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10 Fantastic Books to Help You Solve 10 Major Problems
Matt Karamazov
November 17, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 41 minutes
I used to have all ten of these problems…until I read and took action on these ten books.
Today, I don’t struggle with any of them!
Except maybe with the subjects of books #4 and #7. Those types of problems are fairly difficult to completely eradicate, and I’m not sure that anybody ever does.
And sure, I still have other problems - everybody does! But now, my problems are much more lucrative, and much more fun to solve.
So if you’re running up against any (or all) of the problems tackled by these ten books, they’ll definitely help. And you’ve got my notes and summaries below to guide you too!
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait.
Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you:
Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger.
It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself.
If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.”
“While people easily recognize and reject a negative 60% return on their money, they do it willingly with their time.”
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 Millionaire Fastlane, by MJ DeMarco, a great business book about building a profitable business around the C-E-N-T-S Framework, and a book that helped me leave a dead-end job in my twenties and never look back.
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 1,429 books, including 77 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Clarity is your savior, and we must prioritize programming, maintaining, and evolving the systems our mind runs on. This is done through self-generated goals, creating a path to achieve them, and focusing on solving the problems that arise without being consumed by distractions.”
This book is the definition of “not for everybody,” but for the right person, it could be absolutely revelatory. Life-changing. A complete “Before and After” separating your old self, your old way of life, and the way you’ll live forever after.
The Art of Focus is a philosophy book, disguised as a personal development book, disguised as a business book. It’s directed more or less at creators who are looking for a way to monetize their minds and earn a full-time living producing meaningful work and distributing it online.
But virtually everyone could find something life-changing inside, and it contains layers and layers of meaning that each speak directly to where people currently are on their journey from mental slavery to conscious freedom.
If I’m being a bit vague here, allow me to set the scene a little more. Look around you, and you’ll see that most people (at least many people) are desperately unhappy, desire to make radical changes in their lives, and yet are unsure precisely how to do that.
Dan Koe argues that we’re living in a dystopia of excessive pleasure, comfort, and a false sense of security when it comes to what lies ahead, both individually and collectively.
Every single day, there are literally thousands of marketing messages being launched straight into your prefrontal cortex, each of them demanding your attention. In other words, demanding a little piece of your LIFE.
Eventually, what happens to most people is that they don’t know who they are anymore, or what they really want. They’re told what they want, and they believe it. Personal agency is a distant memory, and the default path is all that’s left. Wage slavery, mental slavery, and debt slavery, if not actual slavery.
The way out of this meaningless hellscape (oddly comfortable and “safe” though it may appear to be), lies in taking the path of the Creator, as opposed to the Consumer.
We all consume sometimes, of course, but if your entire life revolves around consumption, and you only watch, read, and talk about what everyone else watches, reads, and talks about, you’ll only be able to think what everyone else is thinking.
Your individuality - the very essence of who you are - will be stripped away, and you’ll barely even realize that it’s gone.
If you don’t want the same quality of life as everyone else (and I’d argue that you don’t!), then focus is the cure. Yes, “focus” in the sense of being able to pay attention to something longer than a beer commercial, but also in the sense of being able to separate action from distraction, meaning from meaninglessness, and success from failure.
For a long time now, I’ve rejected the future that was just “assigned” to me by society on the date of my birth: get good grades, go to college, work for forty years, collect gold watch, die. I already knew there was more to life before I read this book. But it gave me a sense of urgency, and personal power that was…electric.
Here was Dan, living free and uncommitted - except to his purpose. Living consciously and intensely, following his own curiosity, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per month doing so.
I was already a full-time creator myself, having struggled for years to “make it,” and now I just had this renewed sense that even more was possible, and that my future was wide open.
Decades and decades of my life opened up right in front of me, and I knew that I’d never go back to my old life for as long as I lived. The Art of Focus was my point of departure into my most exciting future.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: The Art of Focus will help you identify and build a meaningful life, primarily by teaching you how to notice, and by helping you to identify what you don’t want your life to look like.
“In between the numbers, charts, and data sits the messiness and absurdity of the human mind. Money is a remarkable tool that can provide a better life if you know how to use it. But knowing how to use it is quite different from knowing how to acquire it.”
The Art of Spending Money is about what money can buy, what it can’t buy, and how to tell the difference.
I ended up with twelve pages of notes from the thing, and it’s easily one of the best books I read in 2025. I’ll still be thinking about what I learned from it in 2035. Likely longer.
A few terms stand out that helped me think completely differently about money and its relationship to my life and happiness. One is “social debt,” which refers to how there are often hidden costs associated with certain large purchases and expenditures.
Once you’re expected to spend money, you have to keep spending money, or else risk losing the status you’ve gained within your newly-entered socioeconomic reference group.
