Books

  • August 7, 2025

    How Business Books Get Time Management Wrong for Solopreneurs

    I just finished reading Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. It came highly recommended by a number of people. But there were a couple of problems with the book…the same problems I see with most business books.

    First, it’s not written for solopreneurs. It’s for people who want to build big businesses; the kind of businesses the author has built.

    It’s also written for less experienced business owners, in my opinion. I think it’s another rote business book. It drops references to The Checklist Manifesto, Tony Robbins, and the big rock/pebble/sand theory. Ultimately, while it’s called Buy Back Your Time, it should really be called How to Hire People for Your Business.

    Because the truth is, hiring isn’t the only way.

    Read at Source

  • July 23, 2025

    Why I’m Trading Highlights for Voice Notes

    “What if I need it?”

    This is the justification for keeping anything you haven’t used in a long time.

    It could be mail, books, kitchenware, clothes, or anything else you’ve accumulated over time.

    For me, it’s cables. I have cables that would be completely unrecognizable to my kids. Heck…I have cables my wife probably never used. Because…”What if I need it?”

    Most other stuff I’m fine getting rid of — almost to a fault. I’ve overzealously thrown out things that were still very much needed, but that weren’t in use the day I got sick of the clutter.

    Clutter in the physical space drives me crazy. But clutter in the digital world…I almost never see that.

    Read at Source

  • June 3, 2025

    I Started Writing my Next Book

    My last book, HTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide came out about 5 years ago, in August 2020.

    It was a book I signed pre-pandemic after pitching a different, WordPress book. I’m very grateful my publisher pitched this one instead, as it’s yielded my first book royalty checks.

    That was before I fully switched niches. Actually, I was mid-switch when the book came out, which is not a great position to be in when you’re supposed to be promoting a book.

    The funny thing about writing a book is that your last one is always your last one…until it’s not.

    There’s some recovery period (for me at least) after writing a highly technical book, where one swears off writing another book.

    Then the next idea strikes, and you catch the writing bug again.

  • March 23, 2025

    My Thoughts on The Anxious Generation

    Lately I’ve been thinking about how fondly I look back on my formative years.

    I’d have fun at school and extracurricular activities, then go home and play outside for a bit, do my homework, and enjoy some TV time (and I’d sketch) before bed.

    During the summer, my brothers and I would do things like swim or play paintball during the day, and play neighborhood-wide manhunt at night.

    But my favorite activity was baseball.

    We’d use our neighbor’s driveway as the home run boundary. When we routinely started hitting home runs, Mr. and Mrs. Davis graciously let us use their yard too, effectively doubling the size of Casabona Park. Here’s my last look of the field, before we moved my parents out:

  • January 31, 2021

    5 Insanely Impactful Books That Helped My Business

    I feel like I’m getting this in just under the wire (as in, published in January), but the new year has a lot of folks thinking about their business and how they can improve, or they are thinking about starting a new business. While some of the best business knowledge comes with experience, I feel like there’s more advice out there than ever before. It’s hard to know what’s good and what’s bad.

    With nearly 20 of freelancing under my belt at this point, there’s lots of things I learned the hard way (through experience), and lots of things I learned through books. To help you cut through the cruft, here are 5 of the most impactful books for my business.

  • September 14, 2020

    Learning HTML and CSS (with My New Book, Out Now!)

    I’ve always been a learn-by-doing kind of guy. Maybe it’s because I’m thinking about other things when something is explained to me, or maybe people are bad at explaining things. But either way, a concept doesn’t really sink in until I do it, or until I see an immediate application for it. When I learned HTML and CSS, I learned it by doing it. I’d make a page in Microsoft Front Page one then see what the generated source looked like.

    Eventually, when I moved to using Notepad (or more accurately, Notepad++), I’d try something and see what happens, or copy someone else’s source and modify it. It wasn’t ideal, and today there are lots of great alternatives. I’m happy to add a new one to the fray: my new book, HTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide.

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  • August 1, 2019

    Books Recap for July 2019

    In August I finished 3 books and read about 970 pages. That brings my grand total up to 20 books. I was hoping to hit my goal of 21 in July, but my current book is a grind, and finding time to read it has been equally difficult. Let’s take a look!

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  • July 1, 2019

    Books Recap for June 2019

    In June I finished 3 books and read about 750 pages. That brings my grand total up to 17 books on the year, and 4 away from my goal for 2019. Given that I’m going to the beach this month, I’ll likely hit that by the end of the summer (if not sooner).

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