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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

It’s been an interesting week, and I’m not just talking about these 10 books!

With my dad in the hospital (recovering, doing well, but still requiring quite a bit of my attention and care), my business exploding (in a good way), and all the fantastic books I’ve been reading…it’s been pretty wild.

But we’re not here to talk about me. These 10 books I’m going to recommend tonight are guaranteed to make YOU more interesting, and your life will never be the same once you’ve read them and tried at least a few of the things they suggest.

From mastering “Permissionless Action,” learning how to “want” correctly, and taking the “pathless path,” all the way to building a deep network of fascinating people and making big things happen, these books will set you up for adventure.

With everything that’s been going on, I’ve fallen a bit behind on some things though, so I’ll just ask for your patience there. Things like launching my new book club, responding to people, publishing more YouTube videos, etc. Just give me some time.

But now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

An Extremely Practical and Tactical Book About Uncovering Deception and Getting Along with People, Written by a Former Secret Service Agent (Buy on Amazon)

Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:

📜 Book Quote of the Day (Below)

📖 Business Book of the Month (Skool)

📚 Die with Zero, by Bill Perkins

📚 The Power of Regret, by Daniel H. Pink

📚 The Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd

📚 Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi

📚 How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

📚 What’s In It For Them?, by Joe Polish

📚 You Can Just Do Things, by Jay Yang

📚 The Long Game, by Dorie Clark

📚 Wanting, by Luke Burgis

📚 Year of Yes, by Shonda Rhimes

🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter

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Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Stronger Than Yesterday, by Michael Matthews, which is technically a fitness book, but also a fantastic book about life and how to improve yours.

Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, by Harry Browne

2. The Power of Consistency, by Weldon Long

3. The Importance of Being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde

4. Millionaire Success Habits, by Dean Graziosi

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,482 books, including 28 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

Die with Zero is about maximizing your life experiences, which means balancing time, money, and health throughout your lifespan.

Sometimes it does make sense to trade time for money, but ruining your health for the sake of money is usually a horrible investment! And there are similar tradeoffs between the three resources that you’ll have to make decisions about throughout your life. 

We all know how important money is to our well-being and happiness, but many of us work too hard at jobs we hate to make money that we may never even get to spend! That’s crazy! At the end of our lives, all we have are our memories, and as Perkins notes, these memories pay dividends every time we look back on them! 

So, it usually makes sense to spend money on unforgettable experiences, regardless of whether you can “afford” them at the time.

Before we die, none of us will ever regret not spending more time at the office, but we will regret all those priceless memories we never formed, and all those bold leaps we never took.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: Investing more time, money, and emotional energy in creating epic experiences for yourself and the people you care about will give you way more awesome stories to tell than just slaving away in an office, waiting for “the right time” to start living your life.

Get This Book on Amazon: Die with Zero

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It's more or less a universal human experience to look back on the path we never followed and feel a nagging, painful, sometimes sinking, sickening feeling that we've somehow missed our chance, that we've traded our many unlived lives for this one, real life, and that it could have been so much better had we simply acted differently.

In this book, The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink refers to regret as our most misunderstood emotion and shows how it can potentially be transformed - transmuted into something extraordinarily valuable. We can reflect on our regret, reorganize it in our minds, reconceptualize it, and then use it to live better with all the time we have left.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: After reading this book, you’ll be motivated to “Always go for the story.” Instead of waiting to act, and possibly not acting, only to regret it later, you’ll dive right into life. And whatever happens, whether it works out or not, you’ll have an interesting story to tell.

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The Pathless Path is about the invisible scripts that shepherd us into prescribed modes of living and being in the world; it's about freedom and creativity; it's about money, meaning, and work; and it's about being fearlessly, unapologetically yourself, in a world that shouts back, "You can't do that!"

It's also about going somewhere, but not following anything. Getting lost, and finding yourself. Leaving, but never arriving.

The default path - doing what everyone is doing, living the same day, week, month, and year that everyone else is living over and over again - used to work for most people. But this future that we're building together is not a default future.

The Pathless Path is Paul Millerd's answer to the question of what makes meaningful work and what we might aspire to in our lives. But you and I can never be Paul Millerd. His life is taken. You can only be yourself, and I can only be myself. The pathless path is narrow, wide enough for only one person. You.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: Taking the default path through life just makes you the same as everyone else. Same = Not Interesting. Sure, in many ways your life is going to resemble most other people’s, but this book will help you question that default path and come up with more interesting answers.

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Never Eat Alone is one of the greatest networking books ever written - a certified classic - but it's not literally all about who you have dinner with. Not completely. It's so much more than that, and Keith uses both his own story and the stories of influential power connectors like Katherine Graham, Bill Clinton, and Dale Carnegie to illustrate his best tactics for gaining influence by being valuable to others and cultivating your network.

It's about becoming valuable to the people you're connected to and being a resource for them, someone your whole network can rely on to help them get things done. It's about winning yourself, while making sure that, at the same time, your friends are winning too.

Now is the most exciting time to be alive in the history of the planet, and more opportunities exist today both to get everything you ever wanted and to help other people do the same.

Goodwill isn't finite, and Ferrazzi demonstrates the truth of this statement throughout the entire book. As we assist others and accept their assistance in turn, we expand our total possibilities and begin to access our full potential - together.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: Having more interesting friends and associates is one of the best ways to make your own life more interesting too. By learning Keith Ferrazzi’s top networking and relationship-building strategies, you’ll start finding yourself in more exciting rooms, where more interesting people are making things happen.

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How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than 15 million copies, and ever since reading it I’ve been recommending it all the time.

Dale Carnegie was an old-timey self-help guy with some excellent ideas on how to become more sociable, listen more attentively, rise higher in business, and just generally succeed at life, and his book has served me very well in life so far.

I’ve come to realize that being able to listen - without trying to think of what you’re going to say next, without glancing at your phone - is a literal social superpower in today’s world.

Every single person you meet wants to feel important, and you can give them this gift. Easily! As soon as you step outside of your own world and enter theirs, you’re perfectly positioned to claim this superpower for yourself, and you can use it to go anywhere in life that you want to go.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: One of the best ways to make people interested in you is by becoming interested in them, and this book will show you how (and why) that works. Again, this book is a total cheat code.

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They call him the most connected businessman on the planet, and this book is the distillation of Joe Polish's absolute best advice for creating and sustaining win-win relationships that last a lifetime.

What’s In It For Them? covers some of his main ideas, such as the three keys to connecting with others, the five major assets you need to invest in your relationships, the importance of becoming a "pain detective" to figure out how you can best help the people you encounter in life and business, and how you can become a "first domino" in the lives of others, spurring them on to greater growth and self-actualization. 

Think of Joe's book as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People for the 21st century. While Carnegie's book is still absolutely worth reading, Joe's book represents the future of networking - while at the same time, the underlying themes and success strategies are as old as humanity itself.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: A more interesting life is yours when you learn the secrets of connecting with other people, and you’ll always be invited to the party when you learn and practice the skills Joe talks about in this book.

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The world won’t wait for you to get ready, and life-changing opportunities don’t tend to come looking for you. 

Most people (and I don’t often say “most people,” but in this case it’s justified) are following the exact same life-script: fall in line, wait to be told what to do, hold off until they’re “qualified” to do what they’ve always dreamed of doing.

What Jay calls “Permissionless Action” is different. It’s all about going unscripted. It’s about rejecting the default settings of your life, and going all-in on your grandest ambitions. 

The “script” might be somewhat reassuring to the average person (and I mean this: there’s nothing wrong with working a “regular” job, if that’s truly what you want to do), but it rarely - if ever - leads to the life you want.

For that, you have to make some big moves, take drastic, Permissionless Action, and go out dream-hunting.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: If you can master the art of taking Permissionless Action and making bold moves to creating the life you want, there’s very little that can stop you from living an insanely interesting (and meaningful) life.

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While the rest of the world thinks we're playing checkers, readers of this book will know that we're actually playing chess instead. The greatest Grandmasters in chess plan many, many moves ahead, and the best players in the game of life tend to do the same thing. That's what The Long Game is all about.

In this book, Dorie Clark doesn't claim that the hard path is the only correct path, but she does explain that we have to be intentional about how we structure our choices and prepare a long-term plan for our careers and lives. 

She also shows readers how to enjoy today, because you'll have greater confidence that you're on the right path, instead of scrambling from one imminent deadline to the next, never lifting your head above water for long enough to do any effective planning. 

Creating the white space in our lives necessary in order to step back and take in the whole picture is one of the goals of this book, and she presents a ton of high-level concepts to help you make this kind of thinking more common in your daily life. 

In a world where everyone’s mind is dominated by short-term thinking and their strategies sabotaged by self-destructive impulses, The Long Game will give you an incredible competitive advantage. Absorb its lessons, implement your long-term strategy, and you’ll be the one who emerges at the finish line completely transformed.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: Patience and long-term planning are two of the biggest keys to making BIG things happen. If you give yourself a long enough runway, you can create results that would astonish any “normie.” For the simple reason that big things take time. Compounding results has to take place, and even though it might not seem like you’re making much progress in the beginning, things have a way of speeding up very fast if you just keep going.

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Wanting is about how we arrive at our desires, and about how we can transform our relationship with those desires in order to step into our full humanity, relate to each other more harmoniously, and intelligently select our desires in such a way that we enlarge ourselves, rather than diminish ourselves.

Burgis packs a ton of ideas into a relatively short book, but once you start to see what he's talking about, you can't unsee it. Desire is like the water that the fish are swimming in, and Wanting takes us beyond the fishbowl to view the drama of desire from above. 

Backed up by the hugely influential French intellectual René Girard, author Luke Burgis shows that humans rarely desire anything independently. Human desire is mimetic - we imitate what other people want.

But in the exact same way that gravity exerts an invisible force on our bodies, the psychological force of mimesis shapes human desire all the time, silently and invisibly, and hardly anyone is aware of it happening at all.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: It’s boring to go around wanting what everyone else wants, never taking the time to figure out what you want. This book helps you fight that cultural gravity, that teleological inertia, and start wanting things because you want them.

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Shonda Rhimes is the executive producer of tons of hit shows like Grey’s Anatomy (which I swear I’ve never seen), Scandal, Bridgerton, and others, and this book is about a challenge she took on in 2015, where she decided to say “yes” to everything for one full year. 

These types of books are typically (by definition) formulaic, but there was something about this one that made me keep reading. It’s funny and interesting and sincere, with a level of self-awareness you don’t usually see in books like this. 

More than that, though, Shonda is an incredible motivator and teacher, and she makes you want to start saying “yes” more often in your own life too, simply because of the example she’s set and what her experiment did for her. 

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Make You More Interesting: I think we could all benefit from saying “yes to life,” as Viktor Frankl put it, and you almost can’t help but become more interesting if you make an honest, sustained effort to see more of the world and become an even deeper part of it.

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Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

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OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

From their favorite books and weird hobbies, to their stints in jail and philanthropic work, Billionaire Trivia reveals the lesser-known facts about America’s billionaires. (Buy on Amazon)

📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

The list of books I read last month doesn’t even make sense.

I mean, three of the books have some version of the word “millionaire” in the title, two are about the magic of books and libraries, one is about space exploration and the far future of humanity, another is about the Ultimate Nature of Reality…

It’s a varied list, I guess is what I’m trying to say. All over the place.

Not every book was a masterpiece, sure, and I never expect you to agree with all of my reading choices, but I found enough worthwhile thoughts and ideas inside each one that they kept me reading, and at least one of them was legitimately life-changing.

Here tonight I’ll give you a brief summary of each one, my thoughts, how they changed me/how I’m applying them, and whether I’m likely to recommend them to you.

For anyone who’s new to The Reading Life, this issue looks a little bit different, but the next issue will look much more familiar. I am working on some big changes though, including a free book club on Skool (likely launching next week), and a few more book-related things I’m sure you’ll like. I’ll keep you posted!

Now though, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

Drawing Wisdom from History’s Most Enduring Leaders, This Book Shows You How to Cross the Point of No Return and Become Someone Capable of Leading (Buy on Amazon)

Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:

📜 Book Quote of the Day (Below)

📖 Business Book of the Month (Skool)

📚 Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

📚 The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

📚 The Kybalion, by Three Initiates

📚 Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli

📚 The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel

📚 Million Dollar Habits, by Robert Ringer

📚 Millionaire Habits, by Steve Adcock

📚 The Book of Elon, by Eric Jorgenson

📚 Happy Sexy Millionaire, by Steven Bartlett

🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter

Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Stronger Than Yesterday, by Michael Matthews, which is technically a fitness book, but also a fantastic book about life and how to improve yours.

Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, by Harry Browne

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,479 books, including 25 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

This is a solid read by a former Secret Service agent with 25 years of experience investigating crimes, interrogating people, and catching the bad guys in their lies.

There’s a ton of great stuff in here about getting along with people in more everyday conversations too, which is going to be more immediately applicable to a wider range of people.

I don’t really have any interrogations coming up or anything, but I do want to smooth my way through the world and get what I want (same as you), and this book is great for that.

On the lying front though, what’s especially key to understand is that what you’re looking for are deviations from a person’s normal responses, not some magic “tell” that instantly gives them away as a liar. That’s something that most people tend to miss.

It’s not that, “Oh, he looked down and to the left, then coughed, so he must be lying.” It’s more like, “Hmm, he doesn’t normally do that, so I wonder if there’s more here that he’s not telling me?” A very useful book for sure! Both practical and tactical.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

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This is an incredibly well-researched book on the history of libraries and the development of the written word.

Even though I wasn’t terribly interested in every literary age they described (for example, I learned much more about monasteries than I ever wanted to learn), on balance it was a fantastic read.

What I found especially interesting (not to mention hopeful and optimistic) is the fact that, even though reading has been endangered in every age — threatened by everyone from vicious dictators to prudish parents and librarians — books always come back.

Through fires, plagues, wars, and everything else, reading never disappeared completely, and I don’t think it ever will. Readers and book lovers are born again in every age, and this “book about books” proves it.

“Books about books” are some of my favorites, by the way, and this is one of the best I’ve come across. Highly recommend for book nerds!

Difficulty Rating: Medium

Get This Book on Amazon: The Library: A Fragile History

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Okay, so what do I say about The Kybalion? It’s one of those books that’s not for everybody, and the author does also have this lawyerly, textbook-ish style that’s not always riveting. And of course the book itself is more on the mystical, esoteric side. But it’s wonderful in its own way.

The Kybalion seeks to explain the Seven Cosmic Laws governing reality and the universe — from the Law of Causation, to the Law of Compensation, Polarity, Unity in Diversity, and more.

Drawing on religious texts ranging from the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, to early-twentieth-century philosophy and various New Thought writers and intellectuals, it is deep.

There are certainly easier entry points into the ideas of cosmic unity, evolution, and development — the essential “Oneness” pervading all things — but it’s worth reading!

The backstory behind the creation of the book is fascinating as well, which is why I recommend getting the unabridged version with the introduction by Philip Deslippe.

Difficulty Rating: Medium

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Talk about a rapid change of subject from that last book!

Just Keep Buying is a personal finance book that argues that one of the best investment strategies is just to keep investing what you can into the stock market, across various asset classes, for as long as you can, or until you reach your financial goals.

I mean, it’s a 200-page book, so there’s more to it than that, but that’s what the title refers to. Essentially, most stock markets go up most of the time, and as long as you’re patient, as long as you work on increasing your income, and as long as you don’t blow all your money on stupid silly shit, you’re probably going to make it.

Nick also has another book called The Wealth Ladder that I enjoyed even more than this one, and it’s about the six “Levels” of wealth.

It’s divided into chapters explaining the dangers and opportunities present on each level, how you can move to the next one, and why you might not even want to. Highly recommend that one as well!

Difficulty Rating: Easy

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This is another incredible book about libraries (obviously), by the author of A History of Reading.

However, whereas The Library (above) was a more wide-ranging history of all libraries, The Library at Night more closely resembles a tour of Manguel’s library and all the various associations it calls up for him. It’s more personal.

Through chapters like “The Library as Myth,” “The Library as Order,” “The Library as Oblivion,” and “The Library as Home,” etc., he explores what all libraries have in common, how he built his own library, what his books mean to him, and why he reads at all.

His earlier book (above) was astonishingly good, and so is this one! If you’re a book lover (which I’m assuming you are), you’ll likely “get” this one right away. After all, he’s speaking directly to us!

Difficulty Rating: Easy

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This book is way funnier than it has any right to be, and Robert Ringer also has incredible success advice on top of that. It’s both hilarious and wise, and I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would.

The first book of his that I’ve read, Winning Through Intimidation, was really good too! And again, way funnier than it had any right to be. It’s also not a book about how to intimidate people to get what you want, which is why probably more than a few people have been disappointed after buying it!

Anyway, Million Dollar Habits is packed with amazing advice about self-discipline, taking action, not getting stepped on, keeping your word, adopting life-enhancing attitudes, seeing reality clearly, living in the moment and a whole lot more.

It’s just incredible in so many ways, and even if you wouldn’t typically read a book called Million Dollar Habits, I urge you to make an exception just this once! My guess is that you may actually really enjoy it.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

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This is another personal finance book, one that I read because I follow the author online and have always found his advice to be top-notch.

And while I wouldn’t say this book “changed my life” or anything, it did change my behavior a bit, and motivated me to open some additional savings accounts, as well as to organize my financial life a bit more.

