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10 Books to Help You Find a Higher Purpose in Your Life
Matt Karamazov
July 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 35 minutes
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It finally happened! After more than 10 years of reading at least 100+ books a year, I just finished reading my 1,400th book!
Honestly, it’s just a number (something I say all the time), but it’s still pretty damn cool!
The last book I finished was Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, and the other 8 books I’ve read so far in July are listed below, along with 10 books that will help you find and cultivate greater purpose in your life.
I stand by each one of my selections, of course, but part of me doesn’t want to recommend any books about “finding your purpose.” You don’t really need them.
What makes us think that life has (or should have) a purpose anyway?
Why do we have to live for something beyond this moment?
As one of my favorite philosophers, Alan Watts, used to ask:
Is the “purpose” of music just to get to the end of the song? What’s the point of dancing? Is it to get to a particular spot on the floor? Is that the point of dancing?
So no, you don’t need to “find your purpose.” At any age. Ever.
You never have to “figure it out” or “make something of yourself.”
Being alive - fully, completely alive - is more than enough.
That being said, these are some pretty fantastic books! Some of my favorites, in fact.
And if you are feeling a bit lost or directionless, or even just feel as though you want to make a larger contribution to the collective flourishing of the world, you’ll find plenty of inspiration between the covers of these ten books.
I was also going to include The Art of Focus, by Dan Koe, which is actually one of the best books on the subject in recent memory. But I put a few hours into typing up my notes today, and still wasn’t finished. So instead of staying up until 5AM transcribing my notes from that book, I’ll have to include it in a later newsletter. It is phenomenal though.
I also just bought How to Suck as a Leader, by Travis Dalrymple, The Goldfinch, by Donna Tart, and I heard about what I think is going to be a very interesting book on wealth inequality, called Capital Offence, by Paul Musson.
Of course, buying books is one thing - but now I need to buy the time to read them!
Anyway, before our coffees get cold…let’s read!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“Thus it is that my friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways, they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.”
“Millionaires are Readers: 85 percent of millionaires read two or more books every month and 88 percent read 30 minutes or more each day. What did they read? 51 percent read about history, 55 percent read self-help, 58 percent read biographies of successful people, and 79 percent read educational material.”
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 Rich Habits, by Thomas C. Corley, a great book about the differences in habits, attitudes, mindsets, and behaviors between the rich and the poor. 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 1,400 books, including 48 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“I consider self-help a noble pursuit. Authentic self-help demands personal excellence; the overcoming of addiction or crippling habits; and striving to make life a little better for those who come near you.”
I first discovered Mitch’s work through this book, and immediately upon finishing it I went on to read three or four more of his books in rapid succession - to me, it felt exactly like discovering the philosopher Colin Wilson’s work for the first time. That is to say it just made a massive, positive impression on me from the very beginning.
This particular book is a recapitulation of Napoleon Hill’s ideas from Think and Grow Rich, specifically the idea of a Definite Chief Aim - a Massively Transformative Purpose, as some have called it - or the major purpose of one’s entire finite existence.
If that sounds a little grandiose, the book itself is actually wonderfully easy to read and it’s perfect both for people who have never read Napoleon Hill and for people who’ve loved the original.
My own Definite Chief Aim, for example, is to read 10,000 books. There’s no “timeline” for this - it’s just a goal I want to reach eventually - and I’ve engineered almost literally my entire life in pursuit of it. That’s how you know it’s a DCA.
It’s almost completely consumed my waking existence, and the filter for whether or not I’m going to say “yes” to something, or go somewhere, or do something is whether or not it’s taking me closer to or further away from this main goal.
Reading is what I’ve devoted my life to, because I love it that much.
The Miracle of a Definite Chief Aim will help you discover a DCA if you don’t have one already, but it’ll also help you deepen your commitment to it once you’ve found it, and more. I’m so glad I discovered it when I did, and this book helped clarify my ambitions tremendously!
“We do so many things for the attention, to feel important or praised. But what if you had so much attention and so much praise that you couldn’t possibly want any more? What would you do then? What would you stop doing?”
Certain authors just become associated with particular ideas over time, and one that I continue to profit from handsomely – year after year after year – is Derek Sivers’ insight that when making a decision, it’s either a “Hell yeah!” or it’s a “No.”
Either you’re consumed with interest by what you’ve decided to do - it’s just so completely obvious that this is the thing you should be doing/want to do - or you’re better off not doing it at all.
