📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
Most books waste your time for 200+ pages while they drag out 1-3 ideas that could have been an Instagram post.
Then, on the opposite end of that wastefulness spectrum, there are books that contain the combined wisdom of thousands of books, sometimes in as few as 100 pages (like tonight’s third book).
So in this newsletter I’ve selected ten books with some of the most wisdom-per page that I’ve ever found, and a few that have been so influential (for me and others) that they feel like giant shortcuts.
Before we get into those, I just want to remind you that Simone Knego’s book, REAL Confidence, comes out next week!
I received an advance copy, and it’s wonderful. Pre-order here if you want to build the kind of confidence to help you go from unsure to unshakeable.
My friend Steve Kamb also has a new book coming out (FINALLY!), and oh man…
Okay, so long before he and I met, I read his previous book about turning your life into a video game, called Level Up Your Life.
I ripped through that book during a single nightshift, but then the dude made me wait ten whole years for this new one! So inconsiderate.
Anyway…
Most books focus on how to be more successful, more optimized, and how to craft a perfect plan.
Steve wrote a book about what to do after a failure:
The day after bailing on a diet.
The week after a failed workout routine.
The month after abandoning a New Years resolution.
The year after a failed relationship or lost job has us feeling low.
That moment when life feels overwhelming, when we can’t stop beating ourselves up, when we wonder if we’ll ever follow through on anything.
The problem isn’t that we fail.
It’s that we had the wrong expectations, with the wrong strategy, and we forgot that life is under no obligation to go “according to plan.”
We don’t need a fancier journal, or a more expensive piece of equipment, or a more restrictive diet.
We don’t need to just “try try again.”
It’s HOW we try again that makes all the difference.
Which is where Steve’s book comes in.
Now…I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t say for sure that I’ll like it…but I’m pretty damn sure that I’ll like it.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“They took away what should have been my eyes, (but I remembered Milton's Paradise). They took away what should have been my ears, (Beethoven came and wiped away my tears). They took away what should have been my tongue, (but I had talked with God when I was young). He would not let them take away my soul, possessing that I still possess the whole.”
“Your biggest challenge isn’t that you’ve intentionally been making bad choices. Heck, that would be easy to fix. Your biggest challenge is that you’ve been sleepwalking through your choices.”
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 The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy, a great book about the power of compounding and how seemingly insignificant actions can lead to massively positive results over time.
Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
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 1,465 books, including 11 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“You often say; I would give, but only to the deserving, The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and nights is worthy of all else from you. And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.
See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving. For in truth it is life that gives unto life - while you, who deem yourself a giver, is but a witness.”
This classic work of poetry was first published in 1923, and finally found its way to me in 2015, when it completely destroyed any notion I might have held that I didn’t want to dedicate the rest of my life to tracking down books as amazing as this one.
The Prophet has sold well over ten million copies worldwide (some people say 20M+), and it’s made up of a collection of poetic essays that cover the full range of human experience: freedom, self-knowledge, love and marriage, crime and punishment, good and evil, life and death, pleasure and pain - and virtually everything in between.
This was yet another book that changed my life (I know that’s a common phrase that people tend to just throw around like it’s nothing, but in this case it’s actually true), and it basically made me want to go out and read everything else. All the books.
Seriously, there’s at least several lifetimes worth of wisdom within this little tiny book, and it’s made my lifetime infinitely better, both at the time I first read it, and every time I come back to my notes to remind myself of how amazing it is.
In fact, I’d say that it’s one of those books that, even if you don’t like poetry, you can read this one and discover that you actually do.
Difficulty Rating: Easy / Medium (If You’re Not Used to Poetry)
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: This is one of those books that shows you to yourself. Like I said above, it covers the full range of human experience, and in doing so, shows you that life is deeper, more wonderful, more worthy of profound gratitude than you’ve ever realized before.
“At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”
Ryan Holiday has read this book more than a hundred times, and I can absolutely see why.
I’ve only read it twice, but whenever I come back to my notes (which is often), I’m struck again and again by its power and force. The term “life-changing” is thrown around a lot on the internet, but this book is literally life-changing.
