If I use something and love it, I will refer it to my friends. Especially tools and resources that people can use to increase their productivity or earning potential.
Word of mouth is the best form of advertising ever.
Always share the good news about products that your friends and associates have created, supporting each other is how we’re all going to get ahead.
Here are products that I use in my personal and professional life, ranging from my personal blog, writing for Medium, creating niche affiliate websites, consulting, and selling digital products.
Books
Business and Tech Books
Regardless of where you are in your tech career, from new to a seasoned developer, The Developers Field Guide to Getting Hired and Staying Employed, will fill you with confidence and help you take your career to the next level.
Freelancing is a great way to get experience, so you can get jobs that need more experience. You already have skills that someone will pay you for, you just need to learn how to find paying clients. I created this quick start guide to provide you with the actionable steps you can take to get started freelancing.
There are books on Amazon that detail starting a business. Focus on business and consulting (people) skills. I’m a huge fan of the “Dummies” series, and Starting a Business All-in-One For Dummies is a useful guide to getting a business off the ground legally. (I usually give a copy to my consulting clients after we’ve met.) And as cheesy as the title sounds, Million Dollar Consulting: The Professional’s Guide to Growing a Practice is literally worth its weight in gold.
I don’t include many “tech books” on this list because they tend to date quickly, but this one is special:
Disrupt or Die: What the World Needs to Learn from Silicon Valley to Survive the Digital Era by Jedidiah Yueh
If you want to survive, as an employee, business owner, or business, adopting some of the ideas and methods in this book can’t hurt.
Technology enables rapid change, lean into it.
“Keep My Head Straight” Books
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
I picked this up in the San Diego airport and was able to skim through it on a flight to D.C. But when went back and re-read it slowly over the course of a week.
Taught me to disconnect from my mind, and focus on what is happening around me, time is real — but it’s not.
Creativity boosts as a result of the “meditation-like” state that I enter when practicing the nuggets that I pulled from the pages.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Incredibly, this was offered as supplemental reading during management training by a former employer. I took it home and read it over a few nights.
While incredibly powerful, I wondered why my employer provided me with a book describing how a man shaped his life to survive a Nazi death camp.
Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: work, love, and courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless, but we give suffering meaning in how we respond to it.