If you’ve read any number of investing books before, you’re not likely to encounter much in here that’s “life-changing” either, but that said, I finished it because on a page-by-page basis I felt that it was worth reading.

I value my time incredibly highly, and I don’t finish bad books. It’s just that it was a little more basic than other books that would benefit me even more.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

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Stay with me on this one, even though I know many people reading this are already saying, “NOPE!”

I gotta say, though, there is literally zero politics in here, and very little about his family life either. It’s ALL about success, vision, purpose, and ensuring humanity’s future among the stars.

I positively ripped through this book, taking pages and pages of notes all the way through — I basically had my life changed sixteen times in 300+ pages. It’s sooo good. And what a project to put together too! Man, the effort that went into this…

The author (the CEO of Scribe Media) spent a good 5 years and thousands of hours going through all of Elon’s old podcast appearances, interviews, writings, etc., and distilling all his best advice on building companies, positively impacting the future, and saving humanity.

Some people just aren’t going to be able to set aside their personal feelings about the guy for long enough to gain any meaningful value from this book, which is really a shame, because there’s so much great stuff in here.

If only they could stop themselves from foaming at the mouth long enough to find it! It’s worth reading, I’m telling you. And especially if you love humanity and care about its survival and its future!

Difficulty Rating: Easy

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The last book I read in March was actually half-decent, but I gotta agree with some of the 3-star reviews on this one!

That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s just that the advice is a little on the basic side (and I mean hey, a review of the fundamentals can be good!). Plus there’s basically a swear word every two pages, which got old fast.

I’m not a prude or anything, it’s just that it started to be a little much. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking swear sometimes too, but it was just…jarring sometimes, that’s all. Anyway…

It’s still worth reading (and again, I don’t finish 100% bad books!), but if you read books like Psycho-Cybernetics, The Psychology of Money, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and The Millionaire Fastlane, you can get much more out of those than you would with Steven’s book. I still like his podcast though!

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Get This Book on Amazon: Happy Sexy Millionaire

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Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.

To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.

​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).

OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Educational Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.

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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

Tonight’s Great Book is called The Science of Scaling, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and it is easily one of the most transformative business books that I’ve ever read.

It’s also extremely simple to understand and explain.

Dr. Hardy’s book is short, deadly effective, and the “profits per page” that business owners can expect to generate from The Science of Scaling is insane.

After reading it, you'll feel like you’ve scaled yourself up as a person as well. 

I spent about 8 hours reading the book, 2 hours processing and transcribing my notes, and then a further 10 hours compiling this full breakdown of all the key ideas, action steps, and more to help you scale your business faster than ever.

It can also be used to achieve astounding results in your personal life too (many of the ideas are easily transferrable), but it’s primarily a business book.

This book breakdown is also completely free, but not all of them will be. For example, I already have many of them that are exclusively for Premium members of The Reading Life. 

Upgrade here if you want access to all of them, along with three free (published) books just for signing up, and a lot more.

I also want to wish a Happy Book Launch Day to Ethan Starr, who just published a book I’m looking forward to reading about America’s wealthiest people called Billionaire Trivia (the cover is awesome, by the way).

And also to Eric Jorgenson who just published The Book of Elon, which contains the most useful ideas from Elon Musk on purpose and success. I received an advance copy, and I’m absolutely loving it. Seriously, it’s incredible.

There’s also no politics in it, either. Just ideas, motivation, mental models, and massive rockets. It’s also blowing up right now on Amazon! No pun intended.

Anyway…before our coffees get cold, let’s dive deep into The Science of Scaling!

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Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.

Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

3. The Kybalion, by Three Initiates

4. Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli

5. The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel

6. Million Dollar Habits, by Robert Ringer

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,475 books, including 21 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

This Book is For:

*Ambitious entrepreneurs who are willing to do whatever it takes to scale their companies, regardless of the discomfort, fear of missing out, and hard choices that come from asking the necessary questions.

*People who want to raise their standards, both personally and professionally, and who are willing to commit to following through on the key decisions that elite performers are habitually required to make.

*Anyone who is interested in learning how to use time as a tool for building the future they want for themselves, and for designing the kind of intentional, meaningful life that's always worth living.

Summary:

The main idea here is that for rapid growth (as in the exponential, “how is this even legal?” kind of growth), almost nothing will work. Almost everything is also a waste of time. For high, hard goals, there are only a very limited number of pathways that will take you there.

One of the biggest mistakes that business owners make is “optimizing something that shouldn’t exist,” or attempting to grow things inside their business that will never take them where they want to go. 

For example, if you have multiple offers, lines, or products, and the one that’s the most time-consuming to deliver only brings in 15% of your total profits, you must get rid of it in favor of re-allocating your limited resources toward developing your core offer that is able to scale to multiple seven figures. 

The starting point of business strategy is setting the proper goal, and The Science of Scaling will help you set the type of seemingly-impossible goals that force focus, and demand that you become who you have to be in order to make it happen.  

In order to do that, you have to raise your floor, or the minimum standards for what you’re willing to accept. In your business, your life…everywhere. In exactly the same way that the majority of things you could do won’t take you to where you want to go, the majority of your thoughts are detrimental to your progress as well. 

That’s one of the core realizations I came to myself while reading the book. Raising your floor also means raising the quality of the thoughts you think, which requires you to level-up your social circle, the daily issues and events you care about, the books you read…everything. 

Companies that apply Dr. Hardy’s scaling framework routinely grow between 10-100X within just three years, but the majority of business owners aren’t ready to scale; structurally or psychologically. They’re not willing to do what it takes.

Most business owners are simply not ready to make the hard decisions about what kind of business they want to build, what kind of sacrifices they’re prepared to make, what kind of partners they want to surround themselves with, and how fast they’re willing to move.   

Perhaps the most powerful idea in the book on an individual level though, (and not purely from a business standpoint) concerns using time as a tool. Your past and future both direct and shape what you do in the present, but the future is much more effective than the past in guiding the decisions that will impact your success, to say nothing of your happiness.

You can learn from the mistakes of your past and commit to never repeating them again (and that’s great), but only a clear and compelling vision of your future can lead to rapid business growth and personal development. 

In my own business, I’ve used the ideas from Benjamin Hardy’s book to radically simplify everything that I’m doing. I’m now more focused and in control than ever before, and the goals that I’ve set are now powerful filters for deciding what I should and shouldn’t be spending my extremely valuable time on.

After reading The Science of Scaling, my business makes more sense (and more money) than ever before. Not only that, but I’m now absolutely convinced that when you raise your floor, your minimum standards, there’s no success ceiling that will ever permanently limit your life.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: The Case for Seemingly-Impossible Goals

Arnold Schwarzenegger once said that shooting for the smaller goal automatically puts the larger goal out of reach. People fail at achieving large goals all the time, but not reaching for them in the first place guarantees your mediocrity.

What happens when you set a seemingly-impossible goal with a seemingly-absurd deadline is that you automatically increase the expected value of your success.

Put simply, aiming for a 100X increase in revenue over the next three years means that even if you "only" achieve a 50X increase in five years, you're way ahead of where you would have been, had your initial goal been something boring (and relatively easy) like a 25% increase in that same timeframe.

What's more, you'll also start to see that virtually everything you're now doing is a waste of time. I'll have more to say about this later on, but setting seemingly-impossible goals is also an exercise in extreme simplicity.

Your task list will shrink by an order of magnitude, you'll question your default assumptions and uncover new opportunities for rapid growth, and you'll start seeing pathways to victory that were literally invisible to you before you set that massive goal.

This is nothing less than a total revolution in your thinking and your way of operating. You'll be on track to achieve exponential growth, while your competitors are still mired in complexity and corporate bureaucracy, and even your "failure" will be more profitable to you than their highest conception of success.

#2: Almost Nothing Will Work

One major factor in your success is the vehicle you use to get there. To take an extreme example, to become a billionaire in the next ten years, there's almost nothing you can do to make that happen. Almost nothing.

Putting aside the fact that becoming a billionaire may not even be a worthwhile goal for you (very possible), if that were your goal, that automatically limits the available pathways to getting there.

Day trading isn't going to do it, becoming a tax accountant won't get you there, and starting a hot dog stand in NYC gives you an approximately 0% chance of making it.

No, to become a billionaire, just take a look at how most billionaires made their money: founding and scaling a company, investing and asset management, inheritance (that's a big one!), and things like that. For that seemingly-impossible goal (and others), almost nothing will work.

For myself, I have much more "modest" goals for my business. I just want to get to $50,000 per month in revenue. A lifestyle business. That's it. It's not "nothing," and it's certainly a lot more money than most people make, but it's also a lot smaller than the goals of many readers of Dr. Hardy's book. And that's okay.

I once added up virtually everything I could possibly want out of life, and what it would cost me per month to make it all happen, and I came up with about $30,000 per month. Increasing it to $50,000 takes care of taxes, additional investments, a cash buffer, etc. I'm also already happy now, but that's a discussion for another time.

What I'll say now though, is that with respect to the revenue streams I have operating in my business, only a few of them could take me to $50,000 per month.

Running ads in my newsletter, landing sponsors for my YouTube channel, and attracting members to my Skool community could make up a large chunk of that (or even the whole thing eventually), with the other revenue streams basically on the back burner.

For example, I sell my book notes from the 1,000+ books that I've read on my Patreon for $1/month, but I'd need 50,000 people to join if that was my only revenue stream! Whereas, with sponsorships, just four sponsors at $5,000 each adds up to $20,000 per month right there. If my math serves me correctly!

All of this is to say that it's incredibly freeing to realize that you don't have to do so many things at the same time! You don't have to start six companies, or try and do drop-shipping, and a YouTube channel, and drive for Uber, and and and...

In fact, trying to run some Frankenstein business like that is only going to hold you back! You can't just keep adding things all the time. No, you need to subtract, and you have to take an honest look at all the things that won't take you where you want to go. Then, you need to be emotionless about eliminating them.

#3: Massive Goals Are Decision-Filters

Goals and time are both incredible decision filters. Meaning, you can use them to evaluate the choices and pathways you have in front of you, helping you to make the best decision going forward. Time I'll talk about later, but let's start with goals.

People with no goals struggle to make decisions, because they have no idea what's even important or what's worth focusing on. And people with small goals often make decisions that limit their possibilities for success in the future.

Setting the right goal literally determines your potential, and it also changes what you see. Not only that, but is also shows you what you can safely ignore.

If your goal is to 100X your revenue in the next three years, you're probably going to want to (politely) reject the offer from your friend from high school asking you to help him manage his corner coffee shop.

Unless it's going to be the next Starbucks, managing that shop is likely going to be nothing more than a distraction. It might even be a somewhat profitable distraction! But it's all time that could have been spent closing deals and expanding your main business.

When you really think about it, all success really comes down to is a series of decisions. You're here, right now, and at the end of 10,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 decisions is the massive success you're looking for.

The problem is that there are only so many decisions you can make, and every time you choose to make a decision that takes you closer to achieving some smaller, relatively unimportant goal is a decision that could have been taking you to that outrageous success that you really want.

Instead of taking five steps in a hundred different directions, commit to taking five hundred steps in one direction and see how far you get.

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

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Action Steps:

#1: Set a Seemingly-Impossible Goal

Whatever you're thinking, double it. Or triple it. Hell, 100X it for all I care. Just think bigger. The goal you select should challenge you (obviously), and it shouldn't be immediately obvious whether or not you can pull it off.

As you gain more experience in goal-setting, you'll learn your true limits, but you'll also stretch those limits by consistently setting larger goals than you think you can handle.

Don't invest money you can't afford to lose, but also don't set some boring target of attracting 10 customers in the next 150 days. Try 150 customers in 10 days. That's more like it!

#2: Set a Seemingly-Impossible Time Limit

The other part of the equation involves dramatically shortening your time horizon. If adding $100,000 in profits to your company is something you feel like you can achieve in the next year, try to do it in 30 days. It's a qualitatively different goal, and the person you'll become by trying to reach it is not the same person you'd become if you had settled for $100K over the next year.

#3: Mentally Scale Up Each Pathway

When you've selected your seemingly-impossible goal, and zeroed in on a seemingly-impossible time limit, evaluate your options for how you'll get there.

If your company sells a $50 product, a $500 product, and a $10,000 product, and your goal is a $100,000 increase in revenue, visualize what it would take to get there if you could only do it by focusing on one product.

For example, maybe you could partner with 100 influencers to help you sell the $50 product, at a commission rate of 50%.

With those terms, you'd need to sell 4,000 of them to reach $100,000 in revenue (I'm simplifying a ton, obviously), or 40 per influencer, on average. What about partnering with a larger influencer and giving them a higher or lower percentage? Or a flat fee? Or what about running Facebook ads instead?

There are sooo many ways to sell a $50 product online - or offline! Consider offline, too!

For the $10,000 product, how many sales calls would it take (assuming you know your numbers here, which you should!) to close 10 extra deals? Who do you know that can introduce you to more prospects? Do you even need sales calls?

Think through each path and select the best one, according to your preferences, likelihood of success, and other factors.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

This Book on Amazon:

The Science of Scaling, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

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To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.

​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).

OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 200,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life newsletter and enjoy unlimited access to 150+ Premium Book Breakdowns, my complete notes from 1,400+ books, exclusive discounts, and more.

2. Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business (If the link works, I can still fit you in this month).

3. Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.

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No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy:

There's always a way to succeed in life, no matter who you are or where you come from, but you're never going to find it by following the herd. If the herd knew how to achieve success and get everything they ever wanted, you wouldn't need this book.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy:

In this book, the eccentric entrepreneur Dan S. Kennedy shares the extreme time management strategies he uses personally to run his multimillion-dollar company, all while successfully safeguarding his schedule and his sanity.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy:

Almost everything you're doing now is a distraction preventing you from making a 10X leap - in revenue, leadership ability, significance, and more. Exponential transformations are actually easier than these small little 2X improvements, and Dr. Benjamin Hardy will prove it to you here in this book.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

Read the Full Breakdown: 10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:

You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.

Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Set a Seemingly-Impossible Goal

Whatever you're thinking, double it. Or triple it. Hell, 100X it for all I care. Just think bigger. The goal you select should challenge you (obviously), and it shouldn't be immediately obvious whether or not you can pull it off.

As you gain more experience in goal-setting, you'll learn your true limits, but you'll also stretch those limits by consistently setting larger goals than you think you can handle. Don't invest money you can't afford to lose, but also don't set some boring target of attracting 10 customers in the next 150 days. Try 150 customers in 10 days. That's more like it!

#2: Set a Seemingly-Impossible Time Limit

The other part of the equation involves dramatically shortening your time horizon. If adding $100,000 in profits to your company is something you feel like you can achieve in the next year, try to do it in 30 days. It's a qualitatively different goal, and the person you'll become by trying to reach it is not the same person you'd become if you had settled for $100K over the next year.

#3: Mentally Scale Up Each Pathway

When you've selected your seemingly-impossible goal, and zeroed in on a seemingly-impossible time limit, evaluate your options for how you'll get there. If your company sells a $50 product, a $500 product, and a $10,000 product, and your goal is a $100,000 increase in revenue, visualize what it would take to get there if you could only do it by focusing on one product.

For example, maybe you could partner with 100 influencers to help you sell the $50 product, at a commission rate of 50%. With those terms, you'd need to sell 4,000 of them to reach $100,000 in revenue (I'm simplifying a ton, obviously), or 40 per influencer, on average. What about partnering with a larger influencer and giving them a higher or lower percentage? Or a flat fee? Or what about running Facebook ads instead? There are sooo many ways to sell a $50 product online - or offline! Consider offline, too!

For the $10,000 product, how many sales calls would it take (assuming you know your numbers here, which you should!) to close 10 extra deals? Who do you know that can introduce you to more prospects? Do you even need sales calls? Think through each path and select the best one, according to your preferences, likelihood of success, and other factors.

#4: List Everything You're Currently Doing

As we've discussed, virtually everything you're doing now is not taking you to your goal - at least not in the most efficient way possible. Sure, updating the testimonials on your website is important, but what if you just 1,000X'd the traffic to your landing page instead? Would the increased conversion percent make up for whatever sales the outdated testimonials are costing you? There are tons of examples like this.

Realistically, only a very few things you're currently doing are absolutely necessary for you to hit your seemingly-impossible goal. In this step though, I just want you to list them all out so you know what they are. Most business owners have no idea.

#5: Delete 90% of What You're Currently Doing

You heard me. Delete almost everything, and only if you notice after the fact that it was completely necessary do you add it back in. If you're currently updating your landing pages, switching to a new email service provider, changing your website URL, posting on six different platforms, doing cold outreach through DMs, cold outreach through email, getting on sales calls, appearing on podcasts, recording YouTube videos, etc., etc., etc...stop it! It's completely unnecessary. And in fact, it's holding you back from scaling exponentially. Drop. Nearly. Everything.

#6: Raise Your Floor

Everything you've just cut is now below your floor, and belongs on your "Stop Doing List." Which is exactly what it sounds like: a list of everything you've chosen not to do. You're not posting on TikTok, you're not running Google ads, you're not selling sixteen different products - you're doing this.

Raising your floor impacts the rest of your life too, as we've discussed. So drop friends and relatives who don't support your dreams or who are otherwise holding you back, shift your thoughts (as much as possible) to success-oriented, positive, uplifting ones that are taking you where you want to go, and resolve to eliminate any other bad habits that are negatively impacting your chances of success. You know what they are, so eliminate them.