Then there are ideas like “mental liquidity,” meaning the ease with which you’re able to change your mind based on new information. Housel also talks about how memories of past experiences can appreciate and grow in value as you get older - similar to Bill Perkins’ concept of “memory dividends” in his book, Die with Zero.
One of the main lessons of the book is that people are so often clueless about what will actually make them happy. The wrong question to ask in that situation is, “Can money buy happiness?” Rather, you might ask, “How can money buy happiness?”
“What haven’t I tried spending money on yet that might actually improve my life? What’s my thing? And how can I reduce the unnecessary spending in the other areas of my life so that I can spend even more money on what will truly make me happy?”
However, there are very few “shoulds” in this book, for the simple reason that you, and you alone, know what’s best for you. The Art of Spending Money isn’t prescriptive as much as it is about helping you detach from the emotional element of money and look somewhat dispassionately at its true nature.
Personally, my spending habits are inconsistent, which, as Morgan Housel argues in the book, is likely a good thing. It means that I’m making my own purchasing decisions, not buying what random strangers “expect” me to buy.
First-class flights will always seem like a giant waste of money to me; instead, I’ll throw the money I would have spent on leg-room for three hours into index funds and crypto. I’ll spend ridiculous amounts of money on buying time, freedom, and independence, and virtually nothing on fancy vacations.
As you can imagine, this is a book that can keep you busy for long after you’ve read it. Housel covers a lot of ground (in this, and in his other two books, which are also excellent), and virtually everybody can make astounding financial progress (and “peace of mind” progress) by thinking deeply about what he has to say.
I’m calling it right now: many of the things I’ve thought about and pondered as a result of reading this book will seep into my consciousness, quietly informing my spending decisions for many years to come.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: If you always seem to have too much month left over at the end of your money, this book will help you control your spending, make smarter choices, and move ahead financially.
“You should be far more concerned about your current trajectory than your current results.”
I would unequivocally state that Atomic Habits is the definitive book on habits. It’s a 20-million-copy bestseller(!) that has lived up to all the hype, and I ended up with about eight pages of notes - I mean, this thing is packed with everything you need to know in order to set yourself up for every kind of success in the future.
One of the most powerful ideas for me was the idea that we should be far more concerned about our current trajectory than with our current results. The fact is that it takes time to get where we want to be in life, and the only thing we have absolute control over is the direction in which we’re heading.
Many years ago, Socrates would be asked many times, “How does one get to Mount Olympus?” Olympus, if you recall, is where all the gods hung out. So really, the questioner was asking how do we get to the top, to paradise, to our goals?
In response to this question, Socrates would always say, “Make sure that every step you take is in that direction.” Good habits are steps, and when you have all your habits aligned with your destination, you almost can’t help but arrive there eventually.
Everyone who has ever succeeded at anything, ever, has started out extremely far away from where they wanted to end up. Over time, their good habits pulled them closer and closer to their own version of Mount Olympus.
So the trajectory idea is big. One of the other big ideas was that every single action you take is like a vote for the person you want to become.
If you want to get fit, then every time you go to the gym or eat a healthy meal is a vote for who you will be in the future. Every time you pick up a book, you’re voting to become a reader, etc. Take those two ideas alone and you can change your life. But there’s so much more to this book, too.
According to him, the central question that James Clear is trying to answer through his work is, “How can we live better?” He’s spent years and years focusing on this question; reading, listening, learning, observing, speaking with people who are killing it in life, and he’s taken every single thing he’s learned and jammed it into this book.
As Clear says, we don’t rise to the level of our goals, or what we say we’re going to do; we fall to the level of our habits.
‘Atomic’ habits are the smallest-sized things that you can do immediately - today, now - that will let you steamroll past everything that’s been holding you back until now.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: If you’re having trouble adopting beneficial habits, sticking to a workout routine or a diet, or making any other positive change in your life, Atomic Habits will give you a simplified action plan that, if you follow it, will make your eventual success inevitable.
“The more time blindness you have, the more time anxiety you will experience. When you don’t have a good handle on time, you worry about it. You’re constantly rushing without ever feeling settled.”
This is a great book for anyone who feels like they’re constantly running out of time, and like 24 hours a day is never enough. I happen to be one of those people, and even though I wouldn’t say this book “cured” me of this existential anxiety, it certainly helped!
This “time anxiety” is a bigger problem than a book can solve, and as much as I love Chris Guillebeau’s books, I wasn’t expecting him to solve it. The finitude of human existence, seen against the backdrop of infinite possibility and, on a more prosaic level, our never-ending to-do lists, is the fundamental problem.
How do we balance all of our responsibilities, look after ourselves, pursue what we love, make a difference in the world, and finish all the books on our TBR? How, I ask you!? How!?