Hell Yeah or No is a fairly quick read, full of exceptionally useful frameworks for thinking, and I ended up with dozens of book notes and brilliant ideas to think about later. The interesting thing, though, is that many of Sivers' conclusions contradict each other!
Derek is a special thinker in that way. He can calmly and wisely approach big, intimidating questions, and he can disagree with himself multiple times (sometimes even in the same essay), all while getting closer and closer to a tentative answer that he then rigorously tests in the lab of his own life.
He's no armchair philosopher either! I'd even say that he's one of the most interesting people alive today. The dude sold his company, CD Baby, for millions of dollars, enabling him to forget about earning more money (he doesn’t need it or want it), and letting him put every single creative neuron in his brain into his creative work and, you know, living his actual life. And what a life!
In the past, he’s been a musician, a producer, a circus performer, an entrepreneur, a TED speaker, and a book publisher, but here in this book, he’s just your friend Derek.
“Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”
Every now and then, a capital-B Book comes along. You probably know exactly what I mean. For me (and literally millions of other readers over the intervening decades since it was published), this was one of those Books.
Viktor Frankl was a World War II Holocaust survivor who spent years imprisoned in four separate Nazi death camps, losing his entire family before he was set free by the invading Russians and spent the rest of his life helping people find the real meaning of their lives.
This Book is already massively popular, and yet still not as popular as it deserves to be. Something like 16 million copies have been sold, but even attaching any number to it at all almost cheapens the infinite value of this incredible, inimitable, life-transforming Book.
Frankl’s fundamental message is that we always possess the freedom to respond to our circumstances, not to be crushed by them. Our lives are up to us, and as long as we have something – or someone – to live for, no fate or tragedy is insurmountable.
“If you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren't diving into anything fully. A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses."
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?"
“With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you.”
I had been hearing about this guy Clayton Christensen and this book, How Will You Measure Your Life?, for ages and finally decided to take the proverbial plunge. I’m glad I did! And I wasn’t expecting to find so much that would be so relevant to helping me figure out what I wanted to do with the next few decades of my life.
Christensen is an absolute giant in the business world, and while this great book is also about business, it’s mostly about building a life that you love and a life that you’re proud of. It succeeds on all fronts, and he has a way of asking the perfect question at the perfect time. But maybe that’s just because of the life-stage I was in at the time.
I thought it was excellent, and in reading it you’ll learn about life-strategies, stress-testing your assumptions, being a better parent, and creating a life you can look back on with pride and satisfaction.
“To accomplish something great, you have to give yourself no escape route, no chance to ever turn back. You throw away your backup plans and you push forward, no longer bogged down by the infinite ways in which we hedge our own successes.”
The only thing that having a Plan B does for you is distract you from Plan A.
The title “Burn the Boats” comes from the age-old practice of all the great conquerors of literally setting fire to the ships they arrived on and forcing complete focus on winning no matter what. Your Plan B should be to succeed at Plan A, and this is the playbook.
Matt Higgins was a high-school dropout caring for his sick mother in Queens, New York, before burning his own boats and eventually (and I do mean eventually) becoming an investor on Shark Tank, a lecturer at Harvard Business School, and a serial entrepreneur with a billion-dollar portfolio of some of today’s most iconic brands.
He lives an all-in life, and he holds nothing back here. Not his expert advice, not the harsh truths that we all need to hear, not the painful episodes from his own life. Nothing. It’s all here. And for that reason, Burn the Boats doesn’t read like other “success” books out there. There’s something special about this one.
His philosophy is my own, in fact. I’ve ruthlessly eliminated any and every thought of failure or giving up from my own thoughts and I literally - literally - never even entertain the idea that my largest visions won’t someday become a reality.
It…does…not…even enter my mind.
It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be successful - that I’ll get everything I want in this life - and I highly recommend adopting a similar philosophy yourself.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t change directions when the evidence indicates that I should. It doesn’t mean I don’t take advice and seek mentors, differing opinions.
Someone like me doesn’t read 1,400+ books because they think they already know everything.
I change my methods and adapt to the situation, but I do not give up. I’m all in.
Burn the Boats is such a fantastic book, and I really do hope that you’ll read it. But more importantly, I hope that you launch that business; try out for that sports team; ask out that girl (or guy).
Laser in on the highest vision you can possibly imagine for your one and only life, lock in, gather a team of mentors, shut down the haters, and move fucking forward no matter what. And that boat in the back of your mind? Burn it.