#7: Enlist Accountability Partners

As they say, the quality of your future depends on the books you read and the people you surround yourself with, so you need to gather a group of like-minded, supportive individuals around you who want to see you succeed, and who would be proud to help you get there. Might I not-so-subtly suggest joining my private business mastermind?

#8: Make an Iron Promise to Your Future Self

This is the big one. One of the most important pieces of advice that I can give you is that you must never, ever, ever - under any circumstances - lie to yourself or willfully deceive yourself in any way. You must be ruthlessly honest with yourself, and you must tell yourself the truth about your world at all times.

When you do that, you'll come to find that a promise to yourself actually means something. It's an unbreakable bond, something that you refuse to walk back on, no matter what. You have to be able to trust yourself and believe in yourself. So the next time you find yourself facing a mirror, look deep into your own eyes and say (internally or out loud): "I promise to do whatever it takes. I will give this everything I have within me, and I will NOT let you down."

Dr. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and author of Willpower Doesn’t Work and Personality Isn’t Permanent, along with many others.

His blogs have been read by more than 100 million people and are featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, and others. For several years, he was the #1 most-read writer on Medium.com. He and his wife, Lauren, are the parents of six kids. They live in Orlando, Florida.

Additional Resources:

Scaling.com | 10X Your Company in 3 Years or Less

This Book on Amazon:

The Science of Scaling, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

If You Liked This Book:

10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Be Your Future Self Now, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Who Not How, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Your Next Five Moves, by Patrick Bet-David

The Four-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss

Principles, by Ray Dalio

The Long Game, by Dorie Clark

The One Thing, by Gary Keller

Effortless, by Greg McKeown

Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

If you were sent this breakdown, click here to subscribe.

To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.

​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).

OK, that’s it for now…

More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Work with me personally to scale your business past $5K per month and experience the intoxicating freedom of finally being in control of both your time and your income. High-performers only.

2. Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life and enjoy unlimited access to 150+ Premium Book Breakdowns, my complete notes from 1,300+ books, exclusive discounts, monthly donations made on your behalf to an incredible literacy charity, and more!

3. Join Creator Launch Academy, my private business mastermind for creators looking to add at least $1,000/month to their revenue and save at least 20+ hours of productive time each and every week.

 YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

*Ambitious entrepreneurs who are willing to do whatever it takes to scale their companies, regardless of the discomfort, fear of missing out, and hard choices that come from asking the necessary questions.

*People who want to raise their standards, both personally and professionally, and who are willing to commit to following through on the key decisions that elite performers are habitually required to make.

*Anyone who is interested in learning how to use time as a tool for building the future they want for themselves, and for designing the kind of intentional, meaningful life that's always worth living.

This is easily one of the most transformative business books that I’ve ever read, and it’s also extremely simple to understand and explain.

It’s short, deadly effective, and the “profits per page” that business owners can expect to generate from The Science of Scaling is insane. After reading it, you'll feel like you’ve scaled yourself up as a person as well. 

The main idea here is that for rapid growth (as in the exponential, “how is this even legal?” kind of growth), almost nothing will work. Almost everything is also a waste of time. For high, hard goals, there are only a very limited number of pathways that will take you there.

One of the biggest mistakes that business owners make is “optimizing something that shouldn’t exist,” or attempting to grow things inside their business that will never take them where they want to go. 

For example, if you have multiple offers, lines, or products, and the one that’s the most time-consuming to deliver only brings in 15% of your total profits, you must get rid of it in favor of re-allocating your limited resources toward developing your core offer that is able to scale to multiple seven figures. 

The starting point of business strategy is setting the proper goal, and The Science of Scaling will help you set the type of seemingly-impossible goals that force focus, and demand that you become who you have to be in order to make it happen.  

In order to do that, you have to raise your floor, or the minimum standards for what you’re willing to accept. In your business, your life…everywhere. In exactly the same way that the majority of things you could do won’t take you to where you want to go, the majority of your thoughts are detrimental to your progress as well. 

That’s one of the core realizations I came to myself while reading the book. Raising your floor also means raising the quality of the thoughts you think, which requires you to level-up your social circle, the daily issues and events you care about, the books you read…everything. 

Companies that apply Dr. Hardy’s scaling framework routinely grow between 10-100X within just three years, but the majority of business owners aren’t ready to scale; structurally or psychologically. They’re not willing to do what it takes.

Most business owners are simply not ready to make the hard decisions about what kind of business they want to build, what kind of sacrifices they’re prepared to make, what kind of partners they want to surround themselves with, and how fast they’re willing to move.   

Perhaps the most powerful idea in the book on an individual level though, (and not purely from a business standpoint) concerns using time as a tool. Your past and future both direct and shape what you do in the present, but the future is much more effective than the past in guiding the decisions that will impact your success, to say nothing of your happiness.

You can learn from the mistakes of your past and commit to never repeating them again (and that’s great), but only a clear and compelling vision of your future can lead to rapid business growth and personal development. 

In my own business, I’ve used the ideas from Benjamin Hardy’s book to radically simplify everything that I’m doing. I’m now more focused and in control than ever before, and the goals that I’ve set are now powerful filters for deciding what I should and shouldn’t be spending my extremely valuable time on.

After reading The Science of Scaling, my business makes more sense (and more money) than ever before. Not only that, but I’m now absolutely convinced that when you raise your floor, your minimum standards, there’s no success ceiling that will ever permanently limit your life.

#1: The Case for Seemingly-Impossible Goals

Arnold Schwarzenegger once said that shooting for the smaller goal automatically puts the larger goal out of reach. People fail at achieving large goals all the time, but not reaching for them in the first place guarantees your mediocrity.

What happens when you set a seemingly-impossible goal with a seemingly-absurd deadline is that you automatically increase the expected value of your success. Put simply, aiming for a 100X increase in revenue over the next three years means that even if you "only" achieve a 50X increase in five years, you're way ahead of where you would have been, had your initial goal been something boring (and relatively easy) like a 25% increase in that same timeframe.

What's more, you'll also start to see that virtually everything you're now doing is a waste of time. I'll have more to say about this later on, but setting seemingly-impossible goals is also an exercise in extreme simplicity. Your task list will shrink by an order of magnitude, you'll question your default assumptions and uncover new opportunities for rapid growth, and you'll start seeing pathways to victory that were literally invisible to you before you set that massive goal.

This is nothing less than a total revolution in your thinking and your way of operating. You'll be on track to achieve exponential growth, while your competitors are still mired in complexity and corporate bureaucracy, and even your "failure" will be more profitable to you than their highest conception of success.

#2: Almost Nothing Will Work

One major factor in your success is the vehicle you use to get there. To take an extreme example, to become a billionaire in the next ten years, there's almost nothing you can do to make that happen. Almost nothing.

Putting aside the fact that becoming a billionaire may not even be a worthwhile goal for you (very possible), if that were your goal, that automatically limits the available pathways to getting there. Day trading isn't going to do it, becoming a tax accountant won't get you there, and starting a hot dog stand in NYC gives you an approximately 0% chance of making it.

No, to become a billionaire, just take a look at how most billionaires made their money: founding and scaling a company, investing and asset management, inheritance (that's a big one!), and things like that. For that seemingly-impossible goal (and others), almost nothing will work.

For myself, I have much more "modest" goals for my business. I just want to get to $50,000 per month in revenue. A lifestyle business. That's it. It's not "nothing," and it's certainly a lot more money than most people make, but it's also a lot smaller than the goals of many readers of Dr. Hardy's book. And that's okay.

I once added up virtually everything I could possibly want out of life, and what it would cost me per month to make it all happen, and I came up with about $30,000 per month. Increasing it to $50,000 takes care of taxes, additional investments, a cash buffer, etc. I'm also happy now, but that's a discussion for another time.

What I'll say now though, is that with respect to the revenue streams I have operating in my business, only a few of them could take me to $50,000 per month.

Running ads in my newsletter, landing sponsors for my YouTube channel, and attracting members to my Skool community could make up a large chunk of that (or even the whole thing eventually), with the other revenue streams basically on the back burner.

For example, I sell my book notes from the 1,000+ books that I've read on my Patreon for $1/month, but I'd need 50,000 people to join if that was my only revenue stream! Whereas, with sponsorships, just four sponsors at $5,000 each adds up to $20,000 per month right there.

All of this is to say that it's incredibly freeing to realize that you don't have to do so many things at the same time! You don't have to start six companies, or try and do drop-shipping, and a YouTube channel, and drive for Uber, and and and...

In fact, trying to run some Frankenstein business like that is only going to hold you back! You can't just keep adding things all the time. No, you need to subtract, and you have to take an honest look at all the things that won't take you where you want to go. Then, you need to be emotionless about eliminating them.

#3: Massive Goals Are Decision-Filters

Goals and time are both incredible decision filters. Meaning, you can use them to evaluate the choices and pathways you have in front of you, helping you to make the best decision going forward. Time I'll talk about later, but let's start with goals.

People with no goals struggle to make decisions, because they have no idea what's even important or what's worth focusing on. And people with small goals often make decisions that limit their possibilities for success in the future.

Setting the right goal literally determines your potential, and it also changes what you see. Not only that, but is also shows you what you can safely ignore. If your goal is to 100X your revenue in the next three years, you're probably going to want to (politely) reject the offer from your friend from high school asking you to help him manage his corner coffee shop. Unless it's going to be the next Starbucks, managing that shop is likely going to be nothing more than a distraction. It might even be a somewhat profitable distraction! But it's all time that could have been spent closing deals and expanding your main business.

When you really think about it, all success really comes down to is a series of decisions. You're here, right now, and at the end of 10,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 decisions is the massive success you're looking for.

The problem is that there are only so many decisions you can make, and every time you choose to make a decision that takes you closer to achieving some smaller, relatively unimportant goal is a decision that could have been taking you to that outrageous success that you really want. Instead of taking five steps in a hundred different directions, commit to taking five hundred steps in one direction and see how far you get.

#4: Your Goals Determine What You See

Your reticular activation system is the tool your brain uses to filter your reality.

What you look for determines what you see, and once your "tell" your RAS to start looking for ways to achieve a particular goal, your brain goes to work delivering that reality to you by bringing you opportunities and uncovering pathways to make it happen. It's not magic, it's not mysticism, it's just a function of how the human mind works. Which is actually pretty magical when you think about it!

In actual practice, this means that once you've consciously decided that something is important to you, it'll start appearing more often in your field of awareness. The most common example most people cite is when you're looking at buying a new car, you start seeing that specific type of car everywhere.

The reality is that it was always there, but until your brain was tuned to look for Porsche Boxsters or Ford Mustangs, they got filtered out because you weren't paying attention. The same goes for literally any other goal you could select.

In the context of business, when you start thinking in terms of seemingly-impossible goals and exponential growth, you'll start seeing new opportunities everywhere you look. They were always there, mind you, but you didn't see them because you weren't "ready" for them.

Small goals keep you fixated on all the minor things you could do to make an extra $100 here or there, or increase profits by 15%, etc. But when you select massive goals, you signal to your brain that it's time to look for ways to make them happen.

#5: Noise Doesn’t Scale

Simple scales, complexity fails. Businesses that have too many different moving parts and things to keep track of can quickly spiral out of control and become a nightmare to manage, much less grow.

If you have fifty different things that you're tracking, working on, etc., and there are dozens of ways they could each go wrong, that's going to be a much more difficult business to grow than one where you have, say, three revenue streams, three growth channels, and one ideal customer profile.

An even simpler business would be one where you publish YouTube videos (growth channel), for HR managers who want to achieve a better work/life balance (customer profile), with a link in your video descriptions where they can book a call with you and potentially hire you as a coach (revenue stream).

That's sooo much simpler (yet potentially much more profitable, all things considered) than posting on five different platforms, trying to reach people who want to be healthier (such a broad category that it becomes meaningless), selling everything from courses to coffee mugs.

The first person is going to find it much easier to enroll five people in their coaching program for $1,000 each, than if they were to dilute their message in a vain attempt to reach "everybody," confusing them with all these different offers and products that try to address a barely-defined need.

This is especially important when/if you reach a stage where you want to hire additional employees. Instead of trying to manage three sales teams, seven video editors, two social media managers, etc., you have just a few moving parts to explain to others, and a very small number of defined pathways to success.

#6: You MUST Raise Your Floor

Personal standards are everything in life. They affect your success in so many ways, and this is no less true in the field of business.

Raising your floor, or your minimum standards for what you're willing to accept and do, enables an entire world of possibilities that are simply unavailable to people who are willing to settle for less.

Remember: almost nothing will work. If your goal is to raise $50M in venture capital funding, starting a Patreon probably isn't going to be the best decision. Likewise, if your seemingly-impossible goal is to make it to the Olympics, you shouldn't attempt to become a world-class violinist at the same time.

That's to say nothing of the more mundane choices we make every single day. When you have a seemingly-impossible goal, you can't go out drinking five nights a week, hang out with toxic people all day, catch every episode of "that new show," whatever it is. Those activities are all beneath your floor, and you have to eliminate them if you're truly serious about success.

There's a mental component at work here too, where the thoughts you think are either above or below your floor as well. That was one of my biggest realizations while reading The Science of Scaling. Perhaps 90% of the thoughts you think aren't conducive to getting where you want to go in life. Thoughts of regret, revenge, petty annoyances, the various injustices (real or perceived) we each experience throughout the day - none of these things are above your new floor. Drop them.

#7: The Goal Determines the Pathway

This is a mental exercise worth doing (and recommended in the Action Steps section below), and it involves mentally walking down several different potential pathways that get you to your goal, and then selecting the best one.

For a business owner who wants to reach $10,000 in monthly revenue, there are multiple ways to get there, not all of which are created equal. Some will take too long, some will be too uncertain, some will be unethical or immoral...there are many "wrong" paths where a person could get lost on their way to $10K/month.

It's a worthwhile exercise, however, because it expands your mind, opens up your options, and makes it more likely that you discover a pathway to your goal that will work. What Dr. Hardy's saying above is that the bigger your goal, the fewer available pathways there will be to reach it. The goal determines the path.

#8: The 3 Things That Shape What You See and Do

Taking what we said about the RAS even further, the quality and clarity of your goal matters as well, along with the strength of your commitment. Selecting a good goal in the first place is the first step, but seeing its every contour and detail, visualizing it intensely, is the next step after that. Thirdly, you have to keep advancing confidently towards it, no matter what, for however long it takes.

We've already spoken at length about selecting high-quality goals (and there's more to come below), but the clarity with which you can observe that successful realization of that goal in your mind is consistently underrated as well.

Think about every single Olympic athlete you've ever seen or heard about. The fighter pilots, the ultra-successful entrepreneurs - they all saw their idealized, desired future in their minds, almost exactly as if it were a present reality. That's the kind of detail you need to develop and return to in your mind.

Then, you have to commit. But not in the "well, I'll give it my best shot" kind of way, but as though your life depends on it. At the very least, your future depends on it, which is your life. Or at least your potential life if you select the proper goal, see it as though it were already achieved, and never let it go.

#9: Cultivate Ruthless Self-Honesty

Most people are lying to themselves, pretty much every single minute of every single day. The Reality Principle, as Robert Ringer calls it, is a tough one to consistently apply, as it's so much easier and more comfortable to live in a state of blissful self-delusion...until the future actually gets here, and you realize that you could have had everything you've ever wanted, had you not been so unserious.

Cultivating ruthless self-honesty is about building an accurate map of reality, and basing your decisions on how the world actually is, instead of how you would like the world to be. What's true won't always feel good, but if you actually care about scaling, it won't matter. You're in this no matter what, remember?

#10: The Feedback Loop That Forces Results

A maniacal sense of urgency, and a disposition towards radical action are two characteristics that consistently lead to success. You have to want it, you have to get serious about it, and you have move move move. Now. All the time. At least if you're serious about making massive changes.

Most people simply aren't ready to scale - in business or otherwise - and you know what? That's totally fine. You don't have to want what everyone else wants, and you likely won't, if you're being honest with yourself. Again, the important thing is simply never to lie to yourself.

What helps to develop a maniacal sense of urgency is a heightened awareness of the consequences of not changing, of not doing something different, of not moving fast. Again, if you can mentally scale up the pathways and try to catch a glimpse of your future if nothing changes, you can become inspired to make radical changes in the here and now.

When it comes to scaling a company, you'll want to set aggressive deadlines, and you'll want to make clear the consequences for not hitting them. When you know that something terrible is going to happen if you don't hit these deadlines (even if it's "only" public embarrassment), it really gets you moving!

#11: Time is a Tool

Your past is a tool to improve your present, but your future is a power tool to improve your present. Both can help you make better decisions in the here and now, but looking ahead to the future will give you better direction and more useful information than staying stuck in the past.

Learning from the mistakes and negative experiences of your past can tell you what not to do in the future, but they can't really help you set a new direction. Sure, you can kinda sorta figure out what you want to get away from, but it's only by looking ahead to the future that can you set a course to an exciting, meaningful, and profitable new reality.

Using time as a tool means using your future, desired reality as a filter for what you do in the here and now. Knowing where you want to end up in the future determines the moves and actions you take in the present, and this kind of clarity can help you make more correct decisions, because you'll know exactly where you're headed. As they say, if you don't know where you're going any road will take you there.

