📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
The average net worth of a top 1% entrepreneur exceeds $11,000,000, while many in the 99% wonder about whether they should go back to their day jobs.
Making the choice to become a top 1% entrepreneur often means choosing between commanding a business generating $50M+ per year, or working 50+ hours a week building someone else’s dream.
Now, people who have been reading my work for a while know that I have nothing against working a traditional job, working for someone else, commuting to an office, etc. It’s not for me, never has been and never will be, but it can make sense for some people.
That being said…
If you do have grander ambitions - a larger vision of something you want to build, something that you want to see exist more than you want to be “comfortable” - these ten books will help take you there.
Remember, it’s all been done before! These 1% entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily “special” or “gifted.” It’s almost a cliche at this point that there are people dumber and lazier than you out there earning millions and millions per year.
You can join them if you wish. You don’t have to, but you can. Start with these 10 books.
While we’re on the subject, I’ll admit that personally, I don’t want to become a 1% entrepreneur! Right now, I get paid extremely well to talk about books all day, and I wouldn’t change a thing! But I loved all these books and they each helped me in their own way.
And inside Creator Launch Academy, we go super in-depth on books like these to help build our education businesses. You’re welcome to join us, even if you don’t want to start the next Nvidia. Start your free trial and let me help you scale your reach, revenue, and reputation online. Maybe you’ll develop a taste for total freedom like I have :)
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“Centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man, nor the sense of truth within him.”
“Never ask advice from someone with whom you wouldn't want to trade places.”
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 1,468 books, including 14 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: Most entrepreneurs are just aiming to survive month to month; they’re not thinking about disrupting entire industries. This book will help you think bigger and spot opportunities that society will pay you millions (and perhaps billions) for capitalizing on.
“It’s amazing how people spend their lives in prisons entirely of their own making, the key dangling right there in the lock, no jailer in sight.”
I’ve never read a Dan Kennedy book that didn’t send me into a new, higher tax bracket. This one’s no exception, as he covers all the mindsets, principles, tactics, and business strategies one needs to survive (and profit handsomely) in the “New Economy.”
The post-recession economy comes with new restrictions, new obstacles, new opportunities, new revenue streams, new challenges, new demands, new rules that must be followed…new everything. Business will never be the same, and those business owners who don’t learn to adapt are the ones who will be forced to shut their doors forever.
The business landscape has even changed multiple times since I’ve been in business, and I’m a lot younger than Dan Kennedy! He’s been through it all - and emerged a multimillionaire, many times over.
Naturally today, there are several principles and strategies that are still relevant, and will likely continue to be relevant for a long time. Dan identifies them in this book, and tells you how to take advantage of them in order to win.
But there’s plenty that’s new and different. Not only that, but the rate of change is itself speeding up. Change is coming faster than ever before, and, interestingly enough, it’s only the entrepreneurs with the patience and discipline to sit with a real, physical book like this one who are going to survive and profit in the New Economy.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: Dan Kennedy always comes at you with the kind of realism and hard-won optimism that is most conducive to success. Most business owners don’t have a strategy grounded in reality, but this book will help you develop one.
“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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: It’s not so much of a leap to claim that most entrepreneurs have never sold their business for more than nine figures. Brandon Dawson has (then he built another one to the same level), and he wrote this book, so you’re literally learning from the 1% by reading it.
“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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: The real test of a 1% entrepreneur is how they hold up under conditions of extreme adversity, and this book helps you pass those kinds of tests with flying colors.
“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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: With world-class advice from hundreds of the world’s most impressive people, by reading this book you’re learning from the 1% of the 1%. Copy them. That’s why they share all this stuff anyway.
“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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: People don’t tend to associate entrepreneurship with creativity, but that’s almost literally all it is. You’re constantly looking for connections, options, possibilities, and ways forward, and that’s what this book will help you find.
“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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: Because this book flies under the radar, you’re gaining a massive competitive advantage over most other entrepreneurs even by being familiar with it. Now, imagine if you relentlessly applied it!
“‘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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: This book shifted my entire worldview, and I’ve never wanted to look back. It’s super popular now, but when it first came out it was contrarian, it was underground, and it gave you this belief system that was dangerous if applied. It’s still dangerous (in a good way), but even though lots of people have bought it - and maybe even read it - you can be sure that the 99% won’t be as serious about DeMarco’s ideas as you could be.
“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.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: Entrepreneurship is a race against time, and you need to get very, very serious about protecting yours if you ever want to reach the top 1%. This is one to refer back to often.
“If you will not believe in yourself, then why should anyone else? Without self-belief, nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible. It is as brutal and as black and white as that. If you take no other memory from this book, then take that single thought. It was worth a damn sight more than the price you paid for it.”
From college dropout to centimillionaire publishing magnate, all the while harboring an immense love and talent for poetry and the written word, Felix Dennis certainly has the credentials to write a book like this.
But there’s also something tragic about the overall tone of How to Get Rich - tinged with regret as it is - and he actually spends a fairly large portion of the book trying to convince you not to get rich.
It can be extremely difficult, it’s uncertain, it takes a long time, it can ruin your relationships, alienate you from the people you work with, and on and on.
He speaks from personal experience, having amassed personal wealth in the area between $600–900M (rich people know how much money they have, but wealthy people are never entirely sure), and you get the sense that he’s suffered all those losses and more.
In fact, he straight up tells you as much, and interspersed with all this great advice about running companies and amassing wealth, he keeps coming back to the question of, “Do you really want to do this?” The answer is non-obvious and shouldn’t be rushed.
Read this book first and ask yourself whether you’re willing to pay the price that he paid. Most people won’t be, and there’s certainly no shame in that!
All told, this is one of the very best books I read in 2023, and probably one of my favorites of all time. I learned a tremendous amount about growing and running a profitable business, but it’s a very special book for many other reasons as well, and one that I’ll not soon forget.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Help You Get Into the Top 1%: Felix Dennis made it to the top 0.0001% and realized that he had gone too far. He also realized it was too late to turn back, but in this book he can help you stop a few decimal places short of where he did, while still finding yourself firmly within the top 1%.
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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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