I thought it’d be helpful to compile a list of resources—consisting of books, tools, blogs, links, and guides which have helped me learn to brand myself, build an extensive network, travel around the globe, and design a business that I can run from anywhere in the world. Check back often, as the Thrilling Heroics Resources section will undoubtedly grow steadily as I learn more and as my business grows… I recommend bookmarking this page for future reference. Enjoy!

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to products that will earn me a small commission that will help keep ThrillingHeroics.com alive. These are all products and resources that I have used with success or that come highly recommended from my colleagues and mentors, and because they are helpful and are companies that I trust.

Required Reading for Bending Spoons

Here are my “Most-Important Books”—or MIBs. If you read only 10 books after college, read these:

1. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
2. Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less by Sam Carpenter
3. The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
4. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
5. How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
6. Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss
7. Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
8. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
9. The Brand You 50 by Tom Peters (or one of his other books on personal branding)
10. Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins

See more recommended reading»

eBooks & Guides for Owning Your Universe

Now you should be thinking like a renegade! Here are some fantastic ebooks to help you even further on your journey:

• How to Live Anywhere – the guide I wish I’d written! Karol Gajda walks you through step-by-step how to work from your laptop and enjoy ridiculously extraordinary freedom!
• Source Control – an outsourcing framework for the dangerously ambitious from MuseLife.com genius David Walsh
• Passionate Living – this book is incredible! Don’t let your best possible life get away! Henri Juntilla provides a simple guide to doing what you love
• Cloud Living – How to make money with your blog simply, this details Glen Allsop’s success story about how he built a 4,000-subscriber blog in less than a year and earns a 5-figure monthly income
• 007 Lifestyle: Living Like James Bond – Make a location-independent living, travel the world, stay fit & healthy, and attract beautiful women!
• The Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself – Create your own Personal Freedom through a Very Small Business
• The Unconventional Guide to the Social Web – how to get your message to the world using social media to promote and market your business
• Frequent Flyer Master – Chris Guillebeau, on his way to visiting every country in the world, shares all the top secrets for earning free Frequent Flyer miles and getting the most out of them. Even if you don’t fly much, you’ll get all the world’s top vagabond’s travel hacks, and this ebook is guaranteed to pay for itself with a free flight!
• Unautomate Your Finances – A way to simplify your money & get passionate about it, from Baker at ManVsDebt, who eliminated $18K+ in consumer debt and took his family traveling through Australia, New Zealand & Thailand!
• Language Hacking Guide – tips and language hacks from Benny the Irish Polyglot (fluent in 7 languages and counting!), if you’re interested to get to effective fluency in foreign languages, definitely pick this up!

How I Do It

These are the applications, tools, and resources that I use daily and recommend to all my clients and friends. All of my best-kept secrets!

Build Your Business & Online Presence

• WordPress – an easy content management (CMS) system great for blogs, galleries, portfolios, business sites & more.
• BlueHost – reliable, inexpensive, easy web hosting (4 out of 5 of my clients use them). Easy to use, 1-click automatic WordPress installation, and superb customer service!
• WooThemes – incredibly awesome, powerful, open-source themes for WordPress for a reasonable, affordable price. Most of them come loaded with premium features and tie in nicely with Flickr photos and Twitter status, etc. My site is a heavily-customized FreshNews design from WooThemes.
• ThemeForest – more great, inexpensive HTML templates, themes for WordPress and other CMS programs.
• Wishlist Member Pro – if you want to build a community or subscription website, this plugin is the de facto solution for easily turning your WordPress site into a powerful, easily-customizable membership site.