I’ve been taking detailed notes from every single book I’ve ever read since 2014, and they’re all here on my Patreon for just $1.

They’re updated monthly (sometimes twice a month), and by supporting me on Patreon you’ll also be able to keep up with everything I’m reading and learning, and get my best notes, takeaways, and summaries from every book that I finish.

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YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

By this point, I’ve read nearly 1,500 books(!), and it’s getting damn-near impossible to pick ten favorites, much less one favorite.

But for tonight, I did my best to pick out ten books that made a deep, lasting impression on me, and also ones that I haven’t recommended a bunch of times before.

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll likely remember me raving about books like The Revolution from Within, The Outsider, Meditations, Fahrenheit 451, Cloud Atlas, and Siddhartha, and while those are phenomenal books, I wanted to recommend a few that you may not have seen as often.

There’s a wide range of genres represented here, from psychology and philosophy, to literary fiction and military science-fiction (trust me) - there’s even an ancient religious text in here (and not from a religion I personally adhere to).

All of these books are incredible. They all changed my life. And now I’m recommending them to you.

Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

A Great Book About Ditching Unrealistic Ideals of Perfectionism (Buy on Amazon)

Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:

📜 Book Quote of the Day (Below)

📖 Business Book of the Month (Skool)

📚 An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, by Chris Hadfield

📚 At the Existentialist Cafe, by Sarah Bakewell

📚 Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

📚 Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut

📚 The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Eknath Easwaran

📚 The Book, by Alan Watts

📚 The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

📚 The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker

📚 The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

📚 The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

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Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.

Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

3. The Kybalion, by Three Initiates

4. Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli

5. The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,474 books, including 20 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

This is an incredible book by the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, and it was one of the very first books I read after I started counting, way back in 2014.

You don’t have to count the number of books you’ve read, by the way, it literally means nothing. But Hadfield’s book inspired me to read compulsively, to raid the library over and over again, because I realized there were more books like his out there. I just had to find them.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth is about dreaming big, and being ready for anything. It’s about getting yourself ready to achieve big dreams, to start taking moonshots, and to start believing that you have what it takes. Literal moonshots, in his case!

It’s entirely possible that I’m building this book up in my memory so much that it might not be as good as I remember…but I honestly don’t think so. I know it’s common for people to say this, but it’s true: this book changed my life.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why You Might Love It Too: If you love space and you’re excited about the possibility of a bright, expansive human future among the stars, you’ll almost definitely love this one.

But even if you’re more of an Earth-bound type, it’ll inspire you to think bigger, start believing in yourself, and get out there and make it happen.

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Existentialism was one of absolutely favorite courses in university, and I’ve never forgotten how alive it made me feel. This book helped me recapture even more of that aliveness, and I’ve never forgotten how it made me feel either.

The philosophy of existentialism itself is a strong, unshakeable inner conviction that life is worth living; it’s yours; and that you bear ultimate responsibility for living it. 

Characterized by radical freedom, authentic being, and personal responsibility, it’s the definition of high-agency. There may be certain “facticities” of your existence - limits that shape the possibilities of your life - but you have unlimited freedom within those limits to make your life exactly what you want it to be. 

With that in mind, this is a book about the key figures of that philosophical movement, the major events of their lives, the weird troubles they often found themselves in, and how they inspired countless others to recognize their own true freedom as well.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why You Might Love It Too: If you’re into philosophy already, you’ll find this book quite easy to read, and if you’re into being alive at all, you’ll love it. It’ll get you thinking, it’ll get you moving, it’ll get you living.

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Let me tell you a little bit about what makes Infinite Jest so intimidating, and then I’ll tell you why the epic challenge is so indescribably worth it.

For one thing, it’s over 1,100 pages long, including hundreds of endnotes, which you probably should read because some of them contain crucial plot points and several of the funniest jokes. 

Wallace uses 20,584 unique words in the 577,608-word book(!), which ended up sending me to the dictionary on almost every single page. One guy actually calculated this, and he worked out that the first 35,000 words of the novel contain 4,923 unique words, “more than most rappers but still less than the Wu-Tang Clan.”

So it’s long and you won’t know what all the words mean. But what is it actually about?

That’s a big question, and my full summary is massive (too big to include here), so if you’re interested you can read the whole thing here.

Difficulty Rating: HARD

Why You Might Love It Too: Infinite Jest gave me a book hangover that lasted for months. I literally couldn’t stop thinking about it. I realize it’s not going to be everyone’s thing, and it’s one of “those” books that people tend to have all these weird associations with, but man. It’s incredible.

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This is Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, and it’s easily one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

Briefly, it’s about a fully-automated, futuristic society run entirely by super-intelligent machines, but it was written in 1952, so you can just imagine what that’s like! Reading it in 2025 like I did was a trip.

Vonnegut is always hilarious, sure, but he always brought a ton of heart and humanity to his books, his characters, and his writing, and just like with Chris Hadfield above, he was one of the very first people to get me really fired up about reading. This newsletter wouldn’t even exist without those two.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why You Might Love It Too: The jokes alone are reason enough, but it’s also a fascinating look at what people in the 50’s thought the future would be like. The crazy thing is how relevant it still is, even though the details are a little off. Amazing book all around, and one that might get you hooked on Kurt Vonnegut!

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This is one of the main spiritual texts of Hinduism, which you might not expect me to have loved so much - or have even read! But yes, I read it years ago and haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. Seriously, it’s incredible.

The Gita is a philosophical dialogue between the God Krishna and a prince, Arjuna, wherein Krishna explains the fundamental truths of the universe, how humans can come to know God, and how to live in accordance with what I guess you could call the “divine will.”

I’m trying to summarize something that could never fit inside a simple newsletter, but the idea is that the universe has always been perfect, is perfect now, and will always be perfect, that it goes on forever and ever, but we still have to play out our individual parts.

Taking place right before an important battle, Arjuna questions why he has to fight at all, since the universe is perfect anyway, and Krishna basically tells him that it’s his part to play, that it’s perfect, and that, at the same time, his actions are supremely important.

I’m glossing over a huge part of it, and obviously I could dedicate pages and pages to what I learned from the Gita, but I absolutely loved it!

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why You Might Love It Too: You can probably guess that I’m not a Hindu, but this book still changed my life. If you’re interested in different religions, curious about the larger universe and what it means, then I highly recommend it!

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The Book goes together perfectly with the the Gita (above), and in fact, Alan Watts was known as the foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences.

His lively lectures (that you can watch for free on YouTube!) were all about freeing people from the idea that life has to be this endless struggle.

He also helped me realize that I didn’t come into this world…I came out of it.

One of my favorite lines of his (and one I can write from memory) is that “You are something that the universe is ‘doing,’ in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” Meaning, that there’s nothing to do or to achieve, nothing to acquire - because you already have it!

You are as much a part of this universe as the basic molecules that make up the water in the oceans, the stars in the skies, and there’s nothing “outside” of yourself that you can attain or grab or rush after that will make you any more or less worthy of human life and all the dignity that being human affords you. Yup, easily one of my favorite books.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why You Might Love It Too: Again, if you’re into that Eastern philosophy stuff (which I am!), you’ll find lots to love in here. Alan Watts never took himself too seriously, he loved being alive, and he gave audiences some of the clearest introductions to those life-enhancing philosophies that they had ever heard.

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This book has been absolutely blowing up online recently, and that makes me so happy.

I’m often hard-pressed to give a straight answer to “What’s your favorite book of all time?” but this might be it! It’s absolutely, astonishingly, amazingly awesome. Damn. 

Briefly, the main character Edmond Dantes is thrown into a deep, dark dungeon for a crime he didn’t commit, where he meets another condemned man who tells him of buried treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo.

This is nothing you won’t read on the back flap, but * spoiler alert * he escapes, finds the treasure, reinvents himself, and spends the rest of the novel taking revenge on the people who put him away.

It’s especially relevant to me because I started reading it while I was sitting in the Halifax police station, waiting to get booked and charged for a crime that I didn’t commit either.

The whole story is too long to get into now, but back when I was a nightclub bouncer, some drunken loser claimed that he had been assaulted, and when the investigating officer, Constable Cadieux, asked me to give the rest of my statement at his house after work(!), he charged me with the crime after I said no. Go figure.

Everything was eventually dropped because being innocent meant that there was no evidence(!), but the whole thing was so dumb. All that is to say that this novel spoke to me. It’d be incredible even if I hadn’t gone through that, but oh man. The Count of Monte Cristo was my whole personality for about two full years.

Difficulty Rating: Easy (But Very Long)

Why You Might Love It Too: If you’ve ever been wrongfully accused of anything, and had your life destroyed (or almost destroyed) because of it, you'll probably love this book. Even if you haven’t…I literally can’t think of a single person I recommended this to who has said “Yeah it was alright.” No, they all loved it.

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This book about the subconscious fear of death and how it motivates much of human behavior won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, but the man behind the book was just as interesting as its subject matter. I never met the guy, but he might just be one of my favorite university professors. 

Becker taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was so beloved by his students that they once got together and offered to pay his salary after learning that the university wasn’t going to renew his contract! 

When he died at the age of 49 from colon cancer, the academic world lost someone very special, and I’d personally recommend several of his other books too, including The Birth and Death of Meaning, and Escape from Evil. 

The main thrust of this book is that being alive - as fragile beings with no satisfying explanation for why we’re here - is so terrifying that in response to this realization, the majority of people retreat into a socially constructed self that basically forms a psychological defense against the reality of death.

Becker also believed that these psychological defenses prevent us from discovering who we really are, and not only that, are also responsible for much of the evil that’s present in the world. 

With brilliantly reasoned arguments, he shows how this subconscious fear of death limits our lives, prevents accurate self-knowledge, and, if not surmounted through the pursuit of “genuine heroism,” casts a dark shadow across our full human potential.

Difficulty Rating: Intermediate

Why You Might Love It Too: Okay, so maybe not everyone will “love” a book about death, but it’s more about life than anything else. It’ll shock you into wakefulness, but in the very human, and deeply thoughtful way that Becker was known for.

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This book became an instant favorite of mine, even though I’m hardly what you would call an avid military science-fiction fan. There’s very little in my personal reading history to suggest that I might enjoy this book, and now it’s one that I damn-near beg people to read. It’s phenomenal, and that’s all there is to it. 

Haldeman is a Vietnam War veteran, and he uses “time dilation” (how time slows down the closer you travel to the speed of light, which is a real thing) to talk about the disconnection and alienation he and thousands of other Vietnam veterans experienced returning to a country that no longer felt like home.

Plot-wise, it’s about a draftee named William Mandella who is conscripted to fight in an interstellar war against the Taurans, an alien civilization many lightyears away, for reasons which are muddled, confusing, and not entirely understood.

Because of the time dilation, centuries pass on Earth, while only months have gone by for Mandella, who returns home to a planet he no longer recognizes either. 

I don’t want to give any more away, because I really, really want you (yes, you!) to go out and read this book! It’s so much more than “just” a sci-fi novel, or “just” a war novel. It might just turn you into an unlikely military science-fiction fan yourself.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why You Might Love It Too: The action scenes are awesome, the sad parts are devastating, the thought-provoking parts are fascinating, and it’s darkly funny in places that bring the absurdity and meaninglessness of Vietnam into clear view in a way that is just…timeless.

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This book has no business being as uplifting as it is, given that Camus’s stated aim was to deal with what he considered the most important question in all of philosophy: the question of suicide. 

If you’re unfamiliar, in Greek mythology, Sisyphus is the dude who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity, which would then roll back down to the very bottom every time he finally reached the top.

Camus uses this myth to explore what he calls the “absurd,” or the contradiction between the deep human need for meaning and the unreasonable silence of the universe in response. 

I know, I know, totally uplifting, right?

But Camus’s whole deal was that he believed human life should be a revolt against this absurdity, and that one should “live to the point of tears,” which is to say as intensely and passionately as conceivably possible - to give meaning to existence, where none may have existed before. 

In the existentialist view, every human being is in the same position as Sisyphus, pointlessly pushing a rock up a hill for all eternity (or at least until we die), with the exception that we have a way out. 

We don’t have to push the boulder anymore; we can just cease to exist. So, should we? Why or why not? 

Exploring that question was Camus’s purpose here, and he comes up with a fundamentally positive, life-affirming answer, one that’s stayed with me ever since I read this beautiful book.

A book that, I will say, is a lot easier and more wonderful to read than pushing a boulder up a hill. And it won’t take forever, either.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why You Might Love It Too: This is yet another one of those great books that will just shock you into wakefulness - a recurring theme in a lot of my favorite books, if you hadn’t noticed! Like I said, it’s fundamentally positive and hopeful and life-affirming, and maybe you’d like to feel that way more often too.

Get This Book on Amazon: The Myth of Sisyphus

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Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.

To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.

​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).

OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Educational Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.

2. Join Creator Launch Academy, my private business mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.

3. Become a Premium Member and get 150+ exclusive Book Breakdowns, my full notes from 1,400+ books, and more.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases

YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

I had a few great books arrive recently, and before I tell you about one of them, I should mention that there’s zero politics in the book whatsoever.

My early copy of The Book of Elon just arrived, and instead of wasting time talking about his family life or who he voted for, it’s a collection of his most useful ideas about purpose, success, and building an astonishingly epic human future in space.

Because that’s honestly all I care about. It’s not even that hard to get along with people. In fact, we need each other to make the future as awesome as it could be.

We need builders, and visionaries, and dreamers, and that’s the kind of person this book is for. I’m already 40 pages in and it’s amazing. The foreword written by Naval Ravikant is excellent too!

I also just ordered The Rubicon Leader, by Vahab Hasiri, a book that instantly hooked me with its references to Caesar, Cleopatra, Confucius, and Lincoln - visionaries in their own right! I’ll have lots more to say about this book soon.

And lastly, I published the first YouTube video I’ve had time for in the last few weeks, about a 1,300-year-old book that is…staggeringly good.

Now, tonight, I’m also sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five Great Books:

📚 Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

📚 King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

📚 The Library Book, by Susan Orlean

📚 The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel

📚 The Sweaty Startup, by Nick Huber

In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Also Got:

📖 What I’m Currently Reading

📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month

📜 The Book Quote of the Day

🎥 This 1,300-Year-Old Book is STAGGERINGLY Good

✍ My Latest Medium Articles

✅ New Book Releases Coming Soon

📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations

🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter

Let’s not wait for our coffees to get cold…let’s hit the books!

The Arabian Nights, translated by Richard Burton: Thousands of years later, The Arabian Nights still has a hold on our collective imaginations. Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and so many other stories you’d likely recognize in here. It’s just a spectacular read, and the Richard Burton translation is one of the best!

I’ve been reading about 20 pages a day, so I’ll likely be reading this one for a while (it’s 730 pages long, in my edition), but exactly like the main character, I just want to keep stretching it out! Highly recommend this one if you love old books and want to get to the root of some of our greatest literary traditions.

The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch: This is my personal “Book of the Month” for March, which means that I’m spending the whole month on it, diving deep into it, testing it, arguing with it, exploring it, and making sure that I really understand it, instead of resting on the surface of the book. I think it deserves such a close reading.

The book is about explanations that transform the world, and the basic argument, as I understand it right now, is that progress is potentially infinite.

Human beings keep running into problems, but then we also keep generating novel solutions to those problems, each one of them leading to more interesting, complex problems that keep moving humanity forward.

Sooo many of my smartest friends kept pushing this book into my hands, so I just had to push it higher on my reading list!

1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

3. The Kybalion, by Three Initiates

4. Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli

5. The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,474 books, including 20 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

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This 1,300-Year-Old Book is STAGGERINGLY Good: I don’t think this AI thumbnail really looks like me at all, but it is what it is. Anyway…

You can probably guess from reading this newsletter that I’m talking about The Arabian Nights, and in this video I give my current thoughts and perspective after reading the first 100 pages or so. I also drop a short reading update at the end with several more great book recommendations you may want to check out! [Watch Time: 7:00]

If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: This lost self-help book from 1908 holds the key to owning every hour of your day.

Michael Jordan’s Personal Trainer Wrote This Book to Help You Become RELENTLESS: Read it if you want to leave “average” behind forever.

Do the Hard Things First: Plus 11 Other Procrastination-Killers to 11X Your Productivity

How to Try Again, by Steve Kamb: This a guide to help readers transform their lives by giving up more often, failing faster, and mastering the art of starting over. I read Steve’s first book, Level Up Your Life (about how to turn your life into a video game) years ago and loved it. Expected: June 16th, 2026

Incorruptible, by Eric Ries: This is a book about why good companies go bad, and great companies stay great, by the author of The Lean Startup. Expected: May 26th, 2026

Inside the Box, by David Epstein: This is David’s follow-up to his previous book, Range (which I really liked), and it’s about how limits are the key to stimulating creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Expected: May 5th, 2026

Protocols, by Dr. Andrew Huberman: Still a long way to go before this one comes out, but it’ll be an essential guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimizing your health in all kinds of ways, and rewiring your nervous system for high performance and a better life. Expected: September 15th, 2026

Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, by Adam Grant: Adam Grant’s newest book goes into the science of these strong connections, and how you can stay sane in crazy (and lonely) times. Expected: October 13th, 2026

This is a great book about relationship-building, communication, and uncovering deception, by someone with heaps of credibility on the subject: retired Secret Service Agent Brad Beeler. 

