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10 Books That Will Put You in the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs
Matt Karamazov
July 01, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 29 minutes
At the very highest levels of business, everybody’s smart, and everybody works hard.
That means, in order to gain an edge, being smart and working hard are not necessarily going to be enough to win. They’re simply the price of entry.
But one thing I can promise you is that most people have not read the following ten books. They are your edge. And I’ll promise you something else:
If you read the following ten books (or even download my notes for free below), then you’re bound to become one fearsome business competitor - and a powerful individual generally. Several of these can also be read, enjoyed, and profited from even if you’re not an entrepreneur and have no desire to become one.
All my notes and summaries from these 10 books are here in this newsletter, but I’ll cut this intro short because I just want to share a few quick book-related items with you before we dive in:
📚 It’s pub day for Wealthy and Well-Known, by Rory and AJ Vaden, an incredible book about growing a sustainable, insanely profitable personal brand, and you can download the audiobook version here for free.
📚 My friend Neil’s new book just came out! Canadians will especially love it, but regardless, it’s awesome!
📚 My other friend Sam LaCrosse recently published his new book - the level of care, study, and research that goes into his work is truly admirable.
📚 My other other friend Elizabeth’s new book came out recently, too! I reviewed her other one recently, The Success Guidebook, and both Jack Canfield and I liked it!
And that’s probably enough! It’s more than time to dive into these ten fantastic books.
So now, before our coffees get cold…let’s read!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
We’ve got lots to cover today, so let’s hit the books!
“The great, insufficiently discussed danger to a democracy stems not from the expression of different views but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use their full intellectual powers in forming those views.”
“Everyone wants change, but few want to change their choices.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per week and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This week’s book is Unscripted, by MJ DeMarco, another business book that I’ve read twice, and from which I’ve taken more than five pages of profitable notes. Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
None Yet (But It’s July 1st, People! Give Me Some Time!)
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 1,390 books, including 38 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“The more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we are too poor to buy our freedom.”
Tools of Titans is a massive compendium of the best, most life-changing advice, tactics, and mental frameworks from the more than 200 world-class performers that Tim Ferriss has interviewed for his podcast.
As you can see from my nine pages of notes, this is an extremely wide-ranging book that doesn’t waste any space. It sacrifices some depth, naturally, but you don’t have to read this book front to back if you don’t want to.
Read about the people who interest you, take a few of their ideas, dive deeper on your own, and implement their advice in the laboratory of your own life.
Tim asks some great questions too, such as: What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis?
In terms of guests, you’ve got Arnold Schwarzenegger, Derek Sivers, Naval Ravikant, Jamie Foxx, Ryan Holiday, Maria Popova - just on and on. I won’t list them all, but you get the idea.
They’ve all shared their wisdom, tactics, and advice with Tim, either for the podcast or this book specifically, and if you don’t have time to listen to all 200 episodes, you can just read Tools of Titans. The wisdom-per-page here is just unreal.
“‘Get rich quick’ exists, but ‘Get rich easy’ does not.”
I always tell people to ignore the slightly scammy title of this book and just read the thing, because it’s absolutely incredible, and downright life-changing for the right person at the right time.
That “right person” was actually me, as I can still remember exactly where I was when I first read it. It marked a turning point in my life, and I say that with no exaggeration whatsoever.
Briefly, I read the book sitting in my car, while working a minimum-wage, overnight security job that held absolutely no future whatsoever.
I finished reading - implementing and taking action on everything M.J. told me to do (this took years, but it was worth it) - eventually leading to me becoming a full-time content creator reviewing and recommending the books I love, and even having M.J. appear as a guest on my podcast at one point!
“Fastlane” does not mean “get rich easy,” by the way. He’s talking 5-10 years of building a business, likely using the internet, which is quick, compared to patiently investing your money in the stock market for 40 years, hoping and praying that the economy doesn’t implode, just so you can finally start enjoying yourself when you’re a senior citizen.
Wheelchairs don’t fit inside the trunks of Lamborghinis, after all!
The Millionaire Fastlane changed the way I think about business, about making money…about life! It changed everything for me, and I wholeheartedly recommend it all the time, basically to anyone who will listen. Even just learning the “C-E-N-T-S” framework and the difference between “scale” and “magnitude” can make you rich.