Paradoxically, one of the first things you can do (that actually helps) is to just give up. Abandon the idea of ever getting everything done, or reaching a point where you can look around, breathe deeply, and say that you’ve achieved everything you wanted to achieve, responded to every message in your inbox, savored every sunrise, traveled to every exotic location, and crossed off every adventure on your list.
But even though you’re never going to win the war against time, you can win some battles. You can rewire your brain for peace and acceptance, you can regulate your emotions so that your time anxiety feels less life-and-death, and you can take concrete, practical steps to create more space in your day and get back to what matters.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: This book will help relieve your stress and anxiety as it relates to running out of time. While it’s not a miracle-cure, and the finitude of human existence still, you know, sucks, there are a large number of helpful, at least partial answers to be found here.
“I think what makes it hard for us to enjoy happiness in the moment is our tendency to hold on too tightly to happiness from the past.
When we idealize the past and subconsciously crave a return to that safer, more certain time, we are taking energy and focus away from being in the present, which is ultimately where we spend our lives.”
This is a tragically underrated (but hopefully not for long) book by the screenwriter-turned-therapist of the Ashton Kutcher movie, Dude, Where’s My Car?, and it’s a “friendly and engaging guide to talk therapy.”
But there’s so much more here, and even if you’ve never been to therapy or had plans of going, you could still absolutely stand to benefit from reading the book.
For one thing, I found Phil’s use of metaphor wonderfully insightful, as he’ll describe depression like being caught in quicksand, addiction as being controlled by a planet’s gravity…just on and on. A completely different way of looking at things that helps you instantly understand, and even if you’ve never struggled with those afflictions yourself, it’ll help you better relate to people in your life who have.
In 50 chapters, he deals with all these things people end up in therapy to help them deal with, like grief, anger, relationship issues, worry - basically everything.
By the end of it you almost can’t help but feel that if you ever were to end up in therapy, you’d want to have a therapist like Phil.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: This book will help you address a variety of mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, anger, and much more. It’s a great book, but even so, I feel like I have to say that going to see a therapist in person might be the perfect next step for you to take! Phil would likely say the same.
“And here’s a secret: most audiences aren’t invested in seeing you fail. Most people are aware that to get up in front of a crowd and talk takes a certain amount of nerve, and they sympathize with you. So before you say a word, you’re starting from a position of strength. Remember this and let confidence flow from it.”
Before I say anything else about this book, I have to mention that I’m actually featured in here too! I mean, I’m actually written about inside the book, which feels insanely cool. If you buy a copy for yourself, look for me on page 109 and again later on!
As you can imagine, this is a book about communication skills, but it’s all the more powerful because of where the author came from, and how he arrived to where he is today. John A. Brink fled the Second World War to come to Canada, and he showed up with just $25.47 in his pocket (which, not coincidentally is the price of the book), not speaking a word of English, and suffering from a number of learning disabilities as well.
In fact, during his very first public speech, he completely froze, and found himself unable to utter even a single word. Today, he’s an extremely successful entrepreneur, with business interests in a variety of industries, a popular podcast, and a media empire that he built through the power of words.
John also happens to be (as of this writing) the oldest competitive bodybuilder in North America, at 85 years old! He’s just a powerhouse, and over the last half a century he’s picked up more than a few speaking tips that he shares in this book.
Billion-Dollar Communication Skills covers a lot of ground, from the history of communication and technology, to discussions of digital communication tools, manipulation and disinformation, speaking with confidence and grace in front of large audiences, and communicating complex ideas with precision and power.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: I may be a bit biased because of all the nice things he said about me in his book, but if you’re scared of public speaking or if you just want to level up your speaking and communication skills, start here!
"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.
Virtually everyone has experienced something to the same effect, ranging from the "that might have been nice," to the "damn, I really should have done that," all the way to the "I've thrown it all away and I'll never, ever recover from this."
Anyone who says that they have no regrets is also usually viewed with suspicion by most people who have taken the time to reflect on their own personal history.
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.
What's more, navigating regret (and life) is always an ongoing process of closing certain opportunities while at the same time opening new ones. Every action we take determines the possibilities that are available to us in the next moment, and we are always choosing, even when we do nothing.
But we are not helpless against regret, as Daniel Pink argues in this book. We can enlist this misunderstood, potentially painful emotion in service of living a larger life, gaining redemption, and reclaiming at least a portion of our remaining unlived lives.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: This book will help you get to the end of your life with fewer regrets. While I don’t necessarily think it’s possible to prevent every future regret you might have, The Power of Regret will go a long way towards helping you prevent the most painful ones.
“Extraordinary wealth will require you to have extraordinary beliefs.”