Far too many books on subjects like these are written by people who are just summarizing what they learned from blog posts or ChatGPT; or, at best, a couple of years spent in the workplace. But Brad has decades of experience in the field, and he lays it all out here. 

It's also extremely “practical and tactical,” meaning that you can use a lot of this stuff right away. Personally, I don't have any interrogations coming up or anything, but literally the very next conversation I have (or anyone has) is an opportunity to practice a lot of what he teaches in the book.

Beeler has 25 years of Secret Service experience, and as one of the agency’s most experienced and decorated polygraph examiners, he teaches you how to master body language, tone, and the full spectrum of senses used whenever you’re engaged in deep conversation.

He shows you how to spot lies and falsehoods, and how to respond effectively to get the information you want and need. And he also explains the best ways to help people become comfortable enough to tell you everything. 

Get This Book on Amazon: Tell Me Everything

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This book is a guide to the four essential male archetypes, according to Jungian psychoanalytical thought.

Its core thesis is that we’ve become disconnected from the kinds of cultural rituals that help boys become men, and the authors argue that today, there are far too many 30-year-old little boys running around, and too few real men. 

One of the many things that the authors get right is that real masculinity, in its true and ultimate manifestation, is not “toxic” in any sense.

Rather, it’s the prevalence in our society of Boy psychology that interferes with true masculine potential, and causes the immature, abusive, overly aggressive and harmful behavior typically denounced today. 

I believe that Jungian psychology tends to overexplain many of the things it attempts to fit into its tightly balanced worldview.

But there’s also some excellent observations in here about how calling upon these masculine archetypes - the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover - can help prevent young men and even older adults from feeling lost, threatened, or unable to express themselves and make their way in society. 

Get This Book on Amazon: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover

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I was sitting at an airport bar in Toronto, about to dive into The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, which I had just picked up in the airport bookstore about twenty minutes before.

I knew I’d like it - I mean, it’s about books - but I had no idea that I wouldn’t want it to end, that I would angrily confront anyone who tried to get me to put it down.

In fact, I would end up pushing it into the hands of dozens of people after I read it, from close family members to strangers who mentioned in passing that, “Yeah, I kinda like books too.” Do you? Then read this! It’s excellent! It’s about libraries! And fires! And books! And librarians! And literature! And life!

Specifically, The Library Book details the events of April 29th, 1986, when a massive fire devastated the Los Angeles Public Library, at one point reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (more than five times the temperature at which paper burns) and lasting for more than 7 hours.

When all was said and done, 400,000 books were completely destroyed, 700,000 books were partially damaged, and the police had exactly zero suspects.

Enter: Harry Peak, underemployed actor, and master storyteller, said by many (but not all) to be at the library that morning, and who subsequently became the focus of the criminal investigation, and later, Susan Orlean’s book.

You can almost think of Orlean’s account as In Cold Blood...except with books!

Before reading it, I honestly never really gave librarians enough credit for all they do and all that they’re capable of. You should see what they have to deal with, the kinds of crazy questions and requests people bring to their desks.

In fact, this one woman I met told me that she was studying Library Sciences, and I think I said something like, “How long does it take to learn the Dewey Decimal System?” That was my previous level of ignorance here, and…I don’t think I ever got a second date with her. 

Anyway...I really can’t recommend The Library Book highly enough. It’s simply excellent. It’s almost worth reading just for the Fahrenheit 451 references alone, plus the story of the author trying to burn a book herself. For research, of course. “Research.”

Get This Book on Amazon: The Library Book

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Out of nowhere, there came this finance book from an obscure author I had never heard of that completely changed how I think about money. The Psychology of Money absolutely blew up when it first came out, and it’s no surprise why.

As you can guess from the title, it deals with the personal, emotional side of money and the role it plays in our individual lives. It turns out that the “soft” skills of money are just as important as the “hard” skills of knowing how to apply the “4% rule” or choosing an investment broker.

Money is completely neutral; it will change aspect and feel depending on whoever it is that’s thinking about it, worrying about it, or pursuing it. Money doesn’t care about anything we’re feeling, it just responds to how we feel about it.

That sounds more woo-woo than I meant for it to sound, but there’s none of that stuff in here. It’s actually similar in some ways to Tim Ferriss’s instant classic, The Four-Hour Workweek, especially the discussion of how critical it is to spend money to buy time; and how everyone’s financial strategy makes sense to them, regardless of how crazy it may look to people on the outside.

No one is crazy. We just bring our whole psychology and library of past emotions and experiences to the subject of money and how we use it, and the result is a real circus!

Get This Book on Amazon: The Psychology of Money

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The reason I’m so philosophically aligned with Nick Huber here is that his approach to business and lifestyle design has led to a great deal of success in my own life as well.

This is a business book, primarily about pursuing unglamorous opportunities for wealth creation in unfashionable industries, but it’s also about consciously choosing your own path forward in life, and not just falling in line with what the people around you are chasing. It’s about saying no, resisting cultural gravity, and carving your own path. 

What Huber calls “boring businesses” are things like landscaping services, storage units, and a variety of other things that will never have much “viral” potential.

No one dreams about one day opening a business helping college students store their stuff, but it’s that exact business that made Huber something like $30,000,000 in personal wealth. So maybe it’s not the worst business idea in the world?  

There’s also so much untapped opportunity in businesses and sectors like these because of that very reason. Everyone else is getting excited about going into venture capital, or building the next Instagram, which, although it might be cooler than mowing lawns for a living, comes with horrifically low odds of success - financial or otherwise. 

To be wildly successful, you don’t even need to have some revolutionary new idea, or be at the head of some miraculous innovation. Nick never “revolutionized” the self-storage business, he just examined his competitors honestly, saw where they were weak, and outcompeted them on his way to a multimillion-dollar net worth.

A great idea with horrible execution can only lead to disaster.

But a boring idea with powerful, precise, and professional execution can lead to the accumulation of obscene wealth over time. 

Get This Book on Amazon: The Sweaty Startup

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Forward this to a friend you think would love these books!

If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.

To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.

​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).

OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.

2. Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.

3. Become a Premium Member and get 150+ exclusive Book Breakdowns, my full notes from 1,400+ books, and more.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases*

YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

I’m about to hit you with an overwhelming number of book recommendations, but there’s absolutely no reason to feel like you need to read every single one of them.

A few of them will land perfectly for you, many (probably) won’t be relevant to you at all, but there’s a high statistical likelihood that you’re going to find your next favorite book somewhere in this newsletter.

I’ve done something a little bit different tonight too. It was supposed to be a time-saving measure for me, but it ended up taking roughly the same amount of time as my usual “10 Books” newsletter haha. Anyway…

What I’ve done is select ten of my most popular Instagram posts - the ones that have received anywhere from tens of thousands of views to millions upon millions of views, and put them all together for you here. Seriously, these are some of my best book recommendations, in a whole variety of subjects and categories.

I’m also working on some improvements to my private business mastermind on Skool, and creating a new free book club, also on Skool. More on that later.

And I’ve got some ideas for new rewards for being a Premium member of The Reading Life - things like members-only reading updates, and some other stuff that I have to work out the logistics for before I say too much.

But now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

An Extremely Practical and Tactical Book About Uncovering Deception and Getting Along with People, Written by a Former Secret Service Agent (Buy on Amazon)

Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:

📜 Book Quote of the Day (Below)

📖 Business Book of the Month (Skool)

📚 365 Books to Read in 2026

📚 31 Ways to Read More Books

📚 42 Short Books You Can Read in a Single Day

📚 30 Fascinating Books That Will Increase Your Intelligence

📚 12 Books That Gave Me the Confidence to Do ANYTHING

📚 32 Books on Every CEO’s Bookshelf

📚 90 Best Business Books to Read

📚 90 Best Leadership Books to Read

📚 90 Best Self-Help Books to Read

📚 Liked This? Read This!

🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter

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Join for free today!

Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.

Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

3. The Kybalion, by Three Initiates

4. Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,473 books, including 19 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

No one's really suggesting that you actually read 365 books this year - although I do know of someone who's really done it!

There's a decently-good book by this woman Nina Sankovitch, who, for an entire year, read (and savored) a new book every single day.

Many of the books in this post though are "heavier" reads - Frederick Douglass, The Divine Comedy, The Beginning of Infinity, etc. - and you're NOT going to get through those in a single day.

But you know what? It's not a race! So don't pressure yourself to catch up to anyone else's reading pace, or feel bad about yourself because you "only" read one book this year.

You read A BOOK. That's awesome. Seriously. And now you've got 365 more books to choose from for next year!

View the Full Post on IG: 365 Books to Read in 2026

Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life for Exclusive Content

Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

Reading a lot of books isn't complicated, but it's also not easy. There's a lot that goes into it, as you can see. But it's possible, especially if you work in at least 5-10 of the strategies I recommend in this post.

Now, why do things like "learn more vocabulary words" help?

Because every time you run into a word you don't know, it slow you down.

But, as you read more and more books (and look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary), eventually there comes a time when you know a TON of words, and you're able to breeze through paragraphs that used to give you problems before.

So, although it takes a long time (reading is a skill, after all), just reading a lot of books and learning a lot of words will help you read faster. There are a ton of other strategies, like making reading a stronger part of your identity, putting your phone on airplane mode, etc., but many of them are pretty self-explanatory.

View the Full Post on IG: 31 Ways to Read More Books

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Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

Have you ever found yourself rushing to hit your reading goals before the end of the year? Not that I'd ever condone that, but...

Any one of these 42 books can be read in a single day. So if you've ever felt like reading 42 books in 42 days...I got you :)

View the Full Post on IG: 42 Short Books You Can Read in a Single Day

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Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

One of the craziest things about reading is that the more you read, the LESS you know.

There comes a point where, after reading hundreds and hundreds of books, you start to realize there's SO MUCH that you didn't even KNOW that you didn't know!

It's literally an "infinite game," in that you can spend your entire life reading and never get to "the end" of it all.

Which can be depressing to some people, but I find it exciting as hell, because that just means I'll NEVER run out of fascinating books to read!

There's always more to learn and discover, and by challenging yourself with some of these books, you'll stretch your intellectual capacities, learn more than you've ever known about our magical world, and come to a deep realization of how complex and amazing life actually is.

View the Full Post on IG: 30 Fascinating Books That Will Increase Your Intelligence

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Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

You see highly confident people moving through the world powerfully and easily, but more often than not, they didn’t start off that way. I sure didn't.

My confidence had to built, it had to earned, it had to be brought forth, and these 12 books helped me do that.

📖 Inner Excellence because once you control your mind you control your life.

📖 REAL Confidence because confidence comes from being real, not from being perfect.

📖 The Magic of Thinking Big because life is FAR too short to play it small.

📖 Free to Lead because we have to break the limiting beliefs that hold us back before we can move forward.

📖 The Greatness Mindset because you don't give yourself enough credit for how far you've come already and how far you still have left to go.

📖 Wild Courage because to get what you want you need to stand up, be seen, and get noticed. Without apology.

📖 Make No Small Plans because once you start moving in the direction of your grandest ambitions, heaven and earth move too.

📖 Be Your Future Self Now because you can borrow the confidence of your Future Self today.

📖 Choose Yourself because the world rewards people who don't stand around waiting to be picked.

📖 A High-Performing Mind because there's a quiet confidence comes from knowing that you're unbeatable.

📖 The Wisdom of Insecurity because the universe has always been uncertain and chaotic, and knowing this, you can find peace and courage.

📖 The Expectation Effect because you see what you're looking for. Look for confidence and personal power and you'll find it within yourself.

View the Full Post on IG: 12 Books That Gave Me the Confidence to Do ANYTHING

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Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

I don't have a lot of faith in that "the average CEO reads XYZ books a year" stat - it sounds made up, frankly. But one thing's for sure:

To get anywhere you want to go in life, whether that's the corner office, the penthouse, the top of any professional mountain you want to climb...

A dedicated reading habit will help you get there SO. MUCH. FASTER!

And because I always like to add some nuance to things...

Not everybody needs to be a "CEO"!

There are as many good lives as there are people to live them. The CEO and the mailroom staff both get my respect. But reading books? That'll make any life you choose to live better. I stand by that 100 percent.

View the Full Post on IG: 32 Books on Every CEO’s Bookshelf

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Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

The hardest thing you will ever do in business is...

To START. And you wanna know the second hardest thing you will ever do?

GROW your business. It doesn't get much tougher than that. It will take everything you have, but in my experience, running a business also comes with incredible growth opportunities.

On two levels actually:

1. On the professional level, when it comes to the growth of your network and your bank balance. But also...

2. On a personal level, where you'll find you have to grow into the type of person who can start, grow, and lead a successful business.

It's definitely not easy, but it's INCREDIBLY rewarding, and the best part is that...

You don't have to do it alone. And you don't have to do it blind.

There are other entrepreneurs and business owners who have been exactly where you are right now, and many of them have also written fantastic books about precisely the things you're struggling with right now.

View the Full Post on IG: 90 Best Business Books to Read

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Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

You can lead...

➡️ Yourself

➡️ Your Family

➡️ Your Team

➡️ Your Organization

➡️ Your Community

➡️ Your City

➡️ Your Country

➡️ Your People

➡️ Your World

...But you're going to need a little bit of help! From these books, and the examples of the greatest leaders EVER to have lived.

Of course, reading a book about leadership isn't the same as actually LEADING people...

But all these books will give you a wealth of ideas, examples, and motivation to become the great leader that you and I both know you can be.

View the Full Post on IG: 90 Best Leadership Books to Read

Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life for Exclusive Content

Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

You may be surprised at which books are NOT here...

For instance, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey?

Fantastic book, but not listed here! The only explanation I can offer is that I tried to mix it up a little bit and include plenty of books that not everyone will have heard of.

But then again, under "Habit Formation" it's hard not to list Atomic Habits at or near the top. All that being said, there are some absolutely PHENOMENAL books here, and every one of these has the potential to change your entire life. Full stop.

View the Full Post on IG: 90 Best Self-Help Books to Read

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Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

This is hands-down one of my most popular posts of all time, gaining 5,500,000 views and spawning imitators ripping off my content left and right. That comes with the territory though, and I can’t spend too much time caring about that. What I do care deeply about, however, is helping YOU find your next favorite book, and you’re bound to find it on my Instagram! Or in this newsletter!

View the Full Post on IG: Liked This? Read This!

Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life for Exclusive Content

Get My Notes From the 1,400+ Book I’ve Read so Far

Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.

To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.

​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).

OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Educational Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.

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Is Your Retirement Plan Built to Last?

Most people saving for retirement have a number in mind. Fewer have a plan for turning that number into actual income.

The Definitive Guide to Retirement Income walks you through the questions that matter: what things will cost, where the money comes from, and how to keep your portfolio aligned with your long-term goals.

If you have $1,000,000 or more saved, download your free guide and start building a retirement income plan that holds up.

Download your free guide.

📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

I’m making a substantial bet on real, human-written book summaries, which is why I’m getting back into writing my popular “book breakdowns.”

I never really stopped; I was just updating my old ones, making some improvements on the backend, etc. But from now on, I’m committing to writing two full, in-depth book breakdowns each month, and the first brand-new one is Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by the legendary entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David (Amazon Link). 

There’s something to be said for using AI to help you learn and retain new information, guide your personalized curriculum, etc., but just like reading a summary is (often) no substitute for reading the actual book, I’m betting that real people are always going to want to know what other real people actually thought of the books they’ve read.

So what follows are 9 key ideas and dozens of notes, takeaways, and action steps from the book, written and synthesized by me, that will help you build your Inner Circle, accomplish your business goals this year, and teach your brain to crave hard work, among other things you’ll learn from Bet-David.

Sure, I use AI to edit my YouTube videos (subscribe to my channel), and that saves me literally hours of cutting out pauses and bad takes, but I’ll never outsource my thinking to a machine, and neither should you.

This book breakdown is also completely free, but not all of them will be. For example, I already have many of them that are exclusively for Premium members of The Reading Life. 

Upgrade here if you want access to all of them, along with three free (published) books just for signing up, and a lot more.

But now…before our coffees get cold, let’s dive deep into Choose Your Enemies Wisely!

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Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.

Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

3. The Kybalion, by Three Initiates

4. Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,473 books, including 19 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

This Book is For:

*People who struggle with motivation and who lack the drive and sense of urgency they once felt (or have always wanted to feel) for running down their biggest goals.

*Business owners who haven't been able to lock onto a logical and methodical business plan and assemble the right team to help them implement it; or, conversely, those who have a good plan, but can't motivate themselves or their employees to move it forward with ruthless effectiveness.

*Anyone who's been stepped on, beaten, or flat-out ignored by the world; anyone who's been told repeatedly that they'd never make it; and anyone who's willing to look deep into their own past to uncover vast deposits of one of the world's most powerful renewable energy sources: revenge.

Summary:

Having the right friends in the right places can help your career, but as it turns out, having the right enemies in your life can help launch you straight towards extreme success and significance faster than you ever thought possible.

It's vitally important to select the “right” enemies, however, as you'll learn in this book, and to engage your emotions in the proper way, channeling those feelings into productive pursuits instead of self-destructive ones. 

Patrick Bet-David is a legendary entrepreneur who came to America with basically nothing (his family literally escaped from Iran, crossing a bridge moments before it was destroyed) and inspired millions of others to put real effort into their own personal development, curb their vices, and help build up their communities. 