Meditations was originally kept as a private journal by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who never intended to publish it. But as will become clear as you read through my notes (below), the entire world has been strengthened and improved because it was published.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the “Five Good Emperors,” and he’s also considered (rightly) to be one of the most important Stoic philosophers, right up there with Seneca and Epictetus. Those are the three that come to my mind anyway whenever I think of Stoicism.
Meditations is even more astonishing when you think of the time period Marcus lived through, which was characterized by constant wars, invasions, plagues, revolts, struggles…just on and on, and Marcus’s book is his impeccably honest attempt to understand himself and make sense of the universe with all this going on around him.
I honestly can’t recommend this book highly enough, and I can’t even imagine a world without it. To think that it was almost lost to the endless abyss of time is unfathomable to me, and I’m just extraordinarily grateful every time I think about it that it wasn’t.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: Marcus Aurelius wasn’t a perfect person, and by his own admission consistently fell short of his own ideals. But in striving constantly to overcome himself, to become better and to live rightly, even though it was difficult, he teaches you more than 1,000 authors would today who think they already have the answers to every question.
“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
It’s often said that you can read this book in an hour, but you could study it for your entire life. I think that’s absolutely true, and it’s for good reason that this short little book has survived for more than 2,500 years.
Written in China, the “Old Master” Lao Tzu shares wisdom about leadership, personal development, interpersonal relations, and the fabric and structure of existence itself.
You will probably recognize some of the saying from Tao Te Ching, as the phrase “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” is straight from this book. I (and many others) believe that this is one of the foundational texts of world literature, and I can’t recommend it highly enough; it’s just remarkable.
It’s also remarkable how such wisdom has existed among human beings for thousands and thousands of years. Lao Tzu may have been the first person to write it down, but he learned it from someone, who learned it from someone else, all the way down the line. Just think of how much wisdom we will be able to pass on thousands of years from now!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: This short book reduces the complexity of a thousand books into the simplicity of just a few pages, but the depth of understanding you’ll gain from spending time pondering those few pages will be simply astonishing. Don’t rush this one!
“What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.”
Seneca was one of the richest, most powerful people in ancient Rome, and yet he didn’t make it out alive either. Even while he was alive, his riches didn’t protect him from psychopathic predators, hardship, and death. But Stoicism did, and Seneca became one of that philosophy’s most famous practitioners.
Incidentally, Seneca was the tutor of the sadistic Emperor Nero, and while he tried to teach him some of what it meant to be a good person, Nero ended up ordering that Seneca commit suicide by drinking poison, after the Emperor came to believe that he had been caught up in an assassination plot.
The Stoic principles Seneca taught didn’t penetrate Nero’s consciousness so much, but they were preserved in this series of letters, which reads like a diary or manual of philosophical meditations. Hopefully we can assimilate them better than Nero did!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: Just like The Prophet (above), this book covers a wide range of human experience, and Seneca can say more in one letter than most authors can in 10 books. Given that there are more than 100 letters here, I’d say that adds up to more than 1,000 books!
“The way any two people interpret a given situation, or even the way a particular person interprets identical stimuli on two different occasions, is only imperfectly predictable and is always uncertain to some degree.”
One of the biggest mistakes we make about people is believing that we can accurately predict their behavior in situations that are wildly different from each other.
In textbook terms (and this book is an academic textbook), we privilege the “person” and we discount the influence of the “situation.”
We make the same mistake when trying to predict our own behavior too, and we’re also consistently unaware of how the situations we’re in influence the ways we think and behave.
It makes sense that, with our unique character traits and personalities, we’d behave more or less the same in whichever situation we find ourselves in, but this isn’t borne out in the scientific literature.
The Person and the Situation is one of Malcom Gladwell’s favorite books (which may be a mark for or against, depending on whom you’re speaking with), and he says that it’s been a constant companion for many years. It’s certainly a helpful book to keep in mind when trying to make sense of the ridiculous ways people behave - in groups or individually.
This is a complex, multi-layered book that’s a little heavy for most casual readers, but it contains an abundance of lessons and insights that can help you make sense of a world where moving too quickly and making judgements too casually can have catastrophic consequences.
If anything, it could make you a little more patient, a little more understanding, and a little more wise.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: There are plenty of books out there that try to help you deal with people, get along with them, get what you want from them, etc. But precious few books will help you uncover astonishingly powerful causes and conditions hiding in plain sight.