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
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: If your business isn’t growing as fast as you want it to grow, this book will put you on the Fastlane to success. To be clear, “Fastlane” doesn’t mean “make a million dollars by next month doing three hours of work per day.” But it’s a hell of a lot faster than most people build wealth.
“Most of us are helpless with respect to many things, including the life and safety of those we love. It feels a lot better if we can form a payback project and get busy executing it (suing the bad doctor, depriving one's ex of child custody) than to accept loss and the real condition of helplessness in which life has left us.
Payback, thus, often has a psychic function. If people are culturally sold on the idea that payback is good, they will feel real satisfaction when they get it. Often this satisfaction is called "closure".
But of course the fact that a cultural teaching constructs patterns of sentiment that become real should not make us embrace a deception.”
Martha Nussbaum is one of the most brilliant thinkers I’ve ever discovered in all my wide reading, and, just as the title would suggest, this book is about something that not only surrounds us, but can also overtake us, causing even the best of us to lose a bunch of IQ points: anger.
I was a nightclub bouncer for over a decade, and so I’ve seen some anger in my day. I’ve felt its corrosive influence in my own life, and I’ve seen its deleterious effects on the wider society.
So I’m especially grateful for someone of Nussbaum’s brilliance to come along and show us what we’ve all been missing when we talk about anger - and its equally misunderstood corollary, forgiveness.
Nussbaum claims in her book that people are generally confused about anger: about when they should be angry, if ever, and about the role it plays in both public and private life.
Most striking (no pun intended) of all for me was her dissection of the current, retributive criminal justice system. We seem to have this erroneous belief that if we make someone else suffer for what they’ve done to us, or to our community, this will make the first injury somehow disappear.
But even in the private sphere, we have so many ill-conceived notions about anger, so many half-formed thoughts and vague ideas about what it’s good for and where its limitations lie, which make it so urgently necessary that we clarify our thinking before we let anger spin out of control, and let forgiveness lose its redemptive power.
For example, if you don’t get angry, do you really care? Do you have an ethical obligation to get angry at injustice? Or does your anger invariably cloud your judgment? If you don’t get angry, will you ever have the requisite motivational drive to change and improve your life? These are just a few of the questions she raises.
Where forgiveness is concerned, is it really the best way of transcending anger? Or does it sometimes cheapen itself by disposing us towards projects of humiliation and diminishment of the “other” as a condition of abolishing our anger? Is forgiveness always good everywhere, and anger always bad everywhere?
We need a closer look. We need Nussbaum.
She’s clear-thinking and wise and kind and generous, and she’s exactly the kind of guide you should wish for when you’re looking to understand the all too human emotion of anger.
Currently, she's the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago; she also has more honorary degrees than I’ve been alive, and I absolutely loved her thought-provoking book.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: If you’re dealing with a lot of anger in your life, and it’s actively harming you and your relationships with other people, this book can help. If nothing else, you can chuck it against the wall and see if that makes you feel any better!
"The people around you generally appear sane and in control of their lives. But put any of them in stressful circumstances, with the pressure rising, and you will see a different reality."
If I had been given The Laws of Human Nature as a textbook in high school, I probably would have learned something while I was there!
Seriously though, there is just so much here, and I believe that most people who have made a serious effort to absorb its lessons have been fundamentally transformed by what Robert Greene has to teach.
Human nature is one of the most expansive topics one could ever hope to cover in a single volume, so of course you're not just going to suddenly "understand people'' by reading it once through.
But I would argue that there's not much else that could be a better use of your time than making that serious effort to understand the hidden psychological motivations and triggers of others.
We deal with other people all day long, and yet we're constantly confused and deceived by their words and actions. They do things we don't understand, for reasons we don't have access to, and not all of them have our best interests at heart.
So this book is just as much about self-defense as it is about understanding your own nature and improving the quality of your close relationships.
But I wouldn't be doing justice to human beings if I made you think that The Laws of Human Nature is only about protection from the negative aspects of human nature. It's not that at all.
Human beings are astonishing, spectacular, and extraordinary. We are amazing in our ability to connect with one another, solve problems together, console each other when faced with the inherent tragedies of human existence, and in our ability simply to rise above our circumstances.
Human beings are powerful, impressive, and awesome - but we're complicated. No one has figured us out yet, and with billions of different people all running into each other, speaking all these different languages, and carrying all these different struggles inside of themselves, we're bound to enter into conflict with one another sometimes.
The Laws of Human Nature, therefore, is also about turning inward, and understanding ourselves in new ways, so that we can take that newfound understanding back into the world with us, and co-exist without tearing ourselves and each other apart.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate
The Problem This Book Will Help You Solve: If you’re constantly confused and angered by the way people around you behave and treat you, The Laws of Human Nature will help you figure out what’s going on, what’s driving them underneath the surface, and how you can regain control of your environment.
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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 170,000+ 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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