Tools For Your Toolbox

This is pretty much the quintessential productivity book for a reason. I read this book in college and immediately started organizing my tasks along some of the frameworks he describes.

There were many lessons I took from this book, but by far the most impactful was the distinction between Importance and Urgency. It's so easy to get caught up in the urgent and pressing tasks, that it's almost inevitable that the important ones will slip through the cracks.

While putting your life on hold to redo everything along the lines of the GTD method can be extreme, just implementing a few of the key lessons from this book can go a long way.

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While I think people in their 20s and 30s have enough advice spewed at them from every news story or blog post about millennials, I think The Defining Decade deserves a chance.

In this book, Dr. Meg Jay draws a pretty compelling argument for why it's important to be very thoughtful about how we spend our time during as twenty-somethings. It's not just about doing things in our twenties, it's also about setting ourselves up for fruitful thirties, forties, and beyond.

Truthfully, I think the advice applies to people at any stage in their lives, as I believe it's never too late or too early to have a plan for our lives and make moves towards our goals. 

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Make. Sell. Repeat is a step by step guide to help those of us who want to build our hobbies and passions into businesses, but don't have the formal education on what starting a business really means.

Based on the author's experiences with launching her own online business of selling handbags, as well as her formal business education, Emily distills some of the most basic, and yet most important steps to building a business for crafters.

Whether it's the marketing, legal, or financial aspects of starting a business, she has some advice and tips on how to determine what you need to spend your time on, and what can wait.

Having sat down with her and learned about her experience, I know she knows her stuff.

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I don't often talk about personal finance, but truthfully nothing gives you more freedom to engage with your passions than having financial freedom. And nothing keeps you from thinking about living a passionate life, than worrying about how you'll be able to keep food on the table.

Get A Financial Life was one of the first personal finance books I read when I started on my path towards getting a grasp of my financial situation in graduate school. It's incredibly easy to get without feeling overwhelmed by terminologies and complexities.

I've recommended this book to pretty much anyone who shows any interest in personal finance, as it's by far the most helpful one I've read (and I've read many).

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I've known the author, Miranda Aisling, for many years, and have actually interview her for the blog (and Crazy Enough To Try). For the entirety of our friendship, I've known her to follow a simple, but challenging philosophy: get out there and give it a try.

As an artist both by traditional education, and by lifestyle, Miranda sought to capture the process that every artists goes through: aiming to create their best work the first time they create and ending up disappointed when it's not as good as they hoped.

In reality, it's only through this practice and 'failures' that we begin down the path towards excellence. But you can only practice by doing.

Beyond art, this is applicable to pretty much any area of development. First we need to try, to get started. Then we can work on improving and perfecting the skills we need.

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This is a bit on the geeky side, and definitely not for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading Why Information Grows. When someone says they can relate atoms, entropy, and economics together in the same book, I'm intrigued. To top it off, the author defines physical products as "crystallized imagination" after the concept that what we create in the world was first created in our imaginations.

While the vast majority of this book is theoretical, and not particular useful for everyday life, it did get my mind thinking in ways that I don't normally look at the world. As I'm always trying to expand my thought process, this was a surprising treat.

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Yes, I love to watch Chip and JoJo. But truthfully, that's only part of the reason I enjoyed this book. The Magnolia Story is just that: a story. It's a story about how two people met, how they fell in love, how they worked for many years to build something special, but more importantly how they stuck together through it all.

It's also a story about the challenges and trials that young business owners face as they take on (sometimes foolish) risks, and have to balance work and a growing family. It's easy to see TV stars have success, but as is the case with most, there are many years of toil and grinding to get to where they make it just look easy.

There is also an underlying element of faith in this story, and even if you don't believe in God, we can all admit that the universe does sometimes just work out in your favor.

It's a light-hearted story, with the happy ending you'd expect from a book published during the epic rise of a favorite TV couple, but also with quite a few business lessons I was not expecting.

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