Forceful Spending # 2

If you're not sure why I'm forcing myself to spend money, go ahead and read this first post I made about forceful spending.

Reflection

Last month was the first time I forced myself to spend money on books, courses and other material that I believed would be valuable and contribute to my "education".

Just to recap, here are the things I bought last month:

I'm not going to review everything. Instead I'll just point out the things I enjoyed, didn't enjoy and what I plan to do differently this time.

What I enjoyed

Sleep Smarter is probably one of the best books I've ever read. Overall, it's amazing. Every chapter focusses on one specific area of sleep quality. The author does a really good job at highlighting why it's important, and gives you a few actionable tips at the end of each chapter to start applying in your life. I'll probably re-read this book a couple times.

TinyMBA and Pocket of Do are great. I surprisingly enjoyed the format of each page being it's own lesson.

Your Next Five Moves was also an interesting read. It definitely made me think a lot about my own business and how I can think more strategically in the future. I also brainstormed a lot of ideas this month which I think was definitely influenced by this book.

What I didn't enjoy

Basically the Udemy courses. Both of these courses came from the same author. They weren't that engaging, and overall didn't help that much.

What will I do differently

I think $100 really is a lot to spend when each item is only $8-20. I ended up buying eight different things. And while they were all relatively high quality, I think I'd be more satisfied with paying $20-$40 per book/course and only buying three things - so long as the increase in price is also coming with an increase in value. This also means I can dedicate more time to each resource.

Onto this month!

Forceful spending

There are only two books this time, compared to last months five books!

So here's the list of what was bought for this month:

Desktop apps with Electron ($51.41 💰)

I found this course maybe two months ago, and it immediately got my attention. I'm not a desktop app builder at all so this is definitely out of my comfort zone, but I'm confident I know enough to get value from this course. It's also relatively expensive, given my $100 budget. But I'm actually fine with that. To me the value seems worth the price.

Speed Up Your Django Tests ($45 💰)

Adam Johnson, a well-known member of the Django community, released this book earlier in the year. It's gotten nothing but good feedback. The book covers a topic that's very relevant to my current line of work so I'm quite excited to get started with this one.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth ($20.76 💰)

This book was recommended to me in a recent conversation about SaaS and Django development. The author, Gabriel Weinberg, is the CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo - the company behind the well-known search engine alternative to Google.

I've now spent $117,27 and met the target. This month is going to be quite different to last month. I've got a feeling I'll most likely finish all of this in the next two weeks. But I actually feel a lot better about the purchases I've made. All three of these resources are very exciting.

If this has inspired you to invest in your learning, let me know how you've taken action!