what the triggers are, so you can stop the negative cycle.

This book has a questionnaire that helps you identify your most faulty patterns of thinking, also known as “life traps” in the book. There are a total of 11 life traps. 

After completing the quiz, I found out that social exclusion, emotional deprivation, and subjugation are most likely to set my inner critic off. With this knowledge, I am more aware of my negative beliefs and how they got developed in the past. I am then able to change the narrative.

Before even thinking about collaborations and alliances with other firms, executives should consider whether their firm is collaborative enough. Surprisingly, the answer is often “no” because the structure and processes have not been established with an eye towards building a network that spreads information and facilitates collaboration. This book provides very helpful advice on how to improve firms through internal network building.

Bill Bratton had the original insight that crime is a city problem, not just a cop problem. In this book, he discusses how collaboration between city, state, and federal agencies is essential to reduce murder and violent felonies. How easy is it to get government agencies to cooperate? Like herding cats, you say? More like herding rabid lions and tigers. You’re dealing with bureaucrats who imbibed the subtleties of the double and triple cross with their mothers’ milk!

I wish I could add the trilogy of Austin Kleon books; with Steal Like an Artist and Keep Going completing the trilogy. Show Your Work was the first book that I read that spoke to me about letting your supporters in on the creating. The sharing of exclusive content has become a staple for independent and major-label artists, Instagram, Tik Tok, and social platforms all rely on the need to share. For me this book was the progenitor of this line of thinking, encouraging the creative to share and disperse with the secrecy of process and move toward converting investors in one's product to investing in the person. 

For many, choosing a career path feels like the sole reason for going to college. The pressure is high, and you think you have to have it all figured out immediately. What do you do to help you make those tough decisions? Mike Sun's book offers a step-by-step guide on choosing the right career path while in school and, more importantly, making it a career you enjoy. Career Development for New College Students walks you through job exploration, self-discovery, and career goal setting so that you are well-prepared for the road ahead.