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.
Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death.
But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
Adam Grant said that this is the most important book ever written about time management, and I’m certainly inclined to agree.
Burkeman’s approach has always been the “negative” one, by which I mean operating by negation – eliminating rather than adding.
For example, his “negative” approach to happiness outlined in his earlier book, The Antidote, meant embracing suffering, and doing things that are challenging, instead of running from them - which would have, paradoxically, led to more suffering over time. That book basically dealt with the famous question: “Do you want an easy life? Or the strength to endure a difficult one?”
If you’re wise, you’ll take the strength every time!
And here in Four Thousand Weeks, where time management is concerned, he counsels giving up the idea of ever getting everything done.
He says that you’re never going to get to a point where you feel like you’re totally on top of everything; and the very effort is wearing us out, stressing us out, and leading us to waste our absurdly, terrifyingly short lives on trivia and nonsense.
The amazing news he’s delivering is that you’re never going to get everything done! Productivity is a trap, because the faster you complete the work assigned to you, the faster more work is going to be assigned to you.
There’s always something else that could be done, but if, instead, we embrace our mortality and our limited timescales, we can make the absolute most of the time we do have, and emerge with a life that’s both truly meaningful, and truly our own.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: There are literally thousands of time management books out there with random tips, strategies, “frameworks,” etc. Many of them are helpful, most are not, but this book is one of the only ones that will help you see the truth of your situation: you have all the time there ever will be, it’s running out, you’ll never have time to do everything, and it’s your responsibility to deal with that.
“They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom."
You thought you knew exactly how the world works. You thought you had the major answers all figured out, and that your personal picture of reality was fully updated.
But then, you happen to read just one perfectly-crafted aphorism, quote, or sentence, and then you realize that "Yes! Actually, the world is like that!"
Now imagine an entire book that's like that, containing more than 500 such lightning bolts to the prefrontal cortex, and you'd get something like The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Taleb.
It's a collection of aphorisms (memorable expressions of a general truth or principle), that investigate opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.
It's also extremely thought-provoking and wise, with valuable insights concerning every vital part of life that we deal with each day.
Alright, so why "Procrustes"?
Well, in Greek mythology, Procrustes was an innkeeper who had a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis.
He would invite visitors to spend the night, except that if the visitor didn't fit the bed - and they never did - he would either stretch them if they were too short, or hack off their limbs if they were too tall, in order to make them fit.
He continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, who "fitted" Procrustes to his own bed.
I know, Greek myths are awesome! But in this book Nassim Taleb makes the larger point that we are all like Procrustes in our daily lives. As he says:
“We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.
Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit - but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers."
We each believe that our view of the world is the correct one, and we change our facts to fit our theories, instead of our theories to fit the facts.
We're stretching and hacking what we see, hear, and perceive, and in the process we're doing things like inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in the classroom, trying to mold society into our tight little theories, and modifying humans to fulfill the promises of technology.
Taleb is trying to get us to stop squeezing life into neat little packages and pre-constructed narratives, and instead come to terms with what we don't know.
So, among the 500+ aphorisms in the book, there are tons of big ideas concerning love, happiness, ethics, success, randomness, chance, religion, and everything else that humans care about.
The aphoristic form is perfectly suited for the purpose of getting us to question our received opinions, because the moment of insight comes on suddenly and catches us off guard. It's not what we were expecting.
With short, almost tweet-like brevity, huge concepts are broken down into immediately digestible sentences, and we suddenly "get it."
This is not a book to be read quickly, even though you could finish it in an hour or so if you really wanted to. It's kind of like the Tao Te Ching (above) in that way: you can read it in an hour, but you could study it for a lifetime.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: Most nonfiction books these days (and for the last 20+ years) are just one or two ideas stretched out to 300 pages. Each of these aphorisms contain the same wisdom as 2-3 of those books.
“The best fortress which a prince can possess is the affection of his people.”
The Prince was written in the 16th century as a gift for the Duke of Urbino, Lorenzo de Medici, who was basically Machiavelli's boss.
It's a work of political science, which I usually find somewhat dry, but Machiavelli is a very insightful student of human nature, so anyone interested in how people think, work, and behave should find plenty of material for pondering here.