“The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It's a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform.
For me, it's also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trust that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved."
The chances of a perfect life path being successfully scripted for you by someone else are precisely zero. We exist in a community of others, but individually, we are completely alone and our lives are up to us.
More than that, we have the opportunity - the ability - to curate our own reality every moment, and by definition, no one can do this for us. We think that the meaning of life is "out there" and that we have to find out what it is. When in reality, it is Life that asks us the questions, and how we live is our answer.
In the same way, Paul Millerd doesn't have any answers. There are no hacks or step-by-step formulas in this book, no mandatory reading lists, and no milestones you have to hit in order to live a meaningful life.
Instead, 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.
We have so many more options and opportunities - possibilities for our lives that we can explore and take to their logical conclusions. The default path is dying away, and we have to come to terms with our own freedom and what we want to do with it.
I mean, here you are, the universe's most spectacular creation, and you're just kinda getting by. Living a "good enough" life, surviving day to day, coasting through a default world you never made.
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.
“Regret is what you should fear the most. If something is going to keep you awake at night, let it be the fear of not following your dream. Be afraid of settling.”
This is the book! This is the book that crystalized my quest in my mind and set me off in the direction of reading 1,000 books by age 30. The author, Chris Guillebeau, had a completely different quest, which was to visit every country in the world by age 35, which he completed successfully!
The Happiness of Pursuit is the story of that quest, and what he’s learned about quests and achievements that the rest of us can use to help us live with more urgency, intensity, and fire. This book literally changed the shape of my life, and for that reason it’ll always be one of my favorites.
It’s not just Chris’s story, though, as it tells the stories of dozens of other people who added adventure to their lives and battled regret to win a life worth living.
One curious thing as well, though, is that after a quest is completed – whether it’s to travel to every country or read 1,000 books – there’s a time afterward that can be dangerous.
You can either sink into a sort of depression when it sinks in that the pursuit you gave your life to is now over. Or you can be inspired to take on brand new challenges, push further than you did before, and accept a new quest.
Behind the mountain are more mountains!
“The most growth-fostering purpose is one that is built on a strong foundation of a secure environment, belonging, connection, and a healthy self-esteem, and is driven by exploration and love. It requires a deep integration of many needs."
This was one of my standout reads from way back in 2020, a book that impressed me and astounded me so strongly that now I recommend it all the time.
In his professional academic career, Scott Barry Kaufman has focused on expanding on and spreading the ideas of Abraham Maslow, whose name you may recognize from that pyramid you were made to memorize in school. You know the one!
At the bottom level, you’ve got the very basic survival needs of air, food, water, and health. Then, going up a level you find shelter and stability as the next most important human needs, all the way up to the need for development, creativity, and growth.
Kaufman shows how, at the end of Maslow’s life, he was working towards extending his world-famous ideas (dealing mainly with self-actualization and self-expression) to the idea of transcendence, or interconnection between the fates and destinies of every human being alive on Earth.
“The purpose of college, to put all this another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn’t go to school for that, but if you’re going to be there anyway, then that’s the most important thing to get accomplished.
That is the true education: accept no substitutes.
The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that’s what people had you do, then you were robbed.
And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning – the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons – then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.”
If you left university with just a degree and a pile of debt, you were robbed.
Somewhere along the way, colleges and universities drifted away from being centers of higher learning and loci of self-discovery, into being commercialized profit-centers, and students themselves became "customers," or, worst of all, commodities.
William Deresiewicz is a former Yale professor with a deep, infectious passion for higher education, which is self-evident throughout Excellent Sheep and which leaps from every paragraph. He cares; he cares so much, and his distress at the decline of educational standards in the United States and elsewhere is shared by myself and a multitude of other educators who know what school can really do.
Universities today often force students to choose between learning and success; the straight path to riches and prestige is prized above real education, real introspection, real meaning, and the creation of one's own real life.
Students step off the high-pressure conveyor belt of higher education with a degree and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, but they also leave with less than they came with; they're stripped of their passion for learning, their self-efficacy, their confidence, and their capacity to meaningfully engage with life.
Contrary to what seems to be happening today, higher education should be about the cultivation of our highest potentialities as individuals, and it should prepare us to meet life with optimism, intelligence, dignity, and care. In the final analysis, whether our educational system helps or hinders this process is up to us.
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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 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 two more ways I can help you:
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