Happy Wednesday and Happy New Year, Wise Owl Nation!

How has the past week been for you?

It's been a little wild over on my end, but such is life, right?

You have to adapt to change and use ambiguity to fuel your growth.

On that note, I've been checking out a lot of new apps, websites, and tools to see if there are any gems I've been missing.

It's always important to keep an eye out for amazing tools, and since I have found a few recently, I figured it was time to do another "tools of growth" issue.

I will also have a section on the state of crypto later on.

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here. 

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🦉 Wise Owl Tool(s) of The Week:

New tools always get me excited, and in some ways, they can act as an injection of motivation. It's always good to get a little extra motivation mojo as you start a new year.

All tools I am sharing today are tools I use myself currently, and I am sharing them because of the following criteria:

• Ease of Use
• My willingness to go to/open the tool every day
• If it's been valuable using the tool regularly

Habitify - The Best Habit Tracker I have found

Habitify is, as its name foreshadows, a habit tracking app!

With both a sleek mobile app as well as a clean-looking browser version, I love this tool because I can access it anywhere.

Some cool features I like about Habitify

• So much data on how and when you complete your habits
• A mood tracker to help correlate moods with ability to get things done
• Access the app on all platforms

I'm using this tool to track my writing, meditation, exercise frequency, and poker studying. I am really trying to use this tool to help keep me motivated and on track to achieve my goals this year.

OnJuno - Banking Meets Crypto

This is a cool one. It's a hybrid between a traditional bank and a crypto bank.

Even if you use it just for normal banking it has some features that are way better than traditional banks

For example, their checking account offers 1.6% APY. That is higher than most high-interest savings accounts!

You can also get your paycheck direct deposited directly into Crypto. You can also choose to have just a portion of your paycheck automatically deposited as crypto.

Check out their website linked above and see if they have what you're looking for.

Speechify - Listen to Text

Okay, so this one has a story with it.

As a part of my day job, I am a part of an at-work book club.

The first book that this book club decided to read in 2022 is a college Textbook.

I'm dead serious.

I hate college textbooks because they are needlessly wordy and verbose. The Authors have zero incentive to keep concepts simple, so I was struggling to care enough to actually read it.

Then I found Speechify, which let me take pictures of each page of the first chapter (easier than it sounds), and converted ALL OF IT into both digital text and audio.

This showed me that listening to the first chapter would only take me about 20 minutes or so, and that made reading this textbook much, much easier.

Fun features:

• Listen on any device
• Natural sounding voices
• Import articles and have them read to you
• Check your own writing by having it read back to you
• Take pictures of text and have it converted to digital text and audio

Bookstash - Top books in 3m or less

This is a really cool tool.

Sometimes you don't need to read an entire book to get the key ideas and concepts.

This tool is one of the best I have found for simplifying and shortening the process needed to acquire a little bit of wisdom.

The website is free, the design is slick, and it has been a joy to use as a part of my morning routine.

On ETH - Are We Entering a Bear Crypto Market?

It's been a while since I wrote specifically about crypto. My goal is still the same as ever - buy ETH, stake ETH, and profit.

That doesn't change due to price volatility. I buy a little ETH every week regardless of the price, because I know that no one can predict where the prices will be from week to week.

In the past week or so the crypto market has taken a hit. This always feels scary, but the longer you hold your crypto, the more you realize that there are patterns throughout the year.

One such pattern is that prices can often go down in December/January due to many macroeconomic reasons I don't have the knowledge to explain well.

I do not think we are entering a bear market, especially for Ethereum. There are too many big things happening with Ethereum this year that I consider extremely bullish.

For example:

• The ETH1 merge into ETH2 is happening in April
• The Layer2 rollout is happening in full swing reducing the cost to transact
• Decentralized Finance is rapidly growing and offers better tools than traditional finance
• NFTs are still raging hot and the popularity of digital collector art is drawing more and more people into the crypto space

There are quite a bit more reasons as well, but I think you get the picture.

Right now ETH is undervalued. It's been undervalued, and it will continue to be undervalued even after the merge happens in April.

In my non-investment advice opinion, buying ETH is still an amazing deal.

Quote/Meme of the week:

Don't let people that aren't worth your time have any power over your emotional wellbeing.

You are your own master.

Never forget that.

Happy New Year and have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4.5% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.25% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.