Yes, this guy's last name is where the term comes from. So don't expect to be instructed on how to become a morally-perfected human being. Instead, take notes if you want to take power…or keep yourself from losing it.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: So many books written these days skirt around the truth about how human beings actually are. Machiavelli doesn’t claim that we’re worse than we are, it’s just that he offers a refreshing amount of honesty that you’ll never find in the 1,000s of books published these days on human nature.
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
After reading some of the best books, I come to think of them as puzzle pieces. They’re books with a tremendous amount of explanatory power - that change the way I view the world in a fundamental way - and The Righteous Mind is one of those books.
The core problem the book is trying to solve is why otherwise good, decent, intelligent people come to disagree so violently and irrationally when it comes to politics, religions, and other matters of crucial importance in our society. A massive topic, to be sure, but one that Haidt does a phenomenal job of making sense of in this book.
One of the main things to understand is that people are driven to certain conclusions under the sway of powerful emotions, and then use logic and reason to “justify” what they want to believe anyway.
The way he explains it is that the logical mind is kind of like a person trying to ride the “elephant” of emotion. The rider has no realistic chance of overpowering the elephant; they’re pretty much just coming along for the ride.
Moral intuitions, as Haidt refers to them, are positions that arise in the presence of different moral modular foundations, and are influenced by genetics and culture. He arranges them into the following categories: Care / Harm, Fairness / Cheating, Loyalty / Betrayal, Authority / Subversion, Sanctity / Degradation, and Liberty / Oppression.
Different people inhabit something akin to different moral universes, in which they care about and protect these different values to a greater or lesser extent than others.
The upshot of all this is that people tend to feel like these moral intuitions are self-evident truths, and literally cannot comprehend why others may not share similar concerns or values.
The only viable explanation - according to the nonexistent reasoning skills of the elephant - is that people who disagree with them are “evil.” Opposite. Not to be trusted. Enemies of our moral universe.
Ever since reading The Righteous Mind I’ve been able (I think? Most of the time?) to transcend my own moral intuitions and see what people with different values and inhabiting different belief systems have to teach me.
It’s made me more open-minded, perceptive, and ultimately more patient and kind. I’ll still fight you if you say that Rocky IV isn’t the greatest movie ever though. Them’s fightin’ words!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: The Righteous Mind is an “edge piece” in the puzzle of life, in that it gives a tremendous amount of context to what we’ve already seen when it comes to how people behave and get along with each other (or don’t). Rather than a “middle piece” that just fills in the picture, this book has much more explanatory power.
“When you actually look around the world - parents looking after their kids, neighbors forming associations, colleagues helping one another, people meeting and encountering each other in coffee shops - you see that loving care is not on the fringe of society. It's the foundation of society."
What if you spent your whole life climbing the ladder to success, only to find that it was leaning against the wrong building?
In this spectacular and damn-near urgent book, political and cultural commentator David Brooks uses a different vertical metaphor - two mountains and a valley - to explore the devastating effects of our culture's unrestrained individualism, the dark night of the soul that's waiting for us when we discover that we've been sold a bill of goods, and what a full life of what he calls "moral joy" might look like.
The "first mountain" represents the relentless pursuit of success and achievement that's possessed the mind of the Western world for so long.
When you climb the first mountain, what you're really cultivating are the "résumé virtues" - the skills and talents you bring to the marketplace. On the second mountain, it's all about the "eulogy virtues" - what they talk about at your funeral.
The Second Mountain is an intensely personal book and one that will stop you cold in dozens of places as you pause to ponder the profundity of what others have discovered about the true aims of life. It can't just be all about the “self.”
A real human life - a committed, relational life - is lived on the second mountain, with others. For others. Brooks explains how we got this all mixed up, and he also offers numerous practical and lofty ideas about how we can restore balance to our inner lives.
He's also fond of quoting George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, although my favorite quote of hers doesn't appear in The Second Mountain. It, however, nicely summarizes Brooks's central idea, and it goes something like this:
"What are we here for if not to make life a little less difficult for one another?"
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: This book brings together all the puzzle pieces of a life well-lived and boils it down to a life of commitment to what matters. A life of depth and compassionate care, living for something instead of just fighting against something, and for that reason I’d move 1,000 books off my bookshelf in order to make room for this one.
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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.
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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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