At the end of the day, owning a business is one of the greatest keys to freedom available to anyone with an internet connection and a burning desire to succeed.
The Millionaire Fastlane also taught me that you can just do stuff; you don’t need anyone else’s permission to be successful, and you certainly don’t need to spend your entire life getting bossed around by other humans at some job you despise.
Days of the week aren’t even real! They’re just abstractions we use to make sense of an inherently chaotic universe. You don’t need to live in fear of Monday, and you certainly don’t need to live the kind of life that the rest of society expects.
“The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”
Peter Thiel’s a billionaire startup founder and investor, and Zero to One gathers all his best thoughts on creating innovative, transformational, and massively profitable businesses all in one place.
There’s so much here that reading it over at least a few times wouldn’t be a bad idea, but even shifting your thinking a little bit in Thiel’s direction will immediately separate you from the majority of entrepreneurs who are only thinking about linear, incremental gains, instead of moonshots, monopolies, and major disruption.
There’s nothing wrong with linear, incremental gains, but you don’t become a billionaire by chasing them.
I don’t even think most people actually want to become a billionaire (or can even fathom 1/100th of what it takes to get there), and my own goals are much more modest. But I still took an incredible amount away from this book and now recommend it all the time.
It’s not even that long of a book, but the “ideas per page” is just unbelievable. It’s full of extremely valuable questions you can ask yourself (“What valuable company is nobody building?”), excellent advice about escaping competition and going 10x instead, and other high-velocity ideas that can help you make those 10x jumps.
Thiel himself is a fascinating figure (read the book, Conspiracy, by Ryan Holiday), and definitely one of the most well-read tech billionaires you’re likely to find.
Most of them just got lucky, but, even though becoming a billionaire always involves a substantial element of luck, Peter Thiel has the intellectual horsepower to back it up, and the result is this book.
“Know that if you give up, those around you will also give up, and that if you develop true resilience and resourcefulness, those around you will discover the same qualities in themselves.”
You’ll never be ridiculed by anyone with bigger dreams than you have. They honestly just don’t have the time to spare!
Anyone with a real, deeply-felt vision is in constant motion to achieve it, and Brandon Dawson seems to be one of those rare individuals who both has bigger dreams and wants you to achieve yours as well.
He’s also done this whole business-building thing before, having sold his last company for $151 million and building his current business to something like a half billion dollar valuation.
I always advise that people learn from someone who has actually done the thing that you want to do, and so if your goal is to grow your business to unimaginable heights, Brandon’s your guy and this is your book.
Naturally, there are plenty of personal stories in this book, such as early in his career when Brandon was unceremoniously kicked out of the company he started and basically had to start again from nothing.
So he didn’t just get lucky; he’s repeatedly built great businesses. And strangely enough, this book is much more “actionable business strategy” than mindset, although there’s plenty of that too.
I took about five pages of notes from this book, but one specific takeaway is the mindset shift away from “having, doing, being,” to “being, doing, having.”
It’s not that we get the things that happy people have, then we’re able to do the things that happy people do, before finally being happy ourselves.
It happens in reverse: be a happy person heading in the right direction, which will cause you to do the things happy people do to become successful, which will then lead to having the kinds of things that you would normally associate with happy people.
Before you can have, you need to do, and before you do, you have to be.
“People always ask me, ‘What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?’ Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.”
Ben Horowitz is the cofounder of Andreesen Horowitz, a prestigious venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and this book is his leadership “manual” for situations where there’s no clear right answer or best move to make.
People think starting a business is hard (and it is), but running a business will destroy you. Ben’s book will help make sure that (hopefully) doesn’t happen, and he explores the idea that hard things are hard because there’s no clear, best way of dealing with them.
There’s no “formula” to follow when competitors are trying to poach your best people, nobody in your organization knows how to talk to each other, you have to lay off friends who’ve been with you since the beginning, and all the rest of it. What do you actually, you know, do in situations like that?! Who prepares you?!
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is wonderfully direct and honest, though, and it’s even funny at times. It’s a book that fills in the gaps that business school never covered, and even though you may never arrive at a clear, perfect, and certainly not easy answer, this book will help you think more clearly about whatever comes up and how you should respond.