Get WordPress help, the best hosting & themes at FreelanceWP»

Gadgets & Gear for Digital Nomad Workers

• Apple MacBook Pro – intuitive, highly-customizable. The 13-inch unibody aluminum model has been great to travel with (it’s taken a hard hit to the ground probably 4 or 5 times and keeps on going. This thing is a tank!).
• iPhone 3G – grab the unlocking instructions here for use on non-AT&T networks, international travel & data access. Still the best phone I’ve found for running a multi-national business remotely.
• Airport Express – this handy little gadget will turn almost any ethernet connection around the world into an instant wifi network. Fits in my cargo pocket.
• Backup your files frequently with TimeMachine and/or Mozy online backup. Last thing any nomadic entrepreneur wants is to lose their whole business when something catastrophic happens to the laptop.
• I also recommend an external GPRS/EDGE/3G USB Modem to plug into your laptop and grab an internet connection through the cell phone data network anywhere (the beach anyone?) if you’re going to be traveling in developing countries where wifi isn’t as widespread.

See more recommended travel gear»

International Communications & Scheduling

• Gmail – please please please ditch Outlook!
• AwayFind – safeguard your attention. AwayFind will let you know when you get something truly important/urgent in your email, so you can spend more time outside the inbox.
• Skype – call friends & clients around the globe for as little as 3 cents a minute. This is also what I use to do video chats with friends & family (and record my video interviews for this site!)
• Google Voice – previously GrandCentral, this will give you one phone number to route and forward to any phone; highly customizable.
• Tungle.me – a scheduling application that connects with your existing calendar to easily allow others to schedule time during your availability, anywhere in the world.
• Doodle – easily schedule meetings & conference calls between multiple people, across timezones.
• Twitter – learn how to use it, but quickly migrate to a good desktop app like TweetDeck.
• Adium or Meebo can connect AIM, gTalk, MSN, Yahoo chat, Facebook chat and more.
• RescueTime – don’t spend too many hours wasted on Twitter & chat. RT is a great free application that will help you track your hours spent on different projects and limit how long you can spend on time-wasters or social sites.

Online Collaboration & Remote Working Tools

• Google Calendar – shareable calendar and schedule organizer.
• Google Docs – collaborative word processor and spreadsheet applications.
• Adobe ConnectNow – meet live over the web and share your screen with anyone.
• Collabtiv – free alternative to web-based project management apps like Basecamp.
• Dropbox – store and share large files online, or sync your virtual dropbox folder across as many computers & mobile devices as you like.

My Web Development Toolbox

• Cyberduck – open-source FTP for Mac
• Smultron – open-source, user-friendly code editor for Mac
• MAMP – run your own local Apache server
• Firebug – Firefox plugin that makes testing code much easier
• Adobe BrowserLab – test cross-browser compatibility for free (keep this one hush-hush

Distribution, Invoicing & Shopping Carts

• Paypal – You’ll need an account if you want to accept payments from many ecommerce providers online, and it’ll give you easy, simple email invoices you can send.
• FreshBooks – simple online invoicing and bookkeeping.
• e-Junkie – handles all the payment and fulfillment for your ebook, audio, or other information products. Links up easily with PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, TrialPay, Clickbank & 2CheckOut to get you paid.
• Clickbank – another digital products retailer that’s reasonably priced and comes with an amazing affiliate program for your products.

Online Marketing & Promotion

• AWeber – leading provider for mailing/customer list management, promotional marketing, and autoresponder newsletter campaigns.
• Market Samurai – the most effective software available for doing in-depth SEO keyword research, market research and niche discovery.
• Su.pr – install the bookmarklet in your browser toolbar, submit your links and they’ll be automatically sent to Twitter, Facebook & StumbleUpon! StumbleUpon also has a great CPC advertising program.
• LinkedIn Answers – LinkedIn is the best professional online network, and Answers is the best place to brand yourself, share your expertise with others, and even solicit feedback on your own questions from experienced CEOs and other professionals.
• Fiverr.com – this is a new site for me, but it’s already been helpful for online promotions. It’s a marketplace where people will do a wide range of actions for you for just $5 USD, including many social media promotions activities.

Money & Personal Finance

• ING Direct – fairly high-yield online savings accounts with convenient sub-accounts, so you can create different “buckets” for different savings goals.
• HSBC Bank – one of the best international banks with locations around the globe.
• Charles Schwab – reimburses all ATM transactions and has no international fees on their checking accounts.
• Discover Miles card – Frequent flyer? Get 1 mile per dollar spent, plus 12,000 bonus sign-up miles.
• Mint.com – powerful, free personal financial management application.
• Unautomate Your Finances – A way to simplify your money & get passionate about it, from Baker at ManVsDebt, who eliminated $18K+ in consumer debt and took his family traveling through Australia, New Zealand & Thailand!