The man also has enemies, it's true, but he’s used them in productive ways, instead of getting himself stuck in a cycle of anger and retribution that would have scuttled his chances of any meaningful success long before he ever got started. Choose Your Enemies Wisely explores the link between logic and emotion, and acts as a bridge between the two.

Myself, I’m much more logical than emotional. Which is great for business planning, but sometimes I just don’t feel anything when I think about what I have to do each day to move my business forward. I don’t automatically get fired up, which can be just as harmful to one’s dreams as being someone who's always boiling over with emotion, yet has no actual plan.

I’ve read three of Bet-David's books so far and he’s never let me down yet. Choose Your Enemies Wisely will teach you how to build a solid business plan, fortify it with logic, amplify it with emotion and feeling, and dominate your competition in business and in life. But it also goes even deeper than that...

This book will convince you to raise your standards, and to declare your dream as a future truth, along with everything that implies. Bet-David also discusses the 14 different types of enemies you can select, where to find them, and how to use them most effectively.

Not only that, but you'll also learn what to look for when assembling your inner circle, how to make your brain crave hard work, and much more besides.

Enemies are everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention. There are also opportunities everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention either. After reading this book, however, you'll know how to select the right enemies and where to find them, how to find and assemble the right allies, and finally, how to bring it all together to get everything you've ever wanted.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: Combine Logic and Emotion If You Want to Win

Overly emotional leaders will never keep their personal chaos under control for long enough to execute a structured, effective plan, but overly logical leaders will fail to inspire their followers to execute even a supremely well-crafted plan.

Self-knowledge can help you bridge the gap, but self-knowledge never just arrives on its own. You have to go out in search of it. You have psycho-analyze yourself and determine where you're deficient, and then take steps to correct the balance.

It doesn't happen without effort, but that effort is worth it because often it's one of the biggest constraints holding you back from victory.

Being more logical or more emotional isn't "better" than the other way around, but they each have their unique drawbacks, of course. A boring, logical plan just doesn't spark the kind of activation energy needed to move forward. Especially not at the relentless pace that's often required for extreme success in business.

People might even prefer to work for a more "logical" leader, but no one in that organization is going to achieve anything great. Why would they? What's their incentive? Where's the drive?

Conversely, working for an overly emotional leader might be a dreadful experience for many people, but with someone like that, things are getting done. That's for sure. It's never just another boring day in the office when there are fireworks and flameouts everywhere you turn.

Unfortunately, leaders like that just take their teams in a bunch of different random directions and never end up anywhere.

#2: How and Why to Raise Your Standards

Committing to raising my standards changed my life forever. I was first introduced to the concept by Tony Robbins in his cringily-titled book, Awaken the Giant Within. Amazing book, horrible title. Anyway, Dr. Benjamin Hardy also talks about standards and raising your "floor" quite extensively in his excellent business book, The Science of Scaling.

The idea is that with personal and professional standards, you maintain a minimum acceptable level of effort, performance, and results. You aim higher, which causes you to take the kind of massive action that your higher standards naturally demand from you.

What's more, you experience extreme cognitive dissonance when you fail to live up to your higher standards.

When your self-concept is such that you see yourself as someone who competes at a high level, works at 100% effort while they're at work, and who expects to succeed, you will naturally begin to perform at that level. Your external world will resolve itself into the shape of your self-image.

Selecting an enemy to fight forces you to raise your standards as well. You have to do this, because if you want to beat that enemy, you have to get on their level. Then you have to beat them, go beyond their level, and tower over them.

The problem is that your new, higher standards often aren't visible in a vacuum. You don't even know what's possible for you, because you haven't seen it modeled in the form of an enemy.

Observing your chosen enemy in action, you witness a level of self-belief, strategic planning, work ethic, and will to win that you didn't even know existed. But now, you know. That's who you have to beat.

#3: The Difference Between a Competitor and an Enemy

Not every one of your competitors has to become your enemy. In most industries, there are simply too many of them.

If you're a real estate agent in New York City, for example, your "competition" is hundreds of thousands of agents, spread across a vast distance. You'd be spending all your time keeping track of their latest wins and what they're doing, and you wouldn't be getting your own work done.

So you have to be a little more selective when it comes to choosing enemies. It's best to have just a few, each motivating you in different ways, which we'll get into in the next Key Idea. You want focused aggression, not scattered jabs.

What makes this process even more difficult is that some enemies come with too much energy attached to them. Sometimes an enemy will be so strong, will bring up such violent emotions in you, that it becomes impossible to focus on executing your plan. So you also have to balance this with emotional regulation, which of course is easier said than done!

The final mistake, though, is selecting an enemy with no emotional resonance, who will never really become any more than a competitor. If you don't feel anything when their face comes to mind, if they don't inspire you enough - enrage you enough - to get down to work, then you haven't yet found your enemy.

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

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Action Steps:

#1: Mine Your Past for Motivation

If you take the time to look back over your life so far, you'll be able to locate the best enemy you have to help you achieve everything you've ever wanted.

Your "best enemy" could be someone you've forgotten exists, or they could be someone who won't get out of your face (or your mind) right now, but they're there. You can find them, and you can use them to help you win. You just have to look for them.

Many of the questions that Patrick Bet-David asks in the book can be helpful here, many of which are reproduced above. Who hurt you? Who said that you weren't good enough? Who told you that you'd never make it? Even today, who still doesn't believe in you? There. You've just found some potential enemies.

#2: Select Your Most Useful Enemies

Not all enemies are created equal. Like we've covered in the Key Ideas above, there are some people who won't make a "useful" enemy for you, for various reasons.

Either they still make you too angry to stay focused on executing your logical plans, or they don't provide enough of a psychological impulse to get you moving.

So you're going to have to go through your list of enemies from Step One above and narrow it down. Ideally, you'd select a few enemies, but probably not more than 3-5 of them.

You're looking for people who push you into action, who you're driven to prove wrong, and who can keep you going when apathy sets in, or when the journey towards your goals gets too comfortable and you start to slow down.

#3: Know Your Enemy Better Than They Know Themselves

Study the competition thoroughly, and enter the conversations that are already happening inside their own heads. Find out what drives them: what their motivations are, what kinds of challenges and threats they face, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

Find out how they talk (to themselves, to their employees and coworkers, to their customers), and dissect their business models. Find out everything you can about them. You're probing for weaknesses, soft spots in their strategy and operations that you can exploit. Spy on them. Know them better than they know themselves.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

This Book on Amazon:

Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by Patrick Bet-David

Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

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OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 200,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life newsletter and enjoy unlimited access to 150+ Premium Book Breakdowns, my complete notes from 1,400+ books, exclusive discounts, and more.

2. Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business (If the link works, I can still fit you in this month).

3. Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.

YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy:

There's always a way to succeed in life, no matter who you are or where you come from, but you're never going to find it by following the herd. If the herd knew how to achieve success and get everything they ever wanted, you wouldn't need this book.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy:

In this book, the eccentric entrepreneur Dan S. Kennedy shares the extreme time management strategies he uses personally to run his multimillion-dollar company, all while successfully safeguarding his schedule and his sanity.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy:

Almost everything you're doing now is a distraction preventing you from making a 10X leap - in revenue, leadership ability, significance, and more. Exponential transformations are actually easier than these small little 2X improvements, and Dr. Benjamin Hardy will prove it to you here in this book.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

Read the Full Breakdown: 10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:

You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.

Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Mine Your Past for Motivation

If you take the time to look back over your life so far, you'll be able to locate the best enemy you have to help you achieve everything you've ever wanted.

Your "best enemy" could be someone you've forgotten exists, or they could be someone who won't get out of your face (or your mind) right now, but they're there. You can find them, and you can use them to help you win. You just have to look for them.

Many of the questions that Patrick Bet-David asks in the book can be helpful here, many of which are reproduced above. Who hurt you? Who said that you weren't good enough? Who told you that you'd never make it? Even today, who still doesn't believe in you? There. You've just found some potential enemies.

#2: Select Your Most Useful Enemies

Not all enemies are created equal. Like we've covered in the Key Ideas above, there are some people who won't make a "useful" enemy for you, for various reasons. Either they still make you too angry to stay focused on executing your logical plans, or they don't provide enough of a psychological impulse to get you moving.

So you're going to have to go through your list of enemies from Step One above and narrow it down. Ideally, you'd select a few enemies, but probably not more than 3-5 of them. You're looking for people who push you into action, who you're driven to prove wrong, and who can keep you going when apathy sets in, or when the journey towards your goals gets too comfortable and you start to slow down.

#3: Know Your Enemy Better Than They Know Themselves

Study the competition thoroughly, and enter the conversations that are already happening inside their own heads. Find out what drives them: what their motivations are, what kinds of challenges and threats they face, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

Find out how they talk (to themselves, to their employees and coworkers, to their customers), and dissect their business models. Find out everything you can about them. You're probing for weaknesses, soft spots in their strategy and operations that you can exploit. Spy on them. Know them better than they know themselves.

#4: Raise Your Standards

Once you've selected the proper enemy, you'll see exactly who you have to beat, and you'll know exactly what level of excellence you have to reach in order to beat them.

Selecting the proper enemy gives you insight into what it takes to win, and whether you're actually willing to go that hard. You may not be! But at least knowing your enemy gives you a baseline, a benchmark that you need to hit.

What you'll find, though, is that raising your standards is its own reward. Yes, it'll help you compete at higher levels - it'll even help you dominate your enemies. But perhaps the greatest thing that raising your standards will do for you is show you the potential that was always there within you, just waiting for you to call it out.

#5: Define Your Success Criteria

Don't turn this into a "forever war." Know when to stop. Decide how you'll know that you've won, and once you've reached that point, have an exit strategy. Picking fights can be an excellent success strategy, but it's not a lifestyle.

With that in mind, define your success criteria, and make them explicit. Tangible. For example, when you hit $1,000,000 in revenue, commit to reviewing your list of enemies and see if they still carry the same emotional weight.

That teacher in high school who said you'd never make it will have to stop yapping once you're a millionaire, wouldn't they? Once you've won the war, lay down your arms.

#6: Add Logic and/or Emotion to Your Business Plan

Your business plan is likely deficient in either logic or emotion - or perhaps both! So determine where you're weak, and make sure to compensate for where you're falling short.

If there's no logical rhyme or reason to your business strategy, your plan of attack, or what you're even trying to achieve in business or how, then you need to spend some more time on the logical side.

If, on the other hand, you've got a clean, fancy, and superbly formatted business plan that just doesn't raise your heart rate even a little bit, then you need to add some emotion to it.

You could have the perfect plan, an amazing product, a team of rockstars, great marketing assets and more, but if, when you wake up in the morning you just...do not care, that's a problem. Fix it now.

#7: Select Your Inner Circle

Examine the list above (in the Book Notes section) and assemble your list of rockstars. The quality of your life is greatly determined by the quality of the books you read and the people you associate with, so do not skip this step! It's critical.

Decide who's worthy of being closely associated with you, and also, just as importantly, resolve to make yourself worthy of the best company. Rockstars only want to hang out with other rockstars. A-players only want to work with other A-players. So if that's not you, that's going to hold you back.

You can build a stacked network of absolute killers (and I mean that in the best possible way), but you have to earn your own place in that network, and you have to keep earning your place every damn day. As they say, if you want to fly with the eagles, you can't scratch with the turkeys.

#8: Conspire to Make Your Allies Successful

One of the guiding principles of my life (one that I learned from Zig Ziglar) is that you can get anything you want in this world, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want.

Yes, select useful enemies and commit to absolutely dominating them, but your allies? Plot and plan and strategize and conspire to make them as successful as possible. It all comes back around.

For this step, what you're going to do is make a list of all your "allies" or partners in business and in life, and take note of what they want in life.

Where are they going? What are their goals? What can you help them achieve? Keep this list handy and refer back to it often. Whenever there's an opportunity for you to make a key introduction, pass along a key resource, or really just help them out in any way, you'll have this list that you can keep coming back to. Again, it all comes back.

#9: Declare Your Dream as a Future Truth

In this final step, you're going to do exactly what it says here: Declare your dream as a future truth. You're going to visualize your desired future (intensely, vividly, utilizing all five senses), and you're going to make a self-promise that you're going to make it real...no matter what.

The future needs to already exist within your own mind. Everything is created twice: first within your consciousness, and once again in the external world. You need to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, and taste it. It has to be real and inevitable.

What's also going to help you tremendously is to make a list (yes, another list!) of every single benefit that's going to come to you once you've externalized this inner reality, this future vision.

Every single good thing that you're going to receive, feel, and experience needs to be made tangible to your consciousness, and you need to revisit this visualization as often as possible. Ideally, every single day.

This sounds all metaphysical, but it's really not. Your brain literally can't tell the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one, and so for all intents and purposes, what you envision becomes real to your conscious and subconscious minds.

You're still going to put in the work. The visualization is really just the beginning, despite what all those "positive thinking" charlatans want you to believe. But once you've declared your dream as a future truth and committed yourself to its external accomplishment, there's not an enemy on Earth who will be able to stop you.

Patrick’s amazing story starts with his family immigrating to America when he was 10 years old. His parents fled Iran as refugees during the Iranian revolution and were eventually granted U.S. citizenship.

After high school, Patrick joined the U.S. military and served in the 101st Airborne before starting a business career in the financial services industry. After a tenure with a couple of traditional companies, he was inspired to launch PHP Agency Inc., an insurance sales, marketing, and distribution company – and did so before he turned 30.

PHP is now one of the fastest-growing companies in the financial marketplace. Patrick is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching thought-provoking perspectives on entrepreneurship and disrupting the traditional approach to a career.

Patrick speaks on a range of business, leadership, and entrepreneurial topics including how and why to become an entrepreneur and the importance of learning how to fully process issues.

From a humble beginning as a young immigrant escaping war-torn Iran with his parents to founding his own company, Patrick has gained a first-hand understanding of what rags-to-riches means and how it is fueled by freedom and opportunity – the core tenants of the American Dream.

Additional Resources:

Patrick-Bet-David.com | Main Website

Valuetainment | YouTube Channel

PBD Podcast | YouTube Channel

PBD General Mastermind | Webinar

This Book on Amazon:

Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by Patrick Bet-David

If You Liked This Book:

Your Next Five Moves, by Patrick Bet-David

Doing the Impossible, by Patrick Bet-David

Discipline is Destiny, by Ryan Holiday

The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg

The Second Mountain, by David Brooks

Be Your Future Self Now, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The Gap and the Gain, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Personal Development for Smart People, by Steve Pavlina

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

The 10 Pillars of Wealth, by Alex Becker

Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

If you were sent this breakdown, click here to subscribe.

To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.

​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).

OK, that’s it for now…

More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Work with me personally to scale your business past $5K per month and experience the intoxicating freedom of finally being in control of both your time and your income. High-performers only.

2. Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life and enjoy unlimited access to 150+ Premium Book Breakdowns, my complete notes from 1,300+ books, exclusive discounts, monthly donations made on your behalf to an incredible literacy charity, and more!

3. Join Creator Launch Academy, my private business mastermind for creators looking to add at least $1,000/month to their revenue and save at least 20+ hours of productive time each and every week.

 YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

*People who struggle with motivation and who lack the drive and sense of urgency they once felt (or have always wanted to feel) for running down their biggest goals.

*Business owners who haven't been able to lock onto a logical and methodical business plan and assemble the right team to help them implement it; or, conversely, those who have a good plan, but can't motivate themselves or their employees to move it forward with ruthless effectiveness.

*Anyone who's been stepped on, beaten, or flat-out ignored by the world; anyone who's been told repeatedly that they'd never make it; and anyone who's willing to look deep into their own past to uncover vast deposits of one of the world's most powerful renewable energy sources: revenge.

Having the right friends in the right places can help your career, but as it turns out, having the right enemies in your life can help launch you straight towards extreme success and significance faster than you ever thought possible.

It's vitally important to select the “right” enemies, however, as you'll learn in this book, and to engage your emotions in the proper way, channeling those feelings into productive pursuits instead of self-destructive ones. 

Patrick Bet-David is a legendary entrepreneur who came to America with basically nothing (his family literally escaped from Iran, crossing a bridge moments before it was destroyed) and inspired millions of others to put real effort into their own personal development, curb their vices, and help build up their communities. 

The man also has enemies, it's true, but he’s used them in productive ways, instead of getting himself stuck in a cycle of anger and retribution that would have scuttled his chances of any meaningful success long before he ever got started. Choose Your Enemies Wisely explores the link between logic and emotion, and acts as a bridge between the two.

Myself, I’m much more logical than emotional. Which is great for business planning, but sometimes I just don’t feel anything when I think about what I have to do each day to move my business forward. I don’t automatically get fired up, which can be just as harmful to one’s dreams as being someone who's always boiling over with emotion, yet has no actual plan.

I’ve read three of Bet-David's books so far and he’s never let me down yet. Choose Your Enemies Wisely will teach you how to build a solid business plan, fortify it with logic, amplify it with emotion and feeling, and dominate your competition in business and in life. But it also goes even deeper than that...

This book will convince you to raise your standards, and to declare your dream as a future truth, along with everything that implies. Bet-David also discusses the 14 different types of enemies you can select, where to find them, and how to use them most effectively.

Not only that, but you'll also learn what to look for when assembling your inner circle, how to make your brain crave hard work, and much more besides.

