Many of the posts on Post-Grad Compass include books, websites, and other resources that I have recommended. I’ve attempted to collate these resources for life after college in one place on this page.
[Post-Grad Compass content is free. If you purchase from referral links on the site, I may make a small commission at no additional cost to you. ]
Adulting
Realworld’s mission is to “simplify adulthood,” and it’s IOS app offers more than 150 playbooks on everything from renter’s insurance to emergency savings.
Career Success
This is the essential guide to early-career success, packed with actionable tips and common-sense (but rarely-spoken) insights. I wish I’d had this book when I graduated college–it would have saved me from many mistakes I made along the way.
Career Pivots and Building Your Network
You Turn, by Ashley Stahl
If you want to make a career pivot, Stahl provides a framework of core skills and core values to help guide your path. And she offers an intensive guide to networking and calling on loose contacts to learn more about an industry.
Networking (with the attendant cold-calling and awkward events) is a concept that turns many people off. Levin instead focuses on how to engage or reengage with the people that you already know. This can create a virtuous circle that could reap benefits for your career.
Linked: Conquer LinkedIn, Get Your Dream Job, by Omar Garriott and Jeremy Schifeling
Powerful tips from how to effectively fill each section of a LinkedIn profile, to practical ways to reach out to first and second-degree connections.
The Startup of You, by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, offers an insider’s guide on how to use the platform effectively, by thinking about your career in the way that a startup business aims to grow.
Personal Finance
Broke Millennial, by Erin Lowry
A great step-by-step look at getting started with finance basics. Lowry shares her own experience navigating finances in her 20s with easily-understood tips from finance experts.
Get Good with Money: 10 Simple Steps to Becoming Financially Whole, by Tiffany “the Budgetnista” Aliche
From dealing with debt to building investments, Aliche’s book provides clear definitions and a series of “challenges” that can help you master and improve particular areas of your finances.
More: Personal Finance Resources to Get Your Money on Track
Investing
Wealthfront is a robo-advisor that helps you to grow investments for the long-term. Wealthfront offers IRAs, brokerage accounts, and other account types, and will automatically rebalance your investments according to your risk tolerance or specific plans. Wealthfront was the tool I used to get started with investing beyond my retirement, making it easy to get into the investing world.
With this link, you’ll get your first $5,000 managed free.
M1 allows you to create investing “pies,” with target proportions for your stocks or ETFs. Whenever you add funds to your investment account, M1 will use those deposits to “buy low” among your different stocks and help you get to your desired amount.
Starting and funding an M1 account with this link can get you $10 added to your account by M1.
Organizing Your Life
The ToDoist app
There are a number of good tools for organizing tasks, but ToDoist is by far my favorite. It allows me to schedule one-off and repeating tasks, assign categories and task types, and generally find ways to organize my life so I don’t have to keep all the deadlines in my head. (Todoist has both a free and premium version that allows syncing across mobile and desktop versions).
Building Better Habits
And more general self-improvement resources.
Clear believes that the smallest (or atomic) habits, when stacked together, can bring about massive change. He starts his book with the story of the British cycling team, which grew from a laughingstock into a medal-winning powerhouse through a series of small 1% improvements, everything from having the racers travel with their own pillows to painting the floor of their van white. Clear provides clear, actionable steps, to build systems that can implement small changes in your life that–like funds in an investment account–can compound to form huge improvements over time.
Better Than Before, By Gretchen Rubin
Rubin dives into a wide range of habit approaches, with the idea that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building or changing habits. Instead, she offers a sampling of different ways to tackle habits, partnered with her Four Tendencies framework(Upholder, Obliger, Questioner, and Rebel).
The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
Duhigg explores the theory and scientific research behind habits, with real-world examples ranging from the early days of toothpaste advertising to the Montgomery bus boycott, to explain how habits impact people and systems, and how understanding habits can allow us to change habits in ourselves and in organizations large and small.
ADHD 2.0 by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey
If you’re having trouble with building new habits despite wanting to, there may be other things at play. Many adults have undiagnosed ADHD, and far more people have symptoms like those in ADHD, caused partly by the millions of devices and screens we interact with. The authors look at what’s now known about the brain chemistry behind ADHD, and offer techniques and strategies for how anyone can work to improve focus.