Travel & Living the Mobile Lifestyle

• Kayak.com – find the best travel deals, Kayak compares thousands of aggregators.
• Priceline – bid low on last-minute flights and check out their Pricebreaker deals.
• Couchsurfing – meet locals for a drink, a tour, and sometimes free accommodation around the world.
• AirBnB – low-cost vacation rentals and sublets from locals in 87 countries.
• EarthClassMail – get all your snail mail sent to you via email. Great for business backpackers!
• World Nomads – easy, affordable travel insurance recommended by Lonely Planet.
• Passport Visas Express – Tim Ferriss recommends this service for expedited visa services and new US passports. Looks useful, but of course it comes at a price.
• Travel Full-time for Less Than $14,000 per Year – an incredible, lengthy guide on Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich site.
• How to Live Anywhere – the guide I wish I’d written! Karol Gajda walks you through step-by-step how to work from your laptop, create sustainable income streams that you can manage from anywhere and enjoy ridiculously extraordinary freedom to live anywhere you want in the world!
• Frequent Flyer Master – Chris Guillebeau, on his way to visiting every country in the world, shares all the top secrets for earning free Frequent Flyer miles and getting the most out of them. This ebook is guaranteed to pay for itself with a free flight!
• Language Hacking Guide – tips and language hacks from Benny the Irish Polyglot (fluent in 7 languages and counting!), if you’re interested to get to effective fluency in foreign languages, definitely pick this up!

Lifestyle Design Tools

• Ideal Lifestyle Costing from Tim Ferriss
• Dreamlining Worksheet
• Subscribe to Sean Ogle’s Location180 newsletter to get a great free audio podcast all about how to craft your own remote work proposal.
• Source Control – an outsourcing framework for the dangerously ambitious from MuseLife.com genius David Walsh.
• Jet Set Money – Rob & Kim from Jet Set Life share their secrets to making income from anywhere in the world to fund their jet set excursions to tropical locales the world over… Comes with tons of interviews of other lifestyle designers and new rich, with details of their income and how they make their living online.
• Virtual Staff Finder – when you’re finally ready to outsource, you’ll find the hardest part is actually finding quality virtual assistants to help you grow your business. My good friend Chris Ducker has lived in the Philippines for 10 years and runs a BPO firm with over 215+ workers—when I need to find someone I go to him to get connected with the best staff. They do the search, the background checks, and the online testing, then I interview the top 3 candidates and hire my desired applicant. Sign up with my referral page and I guarantee you Chris and his team in Cebu will take great care of you and help you find the virtual staff you need.

Forums, Podcasts & Communities

• 4-Hour Work Week Forums – new rich, lifestyle design, and muse creation; focused on the priciples in Tim Ferriss’ book: elimination, automation, and liberation.
• Lifestyle Business Podcast – the #1 podcast on iTunes for lifestyle designers and lifestyle entrepreneurs. Absolutely awesome fundamentals from Dan Andrews.
• Outsource to the Philippines – another fantastic podcast from Dan Andrews all about outsourcing work to qualified virtual workers in the Philippines.
• Untemplater – a new multi-author blog and community made up of dozens of Gen-Y twentysomethings who are all creating & living their own unique lifestyles outside the norm.
• 30 Day Challenge – Ed Dale’s awesome, free, how-to curriculum that will take you through all the basics of market research, online marketing, and how to make your first $ online.
• Mixergy – Andrew Warner consistently interviews highly-successful entrepreneurs for online business tips. Solid.
• If you need a serious kick in the ass to really invest and build the real business you’ve always dreamed of owning, I highly recommend you get Chris Guillebeau’s Empire Building Kit—you’ll get a 365-day plan of attack and 15+ case studies, and he’ll take you by the hand as you build a meaningful business in 1 year with one simple step every day.

Featured image by kaibara.