“If I could go that low and survive, how high could I go in the other direction?”
This book is vintage Grant Cardone, brimming with brutal intensity and hustle, and I absolutely loved it. It was exactly what I needed at the time, though I’ll admit that Cardone’s brand of relentless striving and ruthless ambition ain’t for everyone!
Grant’s story, though, hooked me right from the beginning. Here was a guy - broke, unemployed, a drug addict - who just refused to accept that the world was going to keep him down; who instead decided to see just how far up he could go.
Cardone gave his new life everything, and he was rewarded for that level of obsession. The same obsession that I’ve developed for books, and that he recommends you adopt in this book!
Again, I’ll never say that his approach is for everybody, and certainly, “more” can never be “enough.” But if you’re in a tough spot; if you’re down but not out; if you know that you’re capable of more, and yet you’re the only person around who’s capable of seeing it, this book could really help you. It worked wonders for me.
“The stresses and aggravations of everyday life become somewhat muted under knowledge of one's own raw power.”
This is one of those books that feels like a secret weapon. Not all that many people know about it, and I’m fine with that! The people who’ve never read this book will have to compete against me, and they won’t stand a chance.
Gateless gives you a comprehensive strategy - a precise structure - to maximize your most important resources, which include your skills, reputation, and relationships.
It starts off with the 30,000-foot view, but then dives deep into the weeds to feed you virtually everything you need to know to max out those stats. See my four pages of notes!
To this day, I’m still not sure where I heard about this book, but I’ve returned to it over and over to help me revise my business strategy, optimize my energy levels and effectiveness, and plan my next move.
“Imagine you only have the rest of your life to live. What would you do?”
The Achievement Habit was a serendipitous eBook find, but I’m so glad I discovered it, and it has both a charm and usefulness that’s really quite special.
If you’ve read Tuesdays with Morrie, Bernard Roth is kind of like Morrie. Kind, wise, patient, and always has your best interests at heart.
Roth is the co-founder of the Stanford d.School and an expert in design thinking who convinces you in this book that achievement can be learned. He calls it a muscle, and once you learn how to flex it, you’ll never approach your life in the same way ever again.
You’ll never be intimidated by the magnitude of a pursuit, and you’ll never back down from the great work of your life.
One of the main aims of the book is to get you to stand back from the chaos of your life, get a clear view of your options and possibilities, look as far forward into the future as you possibly can, and then bring yourself back to the present, where you take the very next step forward.
Then the next one, and the next, until you’ve reached the peak you were aiming for in the beginning. Then, from that peak, you’ll be able to see mountains beyond that you never even knew existed.
“To get more out of life, you need to get more out of yourself.”
I don’t know much about Mike Cernovich, and oh man, there are hordes of people online who hate his political beliefs, but you know what? I don’t care about any of that.
I care about being successful and accomplishing my fucking goals, and Mike’s book helped me with that. So we can just leave the Twitter arguments to the brokies.
Gorilla Mindset is about doing whatever it takes to win, and even more importantly, it’s about getting the absolute most out of yourself in order to make that happen.
And while I certainly don’t think it’s the “only” book you need to help you get the life you want (despite what the Amazon description says), it does represent some massive steps toward achieving that outcome.
There’s a lot of great stuff in here about routines, mindset, focus, state, goal-achievement, self-transformation, and more, and for a quick read, it returns far more in terms of actionable tactics and strategies you can apply to improve your life…immediately.
“Buy other people's time so that you can focus on exponentially improving your strengths.”
This is another book that doesn’t waste any time - which is pretty much what you want in a time management book - and it’s where I learned about dozens of ideas that I still use today to save time, improve my effectiveness, and increase the profits in my business.
Not everything here is “revolutionary” or “transformational,” but you know what? If you’re relatively new to time management, it very well could be! It’s an extremely actionable book, too, and like I said, it helped me out tremendously.
The book is based on the author’s research and study of more than 200 entrepreneurs, including Mark Cuban, James Altucher, John Lee Dumas, Grant Cardone, and others I’ve also learned from, alongside advice from various billionaires, Olympic athletes, and high-performers in other fields.
Time management advice either works or it doesn’t, and for hundreds of high-performing people to settle on the same 15 secrets? Well that tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
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 160,000+ 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:
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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