I love learning and tinkering with new ideas! I used to feel ashamed to say that in the past. For some reason it did not sound grown up. With time, I have learned to be comfortable with my curious nature. As I write this, I am preparing to step back from a startup I co-founded to spend time thinking and let my curiosity guide me to my next adventure. I have been going through the list of books, tools, and resources that have helped me.
I share this list with the hope that some of you will find something useful here to help you with your personal development or entrepreneurial journey.
Most of us often set up a standard of productivity where our constant need to be doing something ends up being counterintuitive. So, I will lead with a caveat, New tools and gadgets don’t necessarily make us more productive. However, used correctly, they can definitely guide us. A tool is only useful so long as we use it!
Books
The 7 habits of highly effective people- Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Steven Covey
Deep work on building productive work habits by Cal Newport
Zero to One- Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
Principles by Ray Dalio
Hooked — Designing Habit forming products by Nir Eyal
Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Anything you want- A new kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Seivers
Steal like an artist- 10 things nobody told you about being creative by Austin Kleon
Start Finishing-How to Go from Idea to Done by Charles Gilkey
The Power of Vulnerability -How Vulnerability Can Make Our Lives Better By Dr. Brene Brown
On writing- A memoir of the craft by Stephen King
You can mind my full reading list is on Goodreads
Apps/Websites
Headspace App for my meditation practice
Notion- Powerful personal CRM, note taking and much much more. This has quickly become my favorite tool to keep my life and projects organized.
Asana- Simple and effective task and project management
Unsplash- For High quality royalty free photos
Codecanyon- For affordable templates for anything from wordpress theme to mobile apps
Flippa- To Buy/sell apps and websites
Learning how to learn course on Coursera. Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects. Excellent free course from Courseera.
A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment course on Coursera
Introduction to Computer science course on Edx
Scrivener- For keeping my writing ideas and projects organized
W3 schools- for learning the basics of programming
Canva for quick social media and other graphics
No code and low code Resources:
Thunkable.com and adalo.com for creating mobile/web apps
webflow.com and bubble.is for drag and drop website and web apps
https://www.glideapps.com/ for rapidly creating apps from google sheets
Ionic Framework for creating mobile apps with HTML/CSS
https://www.wix.com/ for easy drag and drop websites
https://carrd.co for simple yet beautiful one page websites
Airtable.com for creating spreadsheets that can be used as database, simple API makes it easy to connect to any apps to use as data source
Zapier.com for creating cutom conenctions between airtable and other tools
Rapidapi.com for finding and using apis, everywhere from recipes to financial data
https://www.sharetribe.com/products/go/ to build marketplace businesses
Podia.com for online classes and memberships
memberstack.io for building membership sites
Teachable.com; Kajabi.com; Thinkific.com For building quiz and learning sites.
blush.design for editable illustrations
Figma.com for rapid prototyping
Misc
Wealthfront.com for hassle free automated investing and financial planning.
https://marketfinder.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en_us/ to get google trends and new and growing market ideas
Google keyword tool for estimating keyword traffic, get ideas of related terms and overall keyword research
Gust Launch for starting a new business. They make it easy to incorporate your new company, provide simple paperwork and issue/maintain shares and vesting plan for founders.
Similarweb for website and app traffic estimate
Sensortower for app store data. Everything from keyword research to store data.