Enemies are everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention. There are also opportunities everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention either.

After reading this book, however, you'll know how to select the right enemies and where to find them, how to find and assemble the right allies, and finally, how to bring it all together to get everything you've ever wanted.

#1: Combine Logic and Emotion If You Want to Win

Overly emotional leaders will never keep their personal chaos under control for long enough to execute a structured, effective plan, but overly logical leaders will fail to inspire their followers to execute even a supremely well-crafted plan.

Self-knowledge can help you bridge the gap, but self-knowledge never just arrives on its own. You have to go out in search of it. You have psycho-analyze yourself and determine where you're deficient, and then take steps to correct the balance. It doesn't happen without effort, but that effort is worth it because often it's one of the biggest constraints holding you back from victory.

Being more logical or more emotional isn't "better" than the other way around, but they each have their unique drawbacks, of course. A boring, logical plan just doesn't spark the kind of activation energy needed to move forward. Especially not at the relentless pace that's often required for extreme success in business.

People might even prefer to work for a more "logical" leader, but no one in that organization is going to achieve anything great. Why would they? What's their incentive? Where's the drive?

Conversely, working for an overly emotional leader might be a dreadful experience for many people, but with someone like that, things are getting done. That's for sure. It's never just another boring day in the office when there are fireworks and flameouts everywhere you turn. Unfortunately, leaders like that just take their teams in a bunch of different random directions and never end up anywhere.

#2: How and Why to Raise Your Standards

Committing to raising my standards changed my life forever. I was first introduced to the concept by Tony Robbins in his cringily-titled book, Awaken the Giant Within. Amazing book, horrible title. Anyway, Dr. Benjamin Hardy also talks about standards and raising your "floor" quite extensively in his excellent business book, The Science of Scaling.

The idea is that with personal and professional standards, you maintain a minimum acceptable level of effort, performance, and results. You aim higher, which causes you to take the kind of massive action that your higher standards naturally demand from you.

What's more, you experience extreme cognitive dissonance when you fail to live up to your higher standards. When your self-concept is such that you see yourself as someone who competes at a high level, works at 100% effort while they're at work, and who expects to succeed, you will naturally begin to perform at that level. Your external world will resolve itself into the shape of your self-image.

Selecting an enemy to fight forces you to raise your standards as well. You have to do this, because if you want to beat that enemy, you have to get on their level. Then you have to beat them, go beyond their level, and tower over them.

The problem is that your new, higher standards often aren't visible in a vacuum. You don't even know what's possible for you, because you haven't seen it modeled in the form of an enemy. Observing your chosen enemy in action, you witness a level of self-belief, strategic planning, work ethic, and will to win that you didn't even know existed. But now, you know. That's who you have to beat.

#3: The Difference Between a Competitor and an Enemy

Not every one of your competitors has to become your enemy. In most industries, there are simply too many of them. If you're a real estate agent in New York City, for example, your "competition" is hundreds of thousands of agents, spread across a vast distance. You'd be spending all your time keeping track of their latest wins and what they're doing, and you wouldn't be getting your own work done.

So you have to be a little more selective when it comes to choosing enemies. It's best to have just a few, each motivating you in different ways, which we'll get into in the next Key Idea. You want focused aggression, not scattered jabs.

What makes this process even more difficult is that some enemies come with too much energy attached to them. Sometimes an enemy will be so strong, will bring up such violent emotions in you, that it becomes impossible to focus on executing your plan. So you also have to balance this with emotional regulation, which of course is easier said than done!

The final mistake, though, is selecting an enemy with no emotional resonance, who will never really become any more than a competitor. If you don't feel anything when their face comes to mind, if they don't inspire you enough - enrage you enough - to get down to work, then you haven't yet found your enemy.

#4: The 14 Types of Enemies

Patrick Bet-David makes such a key distinction here, because it's true, you might find that you have more enemies within you than without. Maybe it's your own ideas of there "not being enough to go around" or your fear of success (which doesn't sound like a real thing, but it definitely is!) that are your true enemies, instead of some random kid in 3rd grade who said that you were lame.

You can likely think of examples for most of these internal/external enemies (though it's the internal ones that you really have to go looking for), but the most interesting category here is the last one: those people who are beating you because their vision and accomplishments are greater than yours.

Before I say anything else, I do have to make one thing clear. Not everyone who's accomplished more than you have is "beating you." Some people are just playing different games than you are...and that's fine. You don't have to play the "richest person in the graveyard" game if you don't want to.

But there's a positive version of this too, and that's where you're so inspired by someone else's grand ambitions and their Olympian self-belief that you start to think quietly to yourself: "I could do that." And you know what?

You might! If you truly gave it everything you have within you, perhaps you could succeed at the highest levels too. You could. And there's really only one way to find out. You'll never see what you're truly capable of unless you're severely tested, and so maybe that's exactly the type of enemy you need: the type of enemy that reflects back to you visions of your own potential, and inspires you to go after it.

#5: Wake Yourself Up

Great generals throughout history were always careful never to back their enemies into a corner, because they knew that if they did, then their enemies would "wake up" and fight back harder than ever.

You never want to give an enemy no way out, because then they'll decide that they have nothing to lose, and you do not want to fight an enemy that feels as though they have nothing to lose.

Your enemies don't even need to know that they are your enemies! They don't need to know that you're after them, that you're paying attention to them, or even realize that they exist. If they do catch on, they might adjust their strategy to compensate for the increased competition, or even step up their efforts against you.

But if you simply select them as an enemy inside your own mind, they can secretly guide your actions and decisions, giving you unlimited motivation for extreme accomplishment, without any of the downsides of engaging in an actual battle.

#6: How to Train Your Mind to Power Through Hard Work

This is such a psychological cheat code right here. It's something that too few people understand, because they fail to establish a connection between the hard work they're doing now, and the reward they're working for that's going to materialize in the future. Sure, some people have a vague idea of some future reward, but you have to make it vivid.

Your mind will do virtually anything you ask it to do, but you have to give it something in return. You have to reward your own psyche for putting in such insane effort to achieve your goals, and it's one of the most powerful psychological feedback loops you can establish.

For example, if your goal is to earn an extra $100,000 this year, that's fine and everything, but it's unlikely to have the kind of psychological gravity necessary to pull you through the tough times between now and then. It's just a number, unattached to anything, and it has no significance. What will that extra $100K actually get you? What's the end game? What's the point? Figure that out, and you suddenly give your psyche a reason to care.

#7: Turn Your Desired Future Into Your Present Reality

Here's another powerful idea for you, and the perfect one with which to close out this section. It has to do with imagining that your desired future is as irrevocable as your past. Meaning, a future that's so certain to get here and become real, that it's just as real as your past that physically already happened.

I've come to call this The DeLorean Technique, whereby you imagine your Future You comes back from the future to visit Present You, just to tell you that your desired future is actually real. You successfully created it, and all you have to do is follow the steps.

If that sounds confusing, just picture your desired future as vividly as something that actually happened in the past. Think back to your strongest, most vivid, most emotional memory, and how clearly you can recreate that in your mind right now. How you can feel yourself there, see what you saw then, hear what you saw then. Every last detail. Now imagine that your desired future is just as real.

Most importantly, you don't have to wait to act like your future self. You can think ahead to how the person who's achieved all of your most massive goals would actually think and behave, and you can be that person in this very moment.

In fact, you need to become that person immediately, because by doing so, you pull your desired future closer. You not only pull your future success closer, but you also make it inevitable.

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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

The ten books I’m going to recommend tonight are for people who want to become unreasonably successful. Not just the “above average, maxing out the ol’ 401K, staying in the odd 5-star hotel every once in a while” kind of successful.

We’re talking: world-changing discoveries; massive industry-wide disruptions; soaring artistic achievements; life-changing contributions to human civilization and shifts in how people live their everyday lives on this planet. That kind of successful.

Or, if that doesn’t light you up (and hey, I totally understand), you can also use the strategies and advice in these books to help you get where you’re going just a little bit faster.

After reading these ten books, my brain has been completely rewired. I don’t look down on anyone who just wants a “normal” life, but I’ve also massively expanded the scope of my ambitions. I see opportunity, potential, and possibility everywhere. And I have the motivation, drive, and the sense of urgency necessary to take everything I want in this life.

These books did not let me sit still, and I credit several of them for making possible the life I live now. These books and what I’ve learned from them gave me this life, and they gave me the ability to make it real. I know they can do the same for you.

Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

A Great Book About Ditching Unrealistic Ideals of Perfectionism (Buy on Amazon)

Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:

📜 Book Quote of the Day (Below)

📖 Business Book of the Month (Skool)

📚 Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It, by Richard Koch

📚 10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

📚 The Quantum Leap Strategy, by Dr. Price Pritchett

📚 The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

📚 The 80/20 Principle, by Richard Koch

📚 Essentialism, by Greg McKeown

📚 Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb

📚 Unscripted, by MJ DeMarco

📚 Effortless, by Greg McKeown

📚 The 10X Rule, by Grant Cardone

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Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.

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1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

3. The Kybalion, by Three Initiates

4. Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,473 books, including 19 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

Richard Koch also wrote the wildly influential book, The 80/20 Principle, and in this book he traces the path of 20 “unreasonably” successful people, identifying and expanding upon the 9 unique landmarks that were central to their extreme success.

The 20 “players” are gathered together from every corner of the world and all fields of human endeavor, including people like Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Viktor Frankl, Albert Einstein, and even Paul of Tarsus. 

Their stories are incredibly diverse and wildly divergent, but they share common themes and similarities, and Koch draws them out as he expands on the importance of setting Olympian Expectations for oneself, cultivating delusional Self-Belief, engineering Transforming Experiences, along with 6 other attitudes and strategies. 

One thing is made abundantly clear in this book, and that is that if you want to become unreasonably successful, you not only have to think differently than regular people, you also have to think and behave differently than conventionally successful people. 

To be “successful” in the eyes of the world is relatively straightforward, even boring. But to be unreasonably successful takes an unreasonable approach.

It’s a lot more fun, exciting, and profitable than most conventional ideas of success, yes, but it takes dedicated, sustained thought, it requires courage and drive, and it requires that you become aware of the unique advantages you do possess. It also requires that you constantly look out for ways to exploit those unique advantages. 

Conventional success is fine, by the way! But society’s definition of success has already been clearly mapped. And it’s just like Carl Jung said: If the path ahead of you is clear, then it’s a sure sign that you’re on someone else’s.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: Conventional success is relatively straightforward. Boring, even. But if you want extreme, unreasonable success, you have to be willing to be extreme. This book lays out nine different ways you can outperform even “successful” people.

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Total transformations are never linear, and they are rarely obvious. It requires something completely different than what came before, a radical change in behavior and thinking, and if you're not consciously aiming for these types of 10X transformations, you'll never experience them.

10X Is Easier Than 2X is not a difficult book to read or understand, and once you see what Hardy's writing about, you can't unsee it. The goal of the book is to inspire entrepreneurial leaders to aim for "breakthrough" goals, not merely "incremental" goals (2X) - which will never lead to radical transformation.

One of the major themes of the book is that, in aiming for these kinds of 10X transformations, you'll have to let go of about 80 percent of what you're doing now. What got you here won't get you there, and as you keep ascending higher and higher in developing your own “Unique Ability,” you'll have to keep zoning in on the 20% that will get you to that next level.

As you progress, this kind of big-picture thinking is likely to start a spin-cycle inside your brain as you start to get a handle on all the possibilities this idea opens up for you to expand your four most important freedoms: Time Freedom, Financial Freedom, Relationship Freedom, and Purpose Freedom.

It's those four fundamental freedoms that you'll need to keep expanding if you want to keep making progress. The projects and purposes you devote yourself to, the people you choose to surround yourself with while you do, the money it'll take to make them real, and the time it'll take to bring it all together.

This all must seem like a lot more work, but it's actually less. It's easier than going 2X, and that's because we're talking about a total reimagining of business as usual, not something that's "a little bit better" than what came before.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: This book will increase the “expected value” of your success. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger says, shooting for the small goal puts the big goal automatically out of reach. In the same way, even attempting to go 10X means that, even if you fall short, you still succeed at a higher level than if you were “just” aiming for a 2X improvement.

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This book has one of the highest ideas-per-page ratios of any book I’ve ever read, which is always a pleasant surprise, since a lot of nonfiction books probably could have been blog posts. They may have 1-3 main ideas in the whole book, stretched to 300 pages just to make the publisher happy. 

However, there is no wasted wisdom in this one - it’s full of fantastic stuff that can help you make a tremendous amount of progress in a very short time. 

The Quantum Leap Strategy is tiny, clocking in at just 40 pages or so - haters might call it a pamphlet. But anyway, I took five pages of notes from the thing, and Dr. Pritchett had me thinking completely differently about my potential, what’s attainable, and what I would have to adjust about my approach in order to achieve my 5-year goals in six months. 

None of it is overcomplicated, and even some of my notes may seem stupidly simple. Almost obvious. Like, of course you should start thinking about what you actually want, not just what’s reasonable for you to expect. Of course you should think big, aim high, and take massive swings. Of course you should doubt your limits, not your potential. 

But there’s something about the clarity and power with which these very simple (yet profound) ideas are expressed that made them really connect with me. 

Out of the 40 pages, I took five pages of notes, like I said, but I probably came away with at least 100+ ideas for how I could grow my business, make more money, fill my life with more adventures and memorable experiences, and make more progress in 12 months than most people will make in their entire lives.

Give this one a shot. It could do the same for you.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: Similar to Dr. Hardy’s book above, this book assumes that the “default” path is merely a suggestion. You can dramatically shorten the timelines to achieving your goals if you start to think bigger, think differently, and commit to taking massive action.

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Never do the second most important thing first. That’s just such simple, fantastic advice, and if I had to boil down this book to just one sentence, that would be it.

Your One Thing is whatever it is absolutely critical for you to do next, and ideally it would be in service of your larger One Thing, which would be what you’d like your entire life to be about.

For example, my One Thing is reading (or, at least that’s one major focus of my life), and so any time that I spend doing something else besides reading is time that I am never going to get back, that I could have used to advance in the area that’s most important to me – reading. Your One Thing could be baseball, or winning a sales competition at your firm, or painting.

Whatever it is, everything else is a distraction. 

Keller comes through with some excellent practical tips on how to focus on your One Thing and fight distraction – everything from time blocking and batching, to a discussion of hyperbolic discounting.

Basically, you want to create a sense of urgency to get the important things done now, and how you do that is to carve out significant blocks of time during your day at which times you only work on your One Thing. 

Batching is also incredibly useful, by which is meant doing all similar tasks at once, then moving on. For example, batching could include making all your telephone calls at once instead of spreading them out throughout the day. 

All that being said, it’s a real stress-killer to realize that you’re never going to get everything done that you want to get done, and to be okay with that. More important than getting to the end of your to-do is getting to the end of your life with the fewest regrets possible.

See, what’s most important isn’t always obvious, so many people go through their entire lives never differentiating between the essential and the trivial. Don’t let it become too late. Attack your One Thing, over and over, relentlessly, give up the idea of perfection or competition, and optimize your life for the fewest number of regrets at the end.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: Think about the sun and how it warms the planet each day. Now, think about the sun’s rays, concentrated through a magnifying glass. The sun, shining naturally, keeps Earth’s temperature steady and pleasant. But filtered through a magnifying glass, the sun’s rays can ignite a raging forest fire. That’s the power of focus. That’s the power of The ONE Thing.

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The “Pareto Principle,” otherwise known as the 80/20 Rule is widely recognized today, but there are few better introductions to this extremely – and I mean extremely – powerful idea than Koch’s book.

It’s more business-oriented, but there are applications of the principle available in literally every facet of our lives, which is something that’s rare in itself, for one principle to be so impactful.  

Briefly stated, the Pareto Principle is the observation that 80 percent of your results will come from just 20 percent of your actions, which of course means that if you want to maximize your effectiveness and utility, you should focus as much as you can on the 20 percent that is going to drive most of your results and ignore or delegate the rest.

In business, this means that 20 percent of your customers are bringing in 80 of your total revenue. In your relationships, it means that 20 percent of the people you associate with are bringing you 80 of the fulfillment you experience.

Originally, it was an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto who noticed that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the landowners. 

However, you can take this idea even further, and keep applying the Pareto Principle to the principle itself! You’ll notice as well that 20 percent of the 20 percent is giving you most of the results as well. These numbers aren’t absolute or anything – there are 99/1 relationships, 85/15 relationships, etc. – but the principle stands up remarkably well.

Whenever you find a principle this powerful and this robust, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t capture as much of the potential value on offer as you can. Apply it to your business, your investments, your time, your friends, your life. It will change everything for you. 

Koch book is definitely one of the 20 percent of books that will give you 80 percent of results in life, although I’ve heard some people say that you can apply the principle to his book too! Meaning that 20 percent of the book will give you 80 percent of its total value.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: “Regular” successful people are all doing the same things to get ahead, but they’re not taking the time in advance to figure out how to apply the most leverage when it comes to achieving their goals. With this book, you can find the real shortcuts hiding in plain sight.

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The main thrust of Essentialism (both the book and the idea itself) is that almost everything is completely worthless.

Discerning the "vital few" from the "trivial many" is going to be one of the most in-demand skills in the economy of the future, and those who can do this well are going to reap the majority of the rewards and experience the highest possible meaning in their lives, while the rest of us are drowning in distraction.

