Books I Re-read When I Need Business Inspiration: 

  1. Moneyball: A book about how statheads turned the business of baseball upside down!
  2. Never Split the Difference: Learn how to listen & connect better with people!
  3. It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work: Most of my friends run agitated companies. This book will teach you how to install calmness in your company.
  4. Company of One: Take the reigns and build a business that makes more sense for you (and your customers and your employer and your…)!
  5. Powerful by Patty McCord: Learn how radical honesty can transform your business and life.
  6. Uncommon Service: This is the best purely business book I have ever read.
  7. Four Hour Workweek: This treatise to effectiveness changed my whole outlook on life in profound ways – business, marriage, parenting, etc.
  8. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Businessy & tactical? Sure. But if you suck at marketing like I do, I can’t think of a better place to start.
  9. Getting To Yes: My go-to workbook every time the going gets tough in a negotiation.
  10. Find Fulfilling Work:  Finding your Why? is the biggest challenge most business owners face once they reach year 3 or so.  I completed this workbook after a couple of iterations of my business, and it pushed me harder and farther than I thought possible!

BOOKS I ESCAPE INTO:

  1. The Lord of the Rings – This is, hands-down, the best book ever written.
  2. 2001: A Space Odyssey – A better companion than the movie (which is also great)!  The book takes us to places that are physically within reach, yet…so far away…
  3. Gods Behaving Badly – Did you ever wonder what life would be like if the Greek Gods (Zeus, Hera, etc.) were the real religion?  And what if they lived in a run-down flat in London?  Wonder no more!  Funniest book I ever read.  Cleverly-written.  Etc. etc. etc.
  4. Winnie-the-Pooh – The original snark.  Joyful & simply amazing.
  5. The Agenda – The inside story of Bill Clinton’s first budget.  Dry?  Absolutely.  Fascinating?  Holy shit!
  6. Peter & The Starcatchers – If you dig Wicked, you’ll love this prequel to Peter Pan.

BLOGS I READ

BUSINESS BLOGS:

MARKETING BLOGS:

MOVIES & SHOWS I LOVE!

What book club would be complete without a listing of companion movies?!  Here it goes…the only movies you should ever feel compelled to see:

  1. Spaceballs – Best movie ever.
  2. Dumb & Dumber – Okay…maybe this is the best movie ever…
  3. Star Wars Episodes IV, V, VI – These never get old.
  4. The Matrix – Brilliantly-creative, genre-busting, goosebumps-inducing!
  5. The Fog of War – Bean counters, politicians, morals, and the urgency of war.  I’ve never seen a more revealing look behind the curtains of the human condition.
  6. Little Shop of Horrors: Zany musical comedy at its best!

MUSICALS I LOVE

Nothing has surprised me more in the last few years than my growing love for bombastic musical theater! It’s what I listen to in the shower, it’s what I think about in my free time. I love it. Honestly, my music theater vocabulary is not big, as I’ve only seen a relatively-small number of shows. Here are some of my favorites:

  1. Book of Mormon: The musical that got me interested in musicals.
  2. Little Shop of Horrors: The ending was a surprise, because it ends opposite than movie!
  3. Jesus Christ Superstar!: This one changed the way I think about musical songwriting.

LISTEN

COMEDY:

  1. George Carlin‘s Back In Town
  2. Steve Martin‘s Wild & Crazy Guy
  3. Rodney Dangerfield‘s No Respect

PODCASTS:

Programming Tools

BUSINESS-BUILDING RESOURCES

RESOURCES

BIZ CONCEPTS & FURTHER READING

FREE WORDPRESS TECH LEARNING

WORDPRESS PLUGINS

  • Organic SEO: Yoast SEO for basic organic SEO tech (Get the premium version if you’re a blogger).
  • WordPress Forms, Quizzes, Surveys, Etc.: Gravity Forms for anything form-related.  I use it for my contact form, Website Cost Calculator, and for my payment pages.  Add the Zapier add-on to connect to everything!  BONUS: Set up your Gravity Form to send to your cell phone via sms!
  • Credit Card Processing: Stripe.com + Gravity Forms/WooCommerce.
  • Cloning Landing Pages: Duplicate Post for cloning your home page to a new landing page.
  • Quick Landing Page Builder: Divi for quickly designing beautiful landing pages.
  • Email Pop-ups & Opt-ins: Bloom for email popups.  Someone in the group mentioned copy-and-paste Mailchimp embeds, which work great, too.
  • Website Calendars: The Events Calendar Pro was mentioned as buggy/bulky, and that’s been my experience with it, too.  I recommendCalendly.com for 1-on-1’s and Eventbrite for everything else (the are both cloud-based apps that you can embed in your emails and website).
  • WordPress Backups: Jetpack Backups for cloud website backups, and Backup Buddy for local/amazon/etc. backups. (Read my writeup about why & how I use Jetpack on almost every site I build.)
  • WordPress Website Migration: WP Synchro or Migrate Guru
  • 301 Redirects: Safe Redirect Manager by 10up
  • WordPress Security: WordFence.  The only reputable WordPress security plugin I know of with a Web Application Firewall built in!

WORDPRESS HOSTING:

  • Pressable or WP Engine for the best WordPress hosting + automatic nightly backups. (If you need something cheaper, try GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Hosting.)  p.s. I used to recommend WP Engine, but I cannot do that any longer. In my recent experiences, their customer support team has become an extension of their sales team and is no longer a team I can in good conscious recommend (my colleagues have reported the same).

WORDPRESS THEMES

I only recommend these two builder themes.  Use anything else at your peril.

DIGITAL TOOLS

Accounting, Invoicing, & Biz Tools

WHERE TO HIRE WORDPRESS PROS

Books I read this year (2021)

  • How to Age by Anne Karpf
  • The Whoopi Goldberg book
  • How to worry less about money
  • The Barack Obama book (listened)
  • The Anne Lamott book (listened)
  • the Neil Degrasse Tyson book

Books I read this year (2020)

  • The Michelle obama book
  • The Bob Woodward book (listened)

Books I read this year (2019)

  • The Netflix HR person's book (listened)

p.s. Here's the toolset that The Mighty Mo! WordPress Design currently uses.