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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!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
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“One insight or new idea that you did not have before can be all that it takes to change the direction of your life.”
“What you do every day is far more important than what you do every so often.”
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.
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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.
“There’s absolutely no point working at something you hate just so you can save money for experiences you’ll never have.”
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.
“Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn't drag us down; it can lift us up.”
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.
"I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live."
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.
“The more new connections you establish, the more opportunities you’ll have to make even more new connections.”
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.
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
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.
“There are some games in life that you can only win by not playing.”
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.
“If you want to accelerate your career, expand your influence, or build something meaningful, the key isn’t just working harder. It’s surrounding yourself with people who challenge you, sharpen your thinking, and open doors you never knew existed.”
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.
“The challenge for all of us is an inner one: to keep going when it seems like no one is paying attention or cares. And to believe that eventually the world will catch up.”
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.
“Each of us spends every moment of our life, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, wanting something. We even want in our sleep. Yet few people ever take the time to understand how they come to want things in the first place.
Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn.”
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.
“The cruelty with which I treated myself is no longer tolerated.”
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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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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