One of the most famous Essentialists in history, Michelangelo, once said that he "saw the angel in the marble and carved until he set him free." In a similar way, we are the sculptors of our own lives, the creators of our own meaning.

The perfect form of our lives is hidden inside the marble of all the distractions, detours, and trivialities of the modern world, and we have to be artists; we have to be disciplined in carving away everything that's stealing our time, focus, and attention away from what we want our one and only lives to be about.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: Your time is limited. It’s also extremely valuable, and you can’t waste it doing low-value tasks that aren’t meaningfully moving you to your desired future. This book will help you identify the highest-leverage actions you can take today to bring that desired future closer, faster.

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The term antifragile is meant to refer to something that “gains from disorder,” or shocks, adverse events, etc. Along a spectrum, you’ve got fragile, robust, and antifragile. For example, a politician would be “fragile” in the event of a massive scandal, and it could very well mean the end of his or her political career. 

Not true for someone like a construction worker or a security guard, who, even if they do find themselves in the middle of some massive, negative publicity event, they can fairly easily find another job, even if they have to move three towns over. They are robust.

The term antifragile could apply to someone like, say, an author or artist, who, even in the middle of a public-relations shitstorm, would likely find themselves exposed to a massive new audience of people who will end up buying their books, sharing their art, talking about them, and making them even more famous.

The author or the artist would be antifragile because they would profit from negative events like this, and Taleb is saying that there are entire categories of human existence where this same principle operates - and where we can tap into it to get everything we ever wanted.

Difficulty Rating: Hard

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: So much of success comes down to positioning. Putting yourself in the right places to accelerate your progress, utilize your unique advantages, and get the most reward for the least effort. This book will help you think strategically about moves like these, thereby achieving greater results in life than most people.

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This is one business book that I’ve read multiple times, and it was the first to get me to realize that named days of the week aren’t even real. 

I mean, no other animal on earth knows the difference between a Monday and a Friday, except for the ones who find themselves chained to desks five days a week. 

Unscripted is about escaping the script that society has written for you, and about playing the part that you actually want to play instead.

It’s about life, liberty, and the pursuit of entrepreneurship, and owning 100% of your time, not just the scraps that are tossed down to you from what’s left over after serving the interests of people who will never truly care about your life as much as you do. 

How fast can you become free? Well that’s one of the many things that I love about MJ DeMarco’s books. He’s not selling six-week dreams or mountains of riches without work. The “Fastlane” to success and freedom will take most people 5-10 years.

Compared to the 40+ years that most people spend desperately trying to get ahead on more traditional career paths, I was willing to give the Fastlane a shot. But I also learned something critical, and relatively quickly.

It was that total freedom may be years away when you’re starting from zero, but when you’re headed in that direction and never stop, and when you want to be free more than anything…then you already are.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: If you think like everybody else, and make the same choices as everybody else, you’re going to have the same quality of life as everyone else. Look around you, though. Do you want that? No? Then read this book.

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This is the follow-up to McKeown’s excellent book, Essentialism, which breaks down the art of stripping down your activities and efforts to what is, well, essential, and leaving it at that.

We live in an age of limitless possibility and opportunity, but the price we pay for that is full consciousness of everything that we could do but don’t have time for.

Essentialism was about simplifying our schedules and strategies, and Effortless is about reducing complexity and hardship.

Some things work the best and can help you attain the best results because they are hard, such as, say, doing squats, as opposed to leg extensions at the gym. There’s no question that squats deliver the most impressive gains in muscle mass as opposed to leg extensions, but squats are also really, really hard, which is why most people don’t do them.

However, equating difficulty with effectiveness is a dangerous error, says McKeown. Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do things. What if our most challenging tasks could be made easier? That’s what Effortless is about. 

The hero is not the person who stayed at the office until midnight, slaving away at an impossible task; the hero is the person who left early because they found an easier way to achieve the same results. Discern the difference between laziness and effectiveness, and effortless results become possible for you. 

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: If you train yourself to be able to do hard things, you’ll have an unmistakable advantage in life. But what if you were able to make those hard things effortless? Or even unnecessary?

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It takes a certain personality type to engage most effectively with a book like this, but if you benefit from a “straight-talk, hard line” approach to success and personal development, Grant Cardone could be someone you should listen to.

This book is mostly about taking massive action on massive goals, and thinking much, much bigger than you’ve ever thought before. 

That sounds like hype-y guru-talk, I know, but I stand by it. There’s something to be said for just throwing every single thing you have into accomplishing your biggest and most far-out goals, and it’s in the process of that where you get to experience a happiness and a fulfillment like no other.

For me, it’s in the action and the striving itself that the happiness and fulfillment is to be found, and when you know you’ve given 100% of your effort to something, you almost can’t help but feel amazing.

Quotes from the book are sometimes over the top, and it’s absolutely not for everybody, but this is one of those books that really helped me see what was possible for me in my own life and to stop selling myself short.

Difficulty Rating: Easy

Why It’ll Help You Become Unreasonably Successful: This book will give you the motivation to put 10X the effort and focus into achieving what you say you want in this life. Sometimes, that’s what it takes. You just have to identify the price of success, the price of achieving your desires, and then resolve to pay it.

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OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

As you might know (or not!), I donate $1 every month to the literacy charity First Book on behalf of each Premium Member of this newsletter.

As of March 1st, 2026, we’ve raised a total of $787 to help children learn to read, and to provide books to everyone who wants to read them!

It’s a cause that’s extremely important to me, and so I’d like to thank you all for helping out! I know firsthand how much books and reading have improved my own life, and to pass on that gift to others is one of the most important things that I do.

Naturally, I hope to raise a lot more money in the future, but we’re just getting started!

If you want to help out by becoming a Premium Member of The Reading Life, click here (and check out everything that being a Member gives you access to), and if you’d like to make a donation to First Book on your own, click here!

Now, tonight, I’m also sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five Great Books:

📚 1984, by George Orwell

📚 Crypto Confidential, by Nat Eliason

📚 The Good Neighbor, by Maxwell King

📚 The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett

📚 What It Takes to Be Free, by Darius Foroux

In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Also Got:

📖 What I’m Currently Reading

📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month

📜 The Book Quote of the Day

🎥 You’ll NEVER Change Your Life - Until You Do This

✍ My Latest Medium Articles

✅ New Book Releases Coming Soon

📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations

🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter

Let’s not wait for our coffees to get cold…let’s hit the books!

The Arabian Nights, translated by Richard Burton: Thousands of years later, The Arabian Nights still has a hold on our collective imaginations. Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and so many other stories you’d likely recognize in here. It’s just a spectacular read, and the Richard Burton translation is one of the best!

I’ve been reading about 20 pages a day, so I’ll likely be reading this one for a while (it’s 730 pages long, in my edition), but exactly like the main character, I just want to keep stretching it out! Highly recommend this one if you love old books and want to get to the root of some of our greatest literary traditions.

The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch: This is my personal “Book of the Month” for March, which means that I’m spending the whole month on it, diving deep into it, testing it, arguing with it, exploring it, and making sure that I really understand it, instead of resting on the surface of the book. I think it deserves such a close reading.

The book is about explanations that transform the world, and the basic argument, as I understand it right now, is that progress is potentially infinite. Human beings keep running into problems, but then we also keep generating novel solutions to those problems, each one of them leading to more interesting, complex problems that keep moving humanity forward.

Sooo many of my smartest friends kept pushing this book into my hands, so I just had to push it higher on my reading list!

1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,471 books, including 17 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

You’ll NEVER Change Your Life - Until You Do This: Once you understand how the Compound Effect works, your life will never be the same.

But you have to do more than just understand it. You also have to let it work long enough for it to actually work its magic. And yes, it really is one of the closest things to magic that exists in this world. [Watch Time: 3:42]

If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: This lost self-help book from 1908 holds the key to owning every hour of your day.

Michael Jordan’s Personal Trainer Wrote This Book to Help You Become RELENTLESS: Read it if you want to leave “average” behind forever.

Do the Hard Things First: Plus 11 Other Procrastination-Killers to 11X Your Productivity

Beyond Belief, by Nir Eyal: I’ve read two of Nir’s books so far, and this one is about science-backed ways to stop limiting yourself and achieve breakthrough results. Even if you’ve read plenty of books on the subject already, you’ll likely to come away with tons more from this book that you can use immediately. Expected: March 10th, 2026

How to Try Again, by Steve Kamb: This a guide to help readers transform their lives by giving up more often, failing faster, and mastering the art of starting over. I read Steve’s first book, Level Up Your Life (about how to turn your life into a video game) years ago and loved it. So I’m excited for this one too! Expected: June 16th, 2026

Incorruptible, by Eric Ries: This is a book about why good companies go bad, and great companies stay great, by the author of The Lean Startup. He argues that, As organizations grow, the systems that govern them - ownership, incentives, charters, accountability, and decision-making - quietly reshape behavior. When those systems are poorly designed, even principled leaders are pushed toward outcomes they never wanted. Expected: May 26th, 2026

Inside the Box, by David Epstein: This is David’s follow-up to his previous book, Range (which I really liked), and it’s about how Limits are the key to stimulating creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Essentially, adding constraints can make us better, and free us to do great work. Expected: May 5th, 2026

Protocols, by Dr. Andrew Huberman: Still a long way to go before this one comes out, but it’ll be an essential guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimizing your health in all kinds of ways, and rewiring your nervous system for high performance and a better life. Expected: September 15th, 2026

Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, by Adam Grant: With the loneliness crisis showing no signs of slowing down, and with the world becoming increasingly divided along ideological lines, making time for friends and establishing strong, supportive communities has never been more important. Adam Grant’s newest book goes into the science of these strong connections, and how you can stay sane in crazy times. Expected: October 13th, 2026

Goodreads says that this is one of the most terrifying books ever written, and I’m inclined to agree! It’s set in an oppressive, authoritarian future, where Winston, the novel’s protagonist, is in the process of “waking up.” 

You’ll recognize plenty in this book from today’s political and social discourse: ideas like “doublespeak,” and “groupthink,” etc. What’s funny is that both sides of nearly every political debate believe that their ideological opponents represent the oppressive regime in the novel. What’s even more funny, is that both sides tend to be right! 

Interestingly, the U.K. government recently included 1984 in a list of books that served as indicators of potential “right-wing” extremism, which tells you basically everything you need to know. It turns out that governments everywhere don’t like their citizens waking up. This was listed next to books like The Lord of the Rings, by the way! 

In the book itself, citizens of Orwell’s horrifying dystopia are constantly monitored by the State, and their very reality is controlled by what the government allows them to see. It’s very “matrix-like,” which is another term you’re likely to be familiar with!  

Their thoughts are controlled, their news and information are controlled, even their actions are controlled - the only thing that stirs Winston’s mind in the direction of rebellion is a woman named Julia, and the humane impulses she stirs up in his heart. 

Get This Book on Amazon: 1984

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This is a nonfiction book, but it reads like a novel. It’s the compulsively readable story of Nat’s total immersion in the scam-and-get-scammed world of crypto speculation, and I just flew through this one.

You’ll likely end up learning quite a bit more about crypto and decentralized finance (at least I did), even though it doesn’t feel like you’re being taught at all. It just feels like you’re reading a thriller.

Long story short, Nat started off in 2021 knowing hardly anything about crypto, but he and his wife had a new baby coming, and when he heard about all the crazy money that his friends were making (i.e. gambling) in the digital wild west, he started to get a lot more curious. Before long, there was no turning back…

In less than a year he’d made millions of dollars writing code, had wild, “is-this-even-real?” adventures in selling pictures of monkeys for two hundred thousand dollars, been hacked, been scammed, been suspected of scamming…at this point, Nat’s like the Hunter S. Thompson of cryptocurrency, except, you know, without the drinking and the drugs. 

But yeah, this is a ripping good read, and Nat’s a fantastic storyteller. He’s certainly the main character of this story, but in the hands of a lesser writer you wouldn’t be nearly as interested - fascinated, even - to know what comes next.

They say that crypto developers don’t sleep, but this book will keep you up too!

Get This Book on Amazon: Crypto Confidential

Get My Complete Notes From This Book (Free)

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Children can always spot a fraud; they know when someone’s not being authentic or when they’re different from who they claim to be – which is evidence that Mister Rogers was the real deal. He was one of the most inspiring early childhood educators ever, and he saw the best in kids, which made it possible for them to bring out the best in themselves.

There are astonishing stories on nearly every page of this book, such as when the TV station held an event where children could come and meet Mister Rogers – thousands of kids showed up, lining up for miles and blocking the street like it was a college football game or something.

But no matter how long the line was, he would get down on one knee, look each kid in the eye and make sure they knew that they mattered. He took kids and their questions seriously, he made a massive effort to give them the best possible start in life, and I just…I just want to be like him! 

It’s funny: you keep reading page after page of this book and you’re like, “There has to be like some sort of scandal, a dark corner of his life, some secrets…” but no; Mister Rogers was exactly who he said he was, and though there may not be angels, there are people who may as well be angels – that was him.

When you offer that kind of unconditional love and support to children, every single morning on his television show for more than 30 years, the kids are going to grow up just fine.

As you can probably tell, I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend this book to pretty much everyone, and I’ve been thinking about it almost every single day since I read it.

His story is surprising, sad, exciting, inspiring – everything you wouldn’t expect from that nice man in the cardigan that used to show up every morning and tell you that he loved you just the way you are.

Get This Book on Amazon: The Good Neighbor

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The “one-liner” for this book drew me in right away. It’s a novella about how the (fictional) Queen of England, after one day finding herself inside a mobile library and being too polite not to borrow a book, becomes an obsessive, voracious, and rapacious reader, causing all sorts of mayhem for the palace staff and the country at large…Sold! 

The Uncommon Reader is such a cool little book. You can finish it in just a few hours (or less if you’re a particularly fast reader), and it’s got everything that dedicated bibliophiles love about books and reading.

It’s hilarious, honest, and sincere. It’s maddening at times (like when various members of the Queen’s retinue grow to dislike how much she’s reading and neglecting her other duties and try to sabotage her), but it’s also genuinely fun to read. 

The Queen herself is the “uncommon reader” of the book’s title, but as the novella unfolds, Alan Bennett does a wonderful job of showing how reading widely, intelligently, earnestly, and yes, for fun can change virtually anybody’s life for the better. 

Get This Book on Amazon: The Uncommon Reader

Get My Complete Notes From This Book (Free)

Get My Notes From 1,400+ Other Books (Just $1)

This is a very simple, easy to read book about freedom. It’s about lifestyle design, mental strength and flexibility, and also about how we can move ourselves closer and closer to our own version of freedom if we’re sufficiently motivated to do so. 

What I liked about the book (besides its simplicity, relatability, and applicability) is how Darius devotes the first few chapters to untangling the various ways in which we’re unfree. 

We chain ourselves down in so many ways, and this very simple, straightforward book will help you identify them, plan them, and in some cases prevent them, so that you can work on those things first. Because it really is just like how Toni Morrison says: if you wanna fly, you gotta give up all the stuff that weighs you down. 

Having achieved an extraordinary degree of freedom in my own life, I know that it’s not necessarily easy, and so I also liked that Darius doesn’t offer up very many easy answers.

Of course, some of the answers are easy, like spend less than you earn, avoid debt, invest the difference in a “freedom fund” of your choosing, stop hanging around with people who limit you in various ways, etc. Those are all relatively easy things to do that will ultimately lead to a much greater degree of freedom in your life. 

But he also recognizes that freedom requires sacrifices, and that you’ll often come up against some hard choices. Choices that you’ll have to make for yourself, and with whose consequences you’ll be forced to live. No one can free you except yourself, and you’re never free from the responsibility of choosing how you’ll live your life. 

One thing that I’ll stand behind 100% though is that gaining your personal freedom is always worth it in the end. You can do anything (legal) that you want with your life, and you don’t have to live according to anybody else’s conception of “the good life.”

The good life is yours to create and live. But one of the most important things that books like this can do for you is to get you to realize that it’s possible to become free. It’s a future possibility that’s open to you, and it may be even closer than you think.

Get This Book on Amazon: What It Takes to Be Free

Get My Complete Notes From This Book (Free)

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OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:

1. Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.

2. Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.

3. Become a Premium Member and get 150+ exclusive Book Breakdowns, my full notes from 1,400+ books, and more.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases*

YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!

Some people can get away with breaking the laws created by human beings, at least for a little while. But the natural laws of the universe are inviolable.

Gravity doesn’t care what you believe, time never stops moving, and entropy is always working against you. Try to ignore those laws and they will crush you.

And it’s exactly the same with these 100 absolutely unbreakable laws of business success. 

There are plenty of wealthy entrepreneurs out there doing exceptionally well, just printing money almost effortlessly, and then there are waves of hapless business owners struggling just to make payroll.

The main difference is whether - and to what extent - they have adapted themselves to the laws laid out in this book.  

The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, by Brian Tracy is definitely going to be the Book of the Month at some point inside Creator Launch Academy, so join us here if you want to work with me and the rest of our members to relentlessly apply what we’re reading and learning in all these great books.

Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss is this month’s Book of the Month, as you may know!

There’s a lot to dig into tonight, though, so before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.

Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. Tell Me Everything, by Brad Beeler

